Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Appendixes/Reader's guide to Wikipedia: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:45, 11 April 2015

Revision as of 19:13, 14 April 2015

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{{WTMM-note|If you click "Search", for curiosity's sake, you'll just get some so-so search results. For example, if you search for ''Reagan wife'', the article ''Nancy Reagan'' shows up 6th and ''Jane Wyman'' shows up 16th. Worse, the context Wikipedia's result page shows is terrible. With a Google search, by contrast, you can get these two names from the context shown for the first result without even having to click a link.}}

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29485.png|frame|rightcenter|When Wikipedia can't find an exact match to a Go request, it provides search results, but it also offers a link to create an article with the same name as the word or phrase you entered.]]

If you don't arrive at an article page when you click Go, and you don't find what you're looking for in the search results toward the bottom of the page, your next best move is to switch to another search engine. Wikipedia makes this very easy for you—just change "MediaWiki search" to another menu choice, as shown in '''Figure 22-1'''.

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29497.png|frame|rightcenter|Wikipedia makes it easy to pick another search engine. Here Google's being selected, but other search engines are available. Take advantage of this option if your initial Go attempt doesn't succeed.]]

'''Figure 22-1''' 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.

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29508.png|frame|rightcenter|The same search for "Institute for Institutional Research" as in Figure C-1, but this time searching with Google. The search results are completely different.]]

{{WTMM-sidebar|Searching from outside Wikipedia|'''Figure 22-1''' shows how to use an outside search engine to search Wikipedia, once your initial attempt to find an article has failed. You can do the same thing (get the same results as '''Figure 22-1''', for example) without using a Wikipedia page initially, which may be easier.

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You can also navigate Wikipedia via a number of different starting points. The best way to get to them is via the links near the top of the Main Page, as shown in '''Figure 22-1'''. Every Wikipedia page has a link to the Main Page, on the left side, in the navigation box below the Wikipedia globe. From the Main Page, you can see the vastness of Wikipedia via three different approaches: categories, portals, and the A-Z index.

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29561.png|frame|rightcenter|Wikipedia's Main Page is accessible via a single click from any other page in Wikipedia. At the top are three links to starting points within Wikipedia that provide different top-down views.]]

==== Categories ====

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Any article may belong to one or more categories ([[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Building a Stronger Encyclopedia/Categorizing Articles|Chapter 17: Categorizing articles]]), which you'll find listed at the bottom of the article. Like everything else in an article, editors add the categories, so categories are only as accurate as the people who enter them; like everything else, if someone sees a mistake, she can fix it. When you click the Categories link shown in '''Figure 22-1''', you'll see the master index (see '''Figure 22-1''').

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29590.png|frame|rightcenter|Here's the top-level list of categories. It's the starting point for drilling down to find all articles in any particular subcategory.]]

The text in '''Figure 22-1''' is hand-crafted, not computer-generated, but once you leave the page via a link on it, the lists you'll see will be computer-generated and thus completely current. For example, when you click Geography at the top of the index, that takes you to a section of the page called "Geography and places", with the main category Geography. Click that word, and you'll see '''Figure 22-1'''. If you're interested in Geography, you can drill down in whatever subcategory you want until you reach actual links to articles, and then follow them.

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29608.png|frame|rightcenter|The category ''Geography'' had 28 subcategories when this screenshot was taken. In the "B" section, you see an expansion of one of those subcategories, Branches of Geography, displaying all the sub-subcategories until there are no further ones, along one line of that subcategory.]]

{{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 can't see them in '''Figure 22-1'''). Those may be truly unique articles, or articles just waiting for further categorization work.}}

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From the Main Page, you can also follow the bolded link "All portals" to the main page for portals ('''Figure 22-1'''). Like categories, portals can be a great way to narrow down the number of articles you're particularly interested in reading, or to lead you to articles that you otherwise might never have known existed.

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29638.png|frame|rightcenter|Portals are probably one of the least known ways to find articles on Wikipedia. If you're particularly interested in a topic, one of the 500 or so existing portals can be a great page to bookmark.]]

==== The A-Z index ====

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The third entry point link on the Main Page is the A-Z index. It's equivalent to browsing the shelves of a library, with the books in alphabetical order on the shelves. '''Figure 22-1''' shows what you'll see if you click the "A-Z index" link at the top of the Main Page.

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29668.png|frame|rightcenter|''The A-Z index'' (also called the ''Quick Index'') lets you go directly to a list of articles beginning with any two characters: El or Na or Tr or whatever.]]

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 22-1''').

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29688.png|frame|rightcenter|If you pick a two-letter starting pair, in '''Figure 22-1''', and click that link, here's what you see. The links in regular text are articles; the links in italics (the majority) are ''redirects'', which take you to an article with a different name. Redirects are used for misspellings, for less common variants of a particular name, and for subjects that don't (yet) have their own articles, and are related to an existing article to which the reader will be directed.]]

The alphabetical index to articles is actually more useful after you've drilled down one level. Now you have the option of searching for articles that start with three or four or even more characters.

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At the bottom of virtually every article, you'll find the categories that Wikipedia editors have assigned to that article. Figure B-12 shows an example.

[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29721.png|frame|rightcenter|The article on major league baseball player Lee Smith has, at the bottom, a larger than usual number of categories. In this case, it's mostly because Smith was a member of eight different teams.]]

Click any of these categories, and you'll be on a category page similar to Figure B-8. With a click, you can jump to another article in the same category.

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==== 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 CatScan at http://tools.wmflabs.org/catscan2/catscan2.php. Figure B-13 shows how to use it to find, for example, baseball players that have been members of both the Seattle Mariners and the Washington Nationals. When you search for articles by category using CatScan, you can choose how many levels of sub- and sub-sub-categories you want to search. This search shows a depth of 3, but since there were no subcategories, the results are only for a depth of 1. But if you were using the category ''Architects'', you'd see results in subcategories such as ''American Architects'' (level 2) and ''Architects from Cincinnati''(level 3).[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29745.png|frame|rightcenter|When you search for articles by category using CatScan, you can choose how many levels of sub- and sub-sub-categories you want to search. This search shows a depth of 3, but since there were no subcategories, the results are only for a depth of 1. But if you were using the category ''Architects'', you'd see results in subcategories such as ''American Architects'' (level 2) and ''Architects from Cincinnati''(level 3).]]

{{WTMM-warning|When using CatScan, capitalization—except for the very first letter—is critical. For example, in Figure B-13, if you had search on the category "Seattle Mariners Players" instead of "Seattle Mariners players," you'd have gotten no matches.}}

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==== Searching for categories ====

External search engines often have options that Wikipedia's search feature lacks, as discussed on [[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Name of Part of the Book/Name of the Chapter#Section heading|the section about xx]]. 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-14 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|rightcenter|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 Figure B-14—finding category pages of interest—before you use the category intersection tool CatScan, to avoid having to guess the exact names of categories that you want to use in CatScan.