Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Appendixes/Reader's guide to Wikipedia: Difference between revisions
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→Searching Wikipedia: In first sentence of first paragraph I corrected the error stating the ___location of the search box on each Wikipedia page is on the left side. changed the word "left" to "right" |
fix portals, brackets, typos, dates, links, references, categories, formatting and persondata, typos fixed: Encyclopaedia Britannica → Encyclopædia Britannica, , → , , ,, → , using AWB |
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* '''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]])
* '''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."
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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'' in December 2005. In that article, a group of experts compared 42 articles in Wikipedia to the corresponding articles in
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.
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=== Searching Wikipedia ===
On the right side of each Wikipedia page, you'll find a box labeled "search", with two buttons—Go and Search. Wikipedia's search engine is widely acknowledged to be quite poor. You best bet to find what you want is to type the title you're looking for into the search box, and then click Go (or press Enter). If you're right, and Wikipedia finds an ''exact'' match, you'll be at that article. If it doesn't find an exact match, Wikipedia provides you with a link to "create this page", which you should ignore if you're searching only for reading purposes. It also provides you some search results. '''Figure 22-1''' shows the result of a failed search for the title ''Institute of Institutional Research'', including the start of some best guess results
{{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.}}
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