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I've read the following 2 articles explaining the difference between virtual memory and physical memory. One thing that I found confusing is that the term virtual memory seems to mean different things in these 2 articles.

What Is the Difference Between Virtual Memory & Physical Memory? says Virtual memory is used when the RAM is filled.

While Wikipedia says virtual memory is used to tell programs where the physical memory is.

Is one of the articles wrong? Or does virtual memory have different meaning in different context?

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The first article is incorrectly using the term "virtual memory" to refer to what should actually be called "memory swapping" or "page-files".

Wikipedia uses the true definition of virtual memory: where programs are given access to an entire address space that may or may not map to parts of physical memory. This ensures that programs do not mistakenly write in each others' address spaces, and allows a program to abstract away from which parts of physical memory it has access to.

This is related to the above concept, since a virtual address may correspond to a page that is stored on disk, rather than in physical memory. But virtual memory is used even if RAM is not full.

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That first link is bogus. I can see where they're getting that misconception from, but it's not actually correct.

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