Welcome! Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is the largest and most popular reference website in the world. Wikipedia is also unique: This encyclopedia is written by everyone and can be read by anyone.
This book is written for readers, current editors, potential contributors, and anyone else interested in Wikipedia. The book describes what kind of writing Wikipedia includes, how Wikipedia works behind the scenes, and how to get involved.
We cover all aspects of participating in Wikipedia, from reading the site to editing articles to navigating the site's community and governance.
Wikipedia is based on a wiki, a technology that allows anyone to change pages easily on the site. If you're impatient to work on Wikipedia, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/ and start improving the encyclopedia right now!
If you learn most quickly by diving right in, or if you already edit Wikipedia, then you can use this book as a reference guide and a source of tips. But if you're just starting out, or if you want to know everything about how Wikipedia works today and how it has developed over time, you should start reading from the beginning.
This book is divided into four parts, starting with the basics and working through all aspects of Wikipedia.
Part I looks at Wikipedia from the reader's point of view. Chapter 1 describes the type of content Wikipedia contains and the basic policies that determine what content is included. The site's history is explored in Chapter 2; in particular, we look at the way that Wikipedia unites three historical strands: encyclopedias, wikis, and free software. How to search and browse the site (including an explanation of the sidebar and main page) is detailed in Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 covers the structure of an individual article and methods for evaluating article quality.
Part II turns to editing the site. A basic explanation of how to edit a page and an introduction to wikisyntax are in Chapter 5; this chapter forms the foundation for the next chapters in this part. Chapter 6 covers how to start a new article and explores encyclopedic writing, research, and collaboration techniques that are useful for working on any article. Formal processes for maintaining content, including collaborative editing drives and cleanup projects, WikiProjects, and article deletion and promotion processes are covered in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 explains how articles are linked together through Wikipedia's category structure, disambiguation pages, and redirects, along with how pages are maintained through merging, splitting, and moving. More advanced syntax, including image formatting, tables, templates, and special characters, is covered in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 steps through the life cycle of a newly created article.
Part III covers Wikipedia's elaborate social side. We begin with how to sign up as an editor, including setting up an account, setting preferences, and using your personal user and talk pages in Chapter 11, in which we also describe Wikipedia's administrator system. Wikipedia's culture and the ways editors communicate (including a list of forums for asking questions and discussing problems) are covered in Chapter 12, and the policies that govern Wikipedia and how these policies are created are described in Chapter 13. Finally, Chapter 14 discusses how the dispute resolution process works—and how to avoid disagreement in the first place.
Part IV steps back from the English-language Wikipedia to cover other Wikimedia Foundation projects, including editions of Wikipedia in other languages in Chapter 15 and Wikipedia's sister projects, including Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikispecies, and Wikiversity, in Chapter 16. Finally, we cover the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia's parent organization) and how work at the Foundation level is coordinated in Chapter 17.
Appendix A includes information about reusing Wikipedia's content under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and examples of reuse (the GFDL itself, under which this book is licensed, is included starting on PREAMBLE). We provide a brief guide for teachers using Wikipedia in the classroom in Appendix B; Appendix C contains a glossary of jargon commonly used in edit summaries; Appendix D has a glossary of jargon frequently used on the site; and, finally, Appendix E is an index of Wikipedia pages quoted in the book.
The basic principles we describe for reading articles, editing pages, and collaborating with others will provide a good foundation for working on any Wikimedia wiki project. But although the Wikimedia projects all share the same general philosophy, any specific policy or custom mentioned here might not apply outside the English-language Wikipedia. If you're interested in exploring another project, remember that each wiki website represents a unique collaborative community, which may have its own rules.