User:Rw98651/sandbox

This is the user sandbox of Rw98651. A user sandbox is a subpage of the user's user page. It serves as a testing spot and page development space for the user and is not an encyclopedia article. Create or edit your own sandbox here. Other sandboxes: Main sandbox | Template sandbox Finished writing a draft article? Are you ready to request review of it by an experienced editor for possible inclusion in Wikipedia? Submit your draft for review!

This is a general introduction for visitors to Wikipedia. The project also has an encyclopedia article about itself, Wikipedia, and an introduction and tutorial for aspiring contributors.

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English Wikipedia right now
MediaWiki version: 1.42.0-wmf.26 (8f44039) Content articles: 6,813,695 Total pages: 60,461,417 Uploaded files: 915,846 Edits: 1,214,781,770 Registered users: 47,268,819 (123,552 active in the past month) and 860 administrators
Data as of 09:03, 18 April 2024 (UTC). Update
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. Wikipedia's articles provide links designed to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism.

Since its creation on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has grown into the world's largest reference website, attracting 1.5 billion unique visitors monthly as of March 2020^[update]. It currently has more than 62 million articles in more than 300 languages, including 6,813,695 articles in English with 123,552 active contributors in the past month.

The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are the five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia; however, it is not a formal requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.

to ensure that edits are improvements. Begin by simply clicking the Edit button at the top of any editable page!

Wikipedia is a live collaboration differing from paper-based reference sources in important ways. It is continually created and updated, with articles on new events appearing within minutes, rather than months or years. Because everybody can help improve it, Wikipedia has become more comprehensive than any other encyclopedia. Besides quantity, its contributors work on improving quality, removing or repairing misinformation and other errors. Over time, articles tend to become more comprehensive and balanced. However, because anyone can click "edit" at any time and add content, any article may contain undetected misinformation, errors, or vandalism. Readers who are aware of this can obtain valid information, avoid recently added misinformation (see Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia), and fix the article.

About Wikipedia

Wikipedia history

Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia, begun by the online media company Bomis. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales (founder of Nupedia and co-founder of Bomis), and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the encyclopedia project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested that a wiki might allow members of the public to contribute material, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10, 2001.

There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a website in the wiki format, so the new project was given the name "Wikipedia" and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15 (now called

, one of the cofounders of Bomis and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey.

In May 2001, a large number of non-English Wikipedias were launched—in

versions were announced.

The domain was eventually changed to the present wikipedia.org when the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation was launched, in 2003, as its new parent organization, with the ".org" top-level domain denoting its non-commercial nature. Today, there are Wikipedias in more than 300 languages.

Wikipedia contributors

Anyone with Web access can edit Wikipedia, and this openness encourages inclusion of a tremendous amount of content. About 120,000 editors—from expert scholars to casual readers—regularly edit Wikipedia, and these experienced editors often help to create a consistent style throughout the encyclopedia, following our Manual of Style.

Several mechanisms are in place to help Wikipedia members carry out the important work of crafting a high-quality resource while maintaining

before contributing to the project.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation owns the site, it is largely uninvolved in writing and daily operations.

Trademarks and copyrights

"Wikipedia" is a registered trademark of the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which has created a family of free-content projects that are built by user contributions.

Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are dual-licensed under the

(GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Some text has been imported only under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-compatible license and cannot be reused under GFDL; such text is identified either on the page footer, in the page history or on the discussion page of the article that utilizes the text. Every image has a description page that indicates the license under which it is released or, if it is non-free, the rationale under which it is used.

Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licenses ensure the content is freely distributable and reproducible. (See content disclaimer for more information.)

Credits

Text on Wikipedia is a collaborative work, and the efforts of individual contributors to a page are recorded in that

, which includes the author and source, where appropriate, along with other information.

Making the best use of Wikipedia

Readers' FAQ
About Wikipedia Administration FAQs Assessing article quality Authority control Books Categories Censorship Copyright Disambiguation Images and multimedia ISBN Microformats Mobile access Offline access Navigation Other languages Page names Portals Searching Student help
Researching with Wikipedia Citing Wikipedia
Readers' glossary Readers' index Reader's guide to Wikipedia
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Exploring Wikipedia

Many visitors come to Wikipedia to acquire knowledge, while others come to share knowledge. At this very instant, dozens of articles are being improved, and

box on the top-right side of the screen.

Wikipedia is available in languages other than English. Wikipedia has more than 300 languages, including a Simple English version, and related projects include a dictionary, quotations, books, manuals, and scientific reference sources, and a news service (see sister projects). All these are maintained, updated, and managed by separate communities, and often include information and articles that can be hard to find through other common sources.

Basic navigation in Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles are all

. Additional links can be easily made if a relevant link is missing—this is one simple way to contribute.

Using Wikipedia as a research tool

As wiki documents, articles are never considered complete and may be continually edited and improved. Over time, this generally results in an upward trend of quality and a growing consensus over a neutral representation of information.

Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information. Indeed, many articles start their lives as displaying a single viewpoint; and, after a long process of discussion, debate, and argumentation, they gradually take on a

. Others may, for a while, become caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint which can take some time—months or years perhaps—to achieve a better balanced coverage of their subject. In part, this is because editors often contribute content in which they have a particular interest and do not attempt to make each article they edit comprehensive. However, eventually, additional editors expand and contribute to articles and strive to achieve balance and comprehensive coverage. In addition, Wikipedia operates a number of internal resolution processes that can assist when editors disagree on content and approach. Usually, editors eventually reach a consensus on ways to improve the article.

External videos
"Using Wikipedia" with John Green, from Crash Course's Navigating Digital Information series, YouTube video

The ideal Wikipedia article is well written, balanced,

cited

. Others will later be augmented with new sections. Some information will be considered by later contributors to be insufficiently founded and, therefore, may be removed.

While the overall trend is toward improvement, it is important to use Wikipedia carefully if it is intended to be used as a research source, since individual articles will, by their nature, vary in quality and maturity. Guidelines and information pages are available to help users and researchers do this effectively, as is an article that summarizes third-party studies and assessments of the reliability of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia vs paper encyclopedias

Main page: Wikipedia is not paper (on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki).

Wikipedia has advantages over traditional paper encyclopedias. First, it is not limited in space: it can keep growing as fast as people add to it.

Second, there are no qualifications required to be able to author its articles. Therefore, it has a very large pool of contributors: the whole world. This, and the first advantage mentioned above, have enabled Wikipedia to become the most comprehensive encyclopedia on Earth.

Third, a paper encyclopedia remains static (stays the same) and falls out of date until the next edition. But Wikipedia is dynamic: you don't have to wait for the next edition to come out (there are no editions), as Wikipedia is published on-line as it is written on-line. Articles are made available as is, regardless of what stage of development they are in. You can update Wikipedia at any instant, and people do so continually around the clock, thereby helping each other to keep abreast of the most recent events everywhere and of the latest facts in every subject.

Fourth, Wikipedia has a very low "publishing" cost for adding or expanding entries, as it is on-line, with no need to buy paper or ink for distribution. This has allowed it to be made available for free, making it more accessible to everyone. This has enabled Wikipedia to be independently developed and published in many different languages at the same time, by people literate in each language. Of the 290+ different language Wikipedias, 137 of them have 10,000 or more articles.

Fifth, Wikipedia has a low environmental impact

.

Sixth, Wikipedia is extra-linear (more than linear). Instead of in-line explanations, Wikipedia incorporates

, with each entry in them hyperlinked to an article on the topic specified.

Seventh, each Wikipedia article provides an introduction summarizing the more extensive detail of its contents.

Eighth, being open to anyone to edit, articles on Wikipedia are subject to additions that might be erroneous or written poorly, which in turn are subject to being corrected or rewritten. It is a community effort, with most people who are involved helping to improve the work, fixing problems they encounter along the way. See more about Wikipedia's strengths and weaknesses, below ...

Strengths, weaknesses, and article quality

Slubice, Poland honors the Wikipedia community

.

Wikipedia's greatest strengths, weaknesses, and differences all arise because it is open to anyone, it has a large contributor base, and its articles are written by consensus, according to editorial guidelines and policies.

• Wikipedia is open to a large contributor base, drawing a large number of editors from diverse backgrounds. This allows Wikipedia to significantly reduce regional and cultural bias found in many publications, and makes it very difficult for any person or group to
  demographic
  (younger rather than older, male rather than female, literate, rich enough to afford a computer, et cetera) and may, therefore, show some bias. Some topics may not be covered well, others in great depth.
• Allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia makes it easily vandalized and susceptible to unverifed information, which requires removal. See
  watchlists
  .
• Wikipedia is written by open and transparent consensus—an approach that has its pros and cons. Censorship or imposing "official" points of view is extremely difficult to achieve and usually fails after a time. Eventually for most articles, all notable views become fairly described and a
  neutral point of view reached. In reality, the process of reaching consensus may be long and drawn-out, with articles fluid or changeable for a long time while they find their "neutral approach" that all sides can agree on. Reaching neutrality is occasionally made harder by extreme-viewpoint contributors
  . Wikipedia operates a full editorial dispute resolution process, one that allows time for discussion and resolution in depth, but one that also permits disagreements to last for months before poor-quality or biased edits are removed. A common conclusion is that Wikipedia is a valuable resource and provides a good reference point on its subjects.
• That said, articles and subject areas sometimes suffer from significant omissions, and while misinformation and vandalism are usually corrected quickly, this does not always happen. (See for example
  this incident in which a person inserted a fake biography linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations and Soviet Russia as a joke on a co-worker which went undetected for four months, saying afterwards he "didn't know Wikipedia
  was used as a serious reference tool".)
• Wikipedia is written largely by amateurs. Those with expert credentials are given no additional weight. Wikipedia is also not subject to any peer review for scientific, medical or engineering articles. One advantage to having amateurs write in Wikipedia is that they have more free time on their hands so they can make rapid changes in response to current events. The wider the general public interest in a topic, the more likely it is to attract contributions from non-specialists.

The MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia retains a history of all edits and changes, thus information added to Wikipedia never "vanishes" irreversibly. Discussion pages are an important resource on contentious topics. Therefore, serious researchers can often find a wide range of vigorously or thoughtfully advocated viewpoints not present in the consensus article. As with any source, information should be checked. A 2005 editorial by a BBC technology writer comments that these debates are probably symptomatic of cultural changes that are happening across all sources of information (including search engines and the media), and may lead to "a better sense of how to evaluate information sources".^[3]

Disclaimers

Wikipedia disclaimers apply to all pages on Wikipedia. However, the consensus in Wikipedia is to put all disclaimers only as links and at the end of each article. Proposals to have a warning box at the beginning have been rejected. Some do not like the way it looks or that it calls attention to possible errors in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, in common with many websites, has a disclaimer that, at times, has led to commentators citing these in order to support a view that Wikipedia is unreliable. A selection of similar disclaimers from places which are often regarded as reliable (including sources such as Encyclopædia Britannica, Associated Press, and the Oxford English Dictionary) can be read and compared at Wikipedia:Non-Wikipedia disclaimers.

Contributing to Wikipedia

Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia by clicking on the Edit tab in an article, and editors are encouraged to

from editing.

Most articles start as

tab, where improvements to it are discussed.

Editorial quality review

As well as systems to catch and control substandard and vandalistic edits, Wikipedia also has a full style and content manual and a variety of positive systems for continual article review and improvement. Examples of the processes include peer review, good article assessment, and the featured article process, a rigorous review of articles that are intended to meet the highest standards and showcase Wikipedia's capability to produce high-quality work.

In addition, specific types of article or fields often have their own specialized and comprehensive projects, assessment processes (such as biographical article assessment), and expert reviewers within specific subjects. Nominated articles are also frequently the subject of specific focus on the neutral point of view noticeboard or in WikiProject Cleanup.

Technical attributes

Wikipedia uses

.

Feedback and questions

Wikipedia is run as a communal effort. It is a community project whose result is an encyclopedia. Feedback about content should, in the first instance, be raised on the discussion pages of those articles. Be bold and edit the pages to add information or correct mistakes.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

• FAQ index
• Category:Wikipedia FAQs

Static help

The Help:Contents may be accessed by clicking help displayed under the ► Interaction tab at the top left of all pages.

• Help:Menu—is a menu-style page that will direct you to the right place to find information.
• Help:Directory—is a descriptive listing of all Wikipedia's informative, instructional and consultation pages.

Giving feedback

There is an established escalation-and-dispute process within Wikipedia, as well as pages designed for questions, feedback, suggestions, and comments. For a full listing of the services and assistance that can be requested on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Request directory.

• Talk pages
  —the associated discussion page for discussion of an article or policy's contents (usually the first place to go)
• Wikipedia:Vandalism—a facility for reporting vandalism (but fix vandalism as well as report it)
• Dispute resolution—the procedure for handling disputes that remain unresolved within an article's talk space
• Village pump—the Wikipedia discussion area, part of the Community portal
• Wikipedia:Contact us

See also:

• Bug tracker—a facility for reporting problems with the Wikipedia website or the MediaWiki software that runs it
• Village pump: proposals page—a place for making non-policy suggestions
• Wikipedia:Help desk—Wikipedia's general help desk, if other pages have not answered the query

Research help and similar questions

Facilities to help users researching specific topics can be found at:

• Wikipedia:Requested articles—to suggest or request new articles.
• Wikipedia:Reference desk—to ask for help with any questions, or in finding specific facts.
• Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia—for information on using Wikipedia as a research tool.

Because of the nature of Wikipedia, it is encouraged that people looking for information should try to find it themselves in the first instance. If, however, information is found to be missing from Wikipedia, be bold and add it so others can gain.

Community discussion

For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the dashboard. For specific discussion not related to article content or editor conduct, see the Village pump, which covers such subjects as milestone announcements, policy and technical discussion, and information on other specialized portals such as the help, reference and peer review desks. The Community portal is a centralized place to find things to do, collaborations, and general editing help information, and find out what is happening. The Signpost, a community-edited newspaper, has recent news regarding Wikipedia, its sister projects, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Contacting individual Wikipedia editors

To contact individual contributors, leave a message on their

.

In addition, the Wikimedia Foundation Meta-Wiki is a site for coordinating the various Wikipedia projects and sister projects (and abstract discussions of policy and direction). Also available are places for submitting bug reports and feature requests.

For a full list of contact options, see Wikipedia:Questions.

Other languages

Sister projects

Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects:

Please note that while other sites may also use MediaWiki software and therefore look like Wikipedia [dot org]—"wiki-" or "-pedia" or anything similar—the only projects which are part of the Wikimedia Foundation are those listed above.

See also