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A featured article should:
- Be comprehensive, factually accurate, stable, and well-written. Please read Great Writing and The Perfect Article to see how high the bar can be set.
- Comprehensive: Covers the topic in its entirety; does not omit any major facts or details.
- Accurate: supports facts with specifics and external citations (beware vague justifications such as "some people say").
- Stable: a featured article should be mostly static, and not change rapidly from day to day
- Well-written: compelling, even "brilliant" prose—the former name for featured articles.
- Be uncontroversial in its neutrality and accuracy (no ongoing edit wars).
- Exemplify Misplaced Pages's very best work. Represent what Misplaced Pages offers that is unique on the Internet.
- Include a lead section which is brief but sufficient to summarize the entire topic (see Misplaced Pages:Lead section).
- Include images (pictures, maps and diagrams, with good captions) where appropriate. Please be sure of the images' copyright status.
- Include headings (see Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (headings)) and have a substantial, but not overwhelming, table of contents (see Misplaced Pages:Section).
- Include references. This must be done by using a ==References== section and should be enhanced by the appropriate use of inline citations. If there are few references and the material is uncontroversial, inline citations are often unnecessary (see Misplaced Pages:Cite sources).
- Comply with the standards set by any relevant WikiProjects, as well as those in the style manual.
Some people feel that every featured article should have a certain length, and if not enough can be said about the article's subject to reach that length, it should in most cases be merged into another article. However, excellent short articles are also accepted.
An article does not have to have a picture to be featured; however, even if the subject does not have any obvious images associated with it, a suggested picture which could be used to represent it on the Main Page (it can be an abstract symbol that would be too generic for the article itself) is helpful.
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