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{{Wikipedia-The Missing Manual - TOC|updated=yes}}
Most of this book is aimed at folks who want to edit Wikipedia articles and become more active in the Wikipedia community. But this appendix is all about appreciating Wikipedia as a ''reader''. It gives you some background on what Wikipedia is and how to get the most out of it even if you have no intention of editing an article.
== Some
{{Main|Wikipedia:Administration}}
Wikipedia is a collaboratively written encyclopedia. It's a ''wiki'', which means that the underlying software (in this case, a system called ''[[MediaWiki]]'') tracks every change to every page. That change-tracking system makes it easy to remove (''revert'') inappropriate edits, and to identify repeat offenders who can be blocked from future editing.
Wikipedia is run by the not-for-profit ''[[Wikimedia Foundation]]''; that's why you don't see advertising on any of its pages, or on any of Wikipedia's sister projects that the Foundation runs (more on those later). To date, almost all the money to run Wikipedia and its smaller sister projects has come from donations. Once a year or so, for a month or so, you may see a fundraising banner instead of the standard small-print request for donations at the top of each page, but, so far, that's about as intrusive as the foundation's fundraising gets.
== What Wikipedia is not ==
To understand what Wikipedia ''is'', you may find it very helpful to understand what Wikipedia is ''not''. Wikipedia's goal is not, as some people think, to become the repository of all knowledge. It has always defined itself as an ''encyclopedia''—a reference work with articles on all types of subjects, but not as a final destination, and not as something that encompasses every detail in the world. (The U.S. Library of Congress has roughly 30 million ''books'' in its collection, not to mention tens of millions of other items, by comparison to about {{number to word|{{#expr:trunc({{NUMBEROFARTICLES:R}}/1000000)}}}} million ''articles'' in Wikipedia). Still, there's much confusion about Wikipedia's scope.
Wikipedia has a well-known policy (to experienced editors, at least) stating what kinds of information belong in the encyclopedia. The sister projects that the Wikimedia Foundation supports, such as Wiktionary, fulfill some of the roles that Wikipedia does not.
===
The Wikimedia Foundation has
{{Image frame|width=640|content=
{{#invoke:String|replace|{{Wikipedia's sister projects}}|Wikipedia .-<div|<div|count=1|plain=false}}
|caption='''Figure B-1''' The Wikimedia Foundation has twelve other projects in addition to Wikipedia, including Commons, a central repository of pictures and other media.|align=right}}
Several of the projects listed in '''Figure B-1''' overlap (or potentially overlap) with Wikipedia:
* '''[[wikt:|Wiktionary]]''' is a free, multilingual dictionary with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations. It's the "lexical companion" to Wikipedia. It's common at Wikipedia to move (''transwiki'') articles to Wiktionary because they're essentially definitions.
* '''[[n:|Wikinews]]''' and Wikipedia clearly overlap. A story in the national news (Hurricane Katrina, for example) is likely to show up on both. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikinews includes articles that are original writing, but the vast majority are sourced. Because of the overlap between the two, Wikinews has struggled to attract editors. Given a choice, most editors chose to work with Wikipedia articles, which are more widely viewed.
* '''[[n:|Wikisource]]''' is an archive of "free artistic and intellectual works created throughout history." Except for annotation and translation, these are essentially historical documents (fiction as well as nonfiction) that are in the public ___domain or whose copyright has expired.
=== Policy: What Wikipedia is not ===
Wikipedia's policy, [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not|''What Wikipedia is not'']], is lengthy, so this section just hits the highlights. Aside from the what seem obvious to more experienced editors at Wikipedia ("Wikipedia is not a blog, Web space provider, social networking, or memorial site", "Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files") and ones that follow from sister projects ("Wikipedia is not a dictionary", "Wikipedia is not a textbook"), here are several that readers and contributors frequently misunderstand:
* '''Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought'''. You won't find ground-breaking analysis, original reporting, or anything else in Wikipedia that hasn't been published elsewhere first. (If you do find any of these, it's a violation of the rules and likely to be removed when other editors discover it.) Thousands of wikis do welcome original research and original writing, but Wikipedia isn't one of them. (You'll find hundreds listed at [http://WikiIndex.org WikiIndex.org], a site not associated with Wikipedia.)
* '''Wikipedia is not a directory'''. Articles aren't intended to help you navigate a local bureaucracy, find the nearest Italian restaurant, or otherwise include information that other Web pages do a perfectly fine job of maintaining.
* '''Wikipedia is not a manual or guidebook'''. Wikipedia articles aren't intended to offer advice, or to include, tutorials, walk-throughs, instruction manuals, game guides, recipes, or travel or other guides.
