Wikipedia: Mississippi is the encyclopedia's main article on the U.S. state of Mississippi, a Deep South state that joined the Union on December 10, 1817, as the 20th state. The page opens with the essentials a reader usually wants first: capital and largest city is Jackson, the state covers 48,434 square miles (32nd in the country), and the population sits at roughly 2.95 million, which ranks 35th. From there Wikipedia: Mississippi widens into the full encyclopedic treatment, with geography, history, demographics, economy, and culture each handled in its own section.
The geography material is concrete and easy to use. Mississippi sits entirely within the east Gulf Coastal Plain, and the article names every neighbor: Tennessee to the north, Alabama to the east, Louisiana and Arkansas to the west, and the Gulf of Mexico along the southern edge. Small details that are hard to find quickly elsewhere are right there too, such as the highest point, Woodall Mountain, at 807 feet. That is exactly the kind of fact a student copying down state statistics needs, and Wikipedia: Mississippi puts it where you can grab it in seconds.
Economic coverage is where Wikipedia: Mississippi proves most useful for anyone trying to understand how the state makes a living. Agriculture and forestry lead, and the article backs that with figures, not adjectives: Mississippi produces more than half of all U.S. farm-raised catfish and ranks near the top for sweet potatoes, cotton, and pulpwood. Manufacturing, utilities, transportation, and healthcare are described as secondary contributors. The page does not soften the harder numbers either. It states plainly that Mississippi has the lowest per-capita income of any state, and it gives a median household income of $54,200 for 2023. Placing the catfish and cotton output beside the income ranking gives a reader a fuller, less flattering picture than a tourism site would, and that honesty is part of why Wikipedia: Mississippi is worth reading.
History gets serious room, and rightly so, because the state's past is inseparable from the country's. The article traces the antebellum cotton economy and the slavery it depended on, noting that enslaved people made up 55 percent of the population by 1860. It follows the thread through secession in 1861, readmission to the Union in 1870, and into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. These are not glossed paragraphs. They carry dates and proportions that let a reader anchor the story, and they connect outward to the many sub-articles Wikipedia keeps on each event and figure. On the antebellum and Civil Rights material, Wikipedia: Mississippi reads as a careful summary rather than a sanitized one.
The cultural section may be the strongest draw for a casual reader. Mississippi is treated as a birthplace of American music, and Wikipedia: Mississippi lays out its part in the blues, jazz, gospel, country, and rock and roll, with the Mississippi Delta singled out as the origin of so much of it. For someone chasing a song's roots or a musician's biography, this is a solid starting point, and the internal links fan out to the players and places behind the names.
Demographics and the economy
The demographic framing sits close to the economic one, and the two reinforce each other. A population near 2.95 million spread across 48,434 square miles is a sparsely settled state by national measures, and the article presents that alongside the income figures without spin. Jackson is both the capital and the largest city, which the page flags early so a reader is not left guessing where the population and government concentrate. Set next to the area ranking of 32nd and the population ranking of 35th, these numbers sketch a state that is mid-sized in land but smaller in people, and the page lets those rankings do the explaining instead of padding them with commentary.
Government is handled briefly and factually, covering the current Republican-controlled legislature and the governorship without editorializing. The value here is less in depth than in orientation: it tells you the shape of state power and then hands you links if you want the detail. That pattern holds across the whole entry. Wikipedia: Mississippi works as a hub, pointing to subsidiary topics on cities, natural features, notable people, and dozens of related articles, so the main page stays readable while the deeper material lives one click away.
What makes Wikipedia: Mississippi reliable as a reference is the same thing that makes any strong encyclopedia article reliable: claims are specific and they are sourced through the citation apparatus the platform is built around. A number like 48,434 square miles or a population near 2.95 million is a figure a reader can check, compare, and cite, and Wikipedia: Mississippi presents these consistently instead of rounding everything into vague summary. It reads like a reference work, not a pitch.
There are limits worth naming. An overview article cannot go deep on everything, so the economy and history sections, useful as they are, function mostly as gateways to longer treatments. A researcher needing the fine grain of, say, Reconstruction-era policy or the modern catfish industry will exhaust the main page quickly and need to follow the links. The same is true of the music coverage: the blues and the Delta get a confident summary, but the real depth on individual artists and labels lives in the sub-articles the page points to, so the entry is a map more than a destination. That is the trade any top-level survey makes, and Wikipedia: Mississippi handles it about as well as the format allows, keeping the summary tight while marking where to go next.
Wikipedia: Mississippi works best as a starting point rather than a final stop. The headline figures are easy to lift, and the inline citations point to the primary sources that justify quoting them. The culture section orients a music researcher before the sub-articles take over. On the harder questions around economics and demographics, the page is direct enough to qualify as a candid overview. That candor, alongside the citation infrastructure, is what keeps Wikipedia: Mississippi useful past a first visit and worth returning to when a specific figure needs checking.
