Wikipedia:FAQ/Overview: Difference between revisions

Overview FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions):

A wiki is a collaborative collection of interlinked web pages, all of which can be visited and edited by anyone at any time (collaborative software). Ward Cunningham invented the concept and software. You could even edit this page by clicking the "edit" link on the third tab above, or edit only a section by clicking on "[edit]" to its right! If you don't have anything to add or correct on this page and you just want to see how it works, try out the Wikipedia:Sandbox. See also: Wikipedia:Editing FAQ.

Wikipedia is a project to produce a novel kind of encyclopedia that is comprehensive and free. See Wikipedia:About and the Wikipedia article for even more enlightening information .

The name 'Wikipedia' is a portmanteau (a word formed by combining two or more words) of "wikiwiki" and "encyclopedia".

Wikipedia's goal is to create a free, reliable encyclopedia—indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, in terms of both breadth and depth. This is an ambitious goal, and will probably take many years to achieve!

Wikipedia is managed by a non-profit parent organization, The Wikimedia Foundation, which also manages the operation of Wikipedia's sister projects, including Wiktionary (a wiki dictionary), Wikibooks (free textbooks), and others, and owns all of their domain names. Previously, the site was hosted on the servers of Bomis, Inc, a company mostly owned by Jimmy Wales, who is currently the funder of part of the site's operational costs. With the announcement of the Wikimedia Foundation on June 20, 2003 the ownership of all domain names as well as the technical equipment was transferred to the Foundation. The site is run by the community of Wikipedians guided by the principles articulated by Jimmy Wales, including, for example, an adherence to a neutral point of view.

The articles hosted on this site are released by their authors under the GNU Free Documentation License, so the articles are free content and may be reproduced freely under the same license. See Wikipedia:Copyrights and Wikipedia:Readers' FAQ for information on how you can use Wikipedia content.

Wikipedians. This is a collaborative endeavor. Thousands of people have contributed to different parts of this project, and anyone can do so, including you. All you need is to know how to edit a page, and have some encyclopedic knowledge you want to share. The encyclopedia provides users with a certain amount of freedom.

You can learn who is responsible for the most recent versions of any given page by clicking on the "Page history" link. But if you spot an error in the latest revision of an article, you are highly encouraged to be bold and correct it. This practice is one of the basic review mechanisms that maintains the reliability of the encyclopedia.

If you are uncertain or find the wording confusing, quote the material on the associated talk page and leave a question for the next person. This helps eliminate errors, inaccuracies or misleading wording more quickly and is highly appreciated by the community.

Given the massively collaborative nature of the project, there's no single point of contact. There are many mailing lists which you can contact for project-specific questions. See the list at meta:mailing lists. There is also a Wikimedia Foundation mailing listand our Metawiki for cross-project matters. If you do not want to communicate publicly, you can contact the directors of the Foundation at board@wikimedia.org. If you want to communicate with a specific user, leave a message on his or her personal talk page; you can find a list of personal pages (and link to your own) at the Wikipedian list. Many Wikipedians have also registered their email addresses, which you can use by clicking the "Email this user" link from the personal pages. Also, each user and each article has a talk page. This gives you the opportunity to leave that user a message or to make comments about a particular article. Use the discussion link in any article to get to the talk page.

Nupedia was a more formal encyclopedia project that spawned Wikipedia. It is now defunct; see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia.

See Wikipedia:Accountability. Editors with account names enjoy several benefits, among them is the positive reputation that goes with quality work. Wikipedians with an established history are respected especially with regard to neutralizing article disputes. Also, Wikipedians sometimes find collaborating with anonymous users frustrating, because it is more difficult to contact them with questions, concerns, or suggestions. This is not to say there is a Wikipedia hierarchy per se - though there are editors with administrative abilities (see Wikipedia:Administrators), these are approved by the community, and the goal of most Wikipedians is to ensure that democracy, albeit with a little anarchy, remains the supreme power on Wikipedia.

Wikipedians with user names are in a sense more anonymous than contributors that are not logged in: while anyone can see the IP address of a user who did not log in when he/she edited, only server administrators can find the IP of a logged-in user. So if you're concerned about privacy and anonymity, you may prefer to create a username for yourself in order to hide your IP.

However, if you'd like to stay in the dark, it's fine to edit without a login. Many valuable contributors have made this choice.

As anyone can edit any article, it is of course possible for biased, out of date or incorrect information to be posted. However, because there are so many other people reading the articles and monitoring contributions using the Recent Changes page, incorrect information is usually corrected quickly. Thus, the overall accuracy of the encyclopedia is improving all the time as it attracts more and more contributors. You are encouraged to help by correcting articles and passing on your own knowledge.

See Wikipedia:Replies to common objections for a longer discussion of this point.

It's reasonably likely they're within their rights. Anybody may mirror or fork Wikipedia as long as they comply with the GNU Free Documentation License. Over 100 sites using Wikipedia for content have been identified and categorised by their degree of compliance, at Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks.

See: Wikipedia:MediaWiki

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