Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Index/Descriptions

historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump .

NOTE: This is in the source of Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Index create editintro! Don't futz with it unless you figure this outn first. jp×g 21:41, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Incubator is a test wiki where new-language wikis are incubated. Sufficiently developed incubated projects are given their own domain and inactive projects may in turn be returned to the Incubator.

The meta-wiki, split off from the English in November 2001, is a coordinating wiki tasked with presenting a central space for discussions involving Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement at large.

The Wikinews project was launched in December 2004 with the mission to report the news on a wide variety of subjects. Contributors from around the world write news articles collaboratively. Reports range from original reporting and interviews to summaries of news from external sources.

The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia . Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching four million articles by July 2012, it was the first edition of and, as of September 2014, has the most articles (more than twice as many as the next in rank, the Swedish Wikipedia).

Wiktionary is a project to create a multilingual free content dictionary in every language. This means each project seeks to use a particular language to define all words in all languages. It actually aims to be much more extensive than a typical dictionary, including thesauri, rhymes, translations, audio pronunciations, etymologies, and quotations.

Wikiquote is a repository of quotations taken from famous people, books, speeches, films or any intellectually interesting materials. Proverbs, mnemonics or slogans are also included in Wikiquote.

Wikibooks aims to build a collection of free e-book resources, including textbooks, language courses, manuals, and annotated public domain books. It aims to help both (self-)instruction of students and teachers in high schools and universities.

Wikisource is a multilingual project, started in November 2003, to archive a collection of free and open content texts. It is not only a superior format for storing classics, laws, and other free works as hypertext, but it also serves as a base for translating these texts.

Wikispecies is an open, wiki-based project to provide a central, more extensive species database for taxonomy. Launched 14 September 2004, is aimed specifically at the needs of scientific users, and as of July 2014, has over 400,000 entries.

Wikiversity is a project dedicated to learning materials and learning communities, as well as research. is not limited to university (or tertiary) level materials, but is open to materials and communities of all learner levels. The way it can facilitate learning activities and communities is still being explored, but is centered around the model of 'learning by doing', or 'experiential learning'.

Wikivoyage aims to create the world's largest free, complete and up-to-date world-wide travel guide. Wikivoyage was launched in January 2013 and is written by volunteers in the same spirit of sharing knowledge that makes travel so enjoyable.

Wikimedia Commons was launched in September 2004 to provide a central repository for free photographs, diagrams, maps, videos, animations, music, sounds, spoken texts, and other free media. It is a multilingual project with contributors speaking dozens of languages, that serves as a central repository for all Wikimedia projects.

Wikidata was launched in October 2012 and aims to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It provides data in all the languages of the Wikimedia projects, and allows for the central access to data in a similar vein as Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files.

The MediaWiki open source community maintains several software projects. The MediaWiki engine is used by all Wikimedia projects and many other sites. Its core functionality can be expanded through extensions, customizations, and mobile applications. Developers