* There actually are wikis for how-to stuff ([http://wikiHow.com wikiHow.com]) and for travel ([[voy:Main Page|Wikivoyage.org]]), but only the latter is affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects.
* '''Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information'''. It's not the place for frequently asked question (FAQ) lists, collections of lyrics, long lists of statistics, routine news coverage, and "matters lacking encyclopedic substance, such as announcements, sports, gossip, and tabloid journalism."
== How good is Wikipedia? ==
The best answer may be "Compared to what?" Wikipedia wouldn't be one of the world's top 10 most visited Web sites (that includes all 250-plus language versions, not just the English Wikipedia) if readers didn't find it better than available alternatives. To be sure, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia under construction. As the general disclaimer (see the Disclaimers link at the bottom of every page) says, "WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY. Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information."
On the other hand, Wikipedia has been reviewed by a number of outside experts, most famously in an article published in ''[[Nature (journal)|Nature]]'' in December 2005. In that article, a group of experts compared 42 articles in Wikipedia to the corresponding articles in [[Encyclopædia Britannica]]. Their conclusion: "The number of errors in a typical Wikipedia science article is not substantially more than in Encyclopaedia Britannica." (The actual count was 162 errors vs. 123.) That comparison is now several years old, and editors have continued to improve those 42 articles as well as all the others that were in the encyclopedia back then. (For a full list of outside reviews of Wikipedia, see the page [[Wikipedia:External peer review]].)
None of which is to say that Wikipedia editors are wildly happy about the quality of many, if not most articles. Those most knowledgeable about Wikipedia have repeatedly talked about the need to improve quality, and that quality is now more important than quantity. The challenge is whether Wikipedia can implement a combination of technological and procedural changes that'll make a difference, because so far relatively incremental changes haven't made much of a dent in the problem of accuracy.
So, should you trust Wikipedia? That should depend somewhat on the article. If you see a star in the upper right corner (see '''Figure B-2'''), indicating a featured article, you can be virtually certain that what you'll read is correct, and that the cited sources back up what's in the article.
[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29416.png|frame|right|'''Figure B-2''' Featured articles (articles with the highest assessed quality in Wikipedia) have a star in the upper right corner. You can click the star to learn how articles get their featured status (see [[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Collaborating with other editors/Lending other editors a hand#Going for the gold: Better and best article candidates|the section about good and featured articles]]).]]
You'll find that each article contains clues to its reliability. If you see a well-written article with at least a reasonable number of footnotes, then you should be reasonably confident that almost all the information in the article is correct. If you see a lot of run-on sentences and templates noting a lack of sources, point of view problems, and so on, then you should be skeptical.
You can get more clues from the article talk (discussion) page; just click the "Talk" tab. At the top, see if a Wikipedia WikiProject (a group of editors working on articles of common interest) has rated the article. Also at the top, look for links to archived talk pages, indicating that a lot of editors have talked a lot about the article, and have therefore edited it a lot.
If there are no archive pages, and not much indication of activity on the talk page you're looking at, then the opposite is true—few editors have been interested in editing the article. That doesn't mean it's not good—some excellent good editors toil in relative backwaters, producing gems without much discussion with other editors. Still, absence of editor activity should make you more doubtful that you've found an example of Wikipedia's best.
Bottom line: Think of Wikipedia as a starting place. If you're just interested in a quick overview of a topic, it may be an ending place as well. But Wikipedia's ideal is for articles to cite the sources from which their content was created, so that really interested readers can use those sources to get more information. If the editors at Wikipedia are doing things right, ''those sources'' are the ones that readers can absolutely depend upon to be informative and accurate.
== Navigating within Wikipedia ==
There are two basic ways to find interesting articles in Wikipedia: Do a search, or browse, starting from the links on the left of every page. Wikipedia has lots of organizing features depending on how you want to browse, like overviews, portals, lists, indexes, and categories. But for a bit of amusement, you can also try a couple of unusual ways to go from article to article, as discussed in this section.
=== Searching Wikipedia ===
On the
{{WTMM-note|If you click
[[
If you
[[
'''Figure B-4''' shows the search done again using Google. To those familiar with the Wikipedia search engine, it's not surprising that the top results are completely different.
{{WTMM-tip|
You generally ''don't'' want to initiate an internal Wikipedia search via your browser. If you see a pull-down menu that lets you pick Wikipedia as your search engine, ignore that choice. It just gets you to Wikipedia's internal search engine, which, as discussed earlier, just isn't very good.
