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

Revision as of 14:44, 11 April 2015

Revision as of 14:48, 11 April 2015

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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 Withinwithin Wikipedia ==

There are two basic ways to find interesting articles in Wikipedia: Do a search, or browse, starting from the Main 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.

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[[File:Wikipedia-The Missing Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29508.png|frame|right|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 Outsideoutside 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.

To do so, type [http://site:en.wikipedia.org http://site:en.wikipedia.org] into the search engine's search box, along with whatever word or phrase you were looking for. (The "en" prefix restricts results to the English Wikipedia, otherwise you could get results from a version in the other 250 or so languages.) This technique works for the big three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN searches. If you use another search engine, look at the "advanced search" option (often available only after you do a search) for how to specify that the results should come only from one ___domain.

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==== Categories ====

Any article may belong to one or more categories ([[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Building a Stronger Encyclopedia/Categorizing Articles|Chapter 17,: Categorizing Articlesarticles]]), 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|right|Here's the top-level list of categories. It's the starting point for drilling down to find all articles in any particular subcategory.]]

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{{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.}}

==== Searching for Categoriescategories ====

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|right|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).]]

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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.

=== Other Waysways of Navigatingnavigating ===

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.