Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Appendixes/Reader's guide to Wikipedia: Difference between revisions
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== Some basics ==
{{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
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.
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The Wikimedia Foundation has seven projects that are parallel to Wikipedia, plus a project called Commons, where pictures and other freely usable media are stored for use by all projects in all languages ('''Figure B-1''').
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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 ===
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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 (journal)|Nature]]'' in December 2005. In that article, a group of experts compared 42 articles in Wikipedia to the corresponding articles in [[Encyclopædia
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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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 "
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.
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