However, if what you're searching for has been added to Wikipedia in the last day or two, only the Wikipedia search engine is likely to give you a successful search. It is the only one using the live database for its searches. Everyone else has a not quite up-to-date ''list'' of Wikipedia pages, and not-quite up-to-date ''versions'' of Wikipedia pages.
}}
=== Top-down navigation ===
You can also navigate Wikipedia via a number of different starting points. The best way to get to them is via the "[[Wikipedia:Contents|Contents]]" page, as shown in '''Figure B-5'''. Every Wikipedia page has a link to this page, on the left side, below the Wikipedia globe. From there, you can see the vastness of Wikipedia via many different approaches, such as categories, portals, and the A-Z index.
[[File:Top of Wikipedia-Contents.png|frame|center|'''Figure B-5''' The page [[Wikipedia:Contents]] is accessible via a single click from any other page in Wikipedia. It provides many links to starting points within Wikipedia that provide different top-down views, some of which are discussed later in this appendix.]]
==== Categories ====
Any article may belong to one or more categories ([[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Building a Stronger Encyclopedia/Categorizing Articles|Chapter 17
[[
The text in '''Figure
[[
{{WTMM-note|Not every article in Wikipedia is intricately categorized. For example, at the bottom of the ''Category:Geography'' page, you see articles in that category which are ''not'' in any subcategory (you
==== Portals ====
From
[[
==== The A-Z index ====
[[
If you were trying, for example, to find the name of an article that began with an unusual pair of letters (say, ''Cg''), then the A-Z index may be helpful (see '''Figure
[[
The alphabetical index to articles is actually more useful after
==== Other entry points ====
=== Categories ===
You can view Wikipedia's entire hierarchy of categories by clicking the Categories link near the top of the
==== Category links at the bottom of articles ====
At the bottom of virtually every article, you'll find the categories that Wikipedia editors have assigned to that article. '''Figure B-
[[
Click any of these categories, and you'll be on a category page similar to '''Figure B-
==== Articles in two different categories ====
One of Wikipedia's most requested features is "category intersection"—the ability to get a list of all articles that fall into two or more categories. Wikipedia still lacks that ability, but you can find it at an off-Wikipedia page called
{{WTMM-warning|When using
==== Searching for
You can search for categories using the standard Wikipedia search engine by modifying the "Search in" box shown in '''Figure B-3''' (see [[#Searching Wikipedia|the section about searching]]). However, external search engines often have additional options, so it may be better to use one.
When you use an external search engine, you simply restrain your search results to Wikipedia pages and apply any other options you like. If you use Google, for example, you can search just Wikipedia category pages by typing ''site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category'' in the search box. '''Figure B-13''' shows how to use this site restriction in Google. This Google search restricts results to category pages, since "site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category" was typed into the search box. It furthermore requires that the title of the category page contain the word "spy"; note "intitle:spy" at the beginning of the search term. There are 16 categories with "spy" in the title. Searching for "spy" instead of "intitle:spy" would turn up category pages with "spy" anywhere on the page (of which there are about 500).[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29765.png|frame|center|'''Figure B-13''' This Google search restricts results to category pages, since "site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category" was typed into the search box. It furthermore requires that the title of the category page contain the word "spy"; note "intitle:spy" at the beginning of the search term. There are 16 categories with "spy" in the title. Searching for "spy" instead of "intitle:spy" would turn up category pages with "spy" anywhere on the page (of which there are about 500).]]
You can also use the technique shown in this section—finding category pages of interest—before you use the category intersection tool PetScan, to avoid having to guess the exact names of categories that you want to use in.
=== Other ways of navigating ===
When you're not on the Main Page, every Wikipedia page offers ways of browsing around. Most of them are in the list of links at the left.
==== Random article ====
If you want to get a sense of the more than two million articles in the English language, a good way is to use the ''Random article'' feature. On any page on the [http://en.wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org] Web site, you find this link at upper-left ('''Figure
[[
==== What links here ====
When
[[
The list of links may seem random, but
==== Six degrees of Wikipedia ====
It can also be fun to just follow links from one article to another: For example, start at ''Kevin Bacon'', then to ''Circle in the Square Theatre'', to ''Theodore Mann'', to ''Drama Desk Award'', to ''New York Post'', and end up at ''Alexander Hamilton''. You can also do the same with the
== Images ==
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Wikipedia aims to distribute free content worldwide in any and all media—including the images used in its articles, and even articles uploaded to its repository for potential use in articles. What does that mean to you? It means you can download almost all of these images to your computer, free of charge.
