Portal:Vital articles

Vital articles Portal

Vital articles are lists of subjects for which the English Wikipedia should have corresponding featured-class articles. They serve as centralized watchlists to track the quality status of Wikipedia's most important articles and to give editors guidance on which articles to prioritize for improvement. The most important articles are in Level 1.

This portal is tailored to the English-language Wikipedia. There is also a list of one thousand articles considered vital to Wikipedias of all languages, as well as Vital Article lists tailored to different Wikipedia languages accessible via the languages sidebar.

Level 1 Vital article

Vital articles.

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Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all of Earth's water is contained in its global ocean, covering 70.8% of Earth's crust. The remaining 29.2% of Earth's crust is land, most of which is located in the form of continental landmasses within Earth's land hemisphere. Most of Earth's land is at least somewhat humid and covered by vegetation, while large sheets of ice at Earth's polar deserts retain more water than Earth's groundwater, lakes, rivers, and atmospheric water combined. Earth's crust consists of slowly moving tectonic plates, which interact to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth has a liquid outer core that generates a magnetosphere capable of deflecting most of the destructive solar winds and cosmic radiation. (Full article...)

Other vital articles
The arts Human Human history Life Mathematics Philosophy Science Society Technology

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Get involved

For editor resources and to collaborate with other editors on improving Wikipedia's Vital Articles, visit WikiProject Vital Articles.

Finish building out Vital article Level 5 list
Make it easier for readers to access the list (better separate reader-focused and editor-focused pages)
Integrate random vital article tool somewhere (main page? sidebar?) for readers
Collaborate with other WikiProjects to focus attention on poor-quality high-level articles
Better integrate VA with the project-specific importance lists
Develop tools for helping identify VA candidates (one attempt: most-viewed unlisted articles)
clean-up listing for Vital_Articles

Featured article

Featured articles in Vital articles.

Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (Latin: [ˈaːwεs]), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweight skeleton. Birds live worldwide and range in size from the 5.5 cm (2.2 in) bee hummingbird to the 2.8 m (9 ft 2 in) common ostrich. There are over 11,000 living species and they are split into 44 orders. More than half are passerine or "perching" birds. Birds have wings whose development varies according to species; the only known groups without wings are the extinct moa and elephant birds. Wings, which are modified forelimbs, gave birds the ability to fly, although further evolution has led to the loss of flight in some birds, including ratites, penguins, and diverse endemic island species. The digestive and respiratory systems of birds are also uniquely adapted for flight. Some bird species of aquatic environments, particularly seabirds and some waterbirds, have further evolved for swimming. The study of birds is called ornithology. (Full article...)

Top 10 WikiProject Vital articles – Popular articles of the month

A selection of most-visited articles from the list of popular pages

Image 1

The Berlin Cleopatra, a Roman sculpture of Cleopatra wearing a royal diadem, mid-1st century BC, now in the Altes Museum, Germany

Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (Koinē Greek: Κλεοπάτρα Θεά Φιλοπάτωρ, lit. 'Cleopatra father-loving goddess'; 70/69 BC – 10 or 12 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and the last active Hellenistic pharaoh. A member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great. Her first language was Koine Greek, and she is the only Ptolemaic ruler known to have learned the Egyptian language, among several others. After her death, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, marking the end of the Hellenistic period in the Mediterranean, which had begun during the reign of Alexander (336–323 BC). (Full article...)
Image 2

YouTube search results, May 2025

YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google Search. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019^[update], videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of mid-2024^[update], there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total. (Full article...)
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The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country located primarily in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and the federal capital district of Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the state of Alaska forming a semi-exclave in the northwest and the state of Hawaii spanning an archipelago in Oceania. Indian country includes 574 federally recognized tribes and 326 Indian reservations with tribal sovereignty rights. The U.S. asserts sovereignty over five major island territories and various uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean. It is an ecologically megadiverse country, with the world's third-largest land area and third-largest population, exceeding 340 million. (Full article...)
Image 4

The Google logo used since 2015

Google LLC (/ˈɡuːɡəl/ , GOO-gəl) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by the BBC and is one of the world's most valuable brands. Alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc. is one of the five Big Tech companies. (Full article...)
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India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area; the most populous country since 2023; and since its independence in 1947, the world's most populous democracy. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is near Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia. (Full article...)
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Einstein in 1947

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence formula $E = mc 2$ , which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. (Full article...)
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World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated, with many nations mobilising all resources in pursuit of total war. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the first and only nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was the deadliest conflict in history, resulting in 70 to 85 million deaths, more than half of which were civilians. Millions died in genocides, including the Holocaust, and by massacres, starvation, and disease. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes. (Full article...)
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The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and most of the smaller islands within the British Isles, covering 94,354 square miles (244,376 km²). Northern Ireland shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland; otherwise, the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. It maintains sovereignty over the British Overseas Territories, which are located across various oceans and seas globally. The UK had an estimated population of over 68.2 million people in 2023. The capital and largest city of both England and the UK is London. The cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast are the national capitals of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Full article...)
Image 9

Presley in a publicity photograph for the 1957 film Jailhouse Rock

Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. Presley's sexually provocative performance style, combined with a mix of influences across color lines during a transformative era in race relations, brought both great success and initial controversy. (Full article...)
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Official portrait, 2012

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004. (Full article...)

Featured pictures

Featured pictures in Vital articles.

Image 1Engineer 5 with construction plan.
Image 2Rhodochrosite 5 on Matrix from Peru 4.
Image 3Azure Kingfisher 5 Ceyx azureus azureus, Julatten, Queensland 5, Australia 3
Image 4A Flame tree against brick building in Mali 4. Tree 3 is Delonix regia commonly known as Royal Poinciana.
Image 5COVID-19 pandemic 4, portrait an intensive care Nursing 3 in Italy 3.
Image 6Self portrait of Tracy Caldwell Dyson in the Cupola module of the International Space Station 4 observing the Earth 1 below during Expedition 24.
Image 7Autumn Red Peach 4, cross section showing freestone variety
Image 8Praying bhikkhus inside Wat Mai Suwannaphumaham in Luang Prabang Laos 4
Image 9Association football 3 friendly Match Austria vs. Brazil national football team 5 in Vienna 4, 2018/06/10.
Image 10A waitress from the Hacker-Pschorr brewery carries beer mugs during the Oktoberfest 5 in Munich 4, Germany 3 (2011)