=== Images in Wikipedia
If you see an image in a Wikipedia article that you'd like to have, just click it. You'll see a new page showing a larger image, as shown in '''Figure B-
The file Image:Fujisan from Motohakone.jpg is used in the article ''[[Tokyo]]''. Clicking the thumbnail image in the article shows you this larger image, though not necessarily a full-sized image. Click "
The vast majority of images on Wikipedia are free content—they're in the public ___domain or have Creative Commons licenses, for example. If you come across an image labeled as a "fair use" or "non-free" image (a screenshot of a commercial software program, for example), don't treat it as free content. Don't download it unless you're sure you're not infringing a copyright by doing so.
===
==== Finding pictures
Because
[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29909.png|frame|right|'''Figure B-17''' Commons' Main Page offers a number of ways to view its content—by starting with featured pictures, by drilling down through categories, or by choosing a topic area. If you choose a topic, you'll arrive at a category page similar to '''Figure B-4'''.]]
The category intersection tool mentioned [[#Articles in two different categories|earlier in this chapter]] works for Commons as well as Wikipedia.
==== Picture of the day ====
If you'd like a free, high-quality picture each day you can subscribe to the [[Commons:Main Page|Commons]]' [[Commons:Commons:Picture of the day|Picture of the day]] mailing list. Sign up [https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-image-l via email] or [https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=featuredfeed&feed=potd&feedformat=rss&language=en via RSS feed].
Wikipedia calls itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." If you don't think you have anything to add to it, you're wrong—Wikipedia is still far from complete. But you as a reader can help when you see an article with a problem, or if you search for an article and don't find it.
{{WTMM-tip|When you're thinking about fixing or adding to a Wikipedia article, make sure you have reliable sources at your fingertips first, as described in [[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Documenting your sources|Chapter 2]].}}
=== Articles with problems ===
If you see vandalism in a Wikipedia article, it could easily have just happened, and an editor's in the process of fixing it. Wait 5 minutes or so, and then refresh your browser window (or leave the page and return). If it's still not gone, you can ask editors to help. Similarly, when you see something in an article that's incorrect or obviously missing (perhaps you had a question that you expected the article to answer), you can always ask about the problem, which makes it much more likely that active editors will fix it.
Asking about something in (or missing from) an article is an easy six-step process:
1. At the top of the article,
:The
2. Do a quick scan of the talk (discussion) page to see if your issue or question has already been asked.
:If so, you
:But if
3. Assuming your issue or question is new, click the
:
4. Type a brief summary of the issue or question into the
:Up to 10 words should be enough.
[[
5. In the main edit box (see '''Figure
:The four tildes tell the Wikipedia software to put a signature and date-stamp there. '''Figure B-19''' shows an example of a comment after being typed in.
[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e30001.png|frame|right|'''Figure B-19''' Here's what the input screen shown in '''Figure B-19''' looks like after someone has entered a section heading (summary) and a comment. It's now ready to be published.]]
{{WTMM-note|The Wikipedia software records, in the page history, exactly the same information that displays when you add four tildes. So you're not revealing anything by "signing" your comment. If you don't, an automated editor (a ''bot'') does it for you, and that may make it harder for other editors to notice your comment. See [[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Collaborating with other editors/Communicating with your fellow editors#Identifying yourself|the section about signatures]].}}
6. Click the "Publish changes" button (you may have to tab down or scroll down or page down to see it).
:Voilá! You've posted a comment to Wikipedia, thereby contributing to the improvement of an article (or bringing missed vandalism to the attention of other editors).
=== Missing articles ===
You've searched for an article and didn't find it, even using an outside search engine ([[#Searching Wikipedia|the section about searching]]). Now what? Wikipedia has created a page where you can check to see if someone has already suggested that Wikipedia needs such an article. And that page, [[Wikipedia:Requested articles]], has associated pages where you can add the name of the article as a suggestion if no one else already has.
Unfortunately, this page, and its associated pages, isn't particularly user-friendly for someone unfamiliar with Wikipedia editing. You have to pick the correct general topic area from a list of 10, then a topic area from what can be a long list, and then maybe even go down yet one more level just to see the area of a page where you're supposed to post.
Finally, when you're at the right area of the page, you have to figure out how to post your suggestion. If all the sections of all the associated pages were consistently formatted, you'd find instructions here on how to post to them—but they're not.
An easier way to suggest to the Wikipedia community that an article is needed is to find a relatively close ''existing'' article, and then, following the steps described [[#Articles with problems|earlier in this chapter]], post a note on the article's talk page. When you post, describe the topic that you looked for and couldn't find, and that you'd appreciate it if a more experienced editor added the subject at the [[Wikipedia:Requested articles]] page.
== See also ==
* [[Help:Mobile device]]
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{{Wikipedia help pages}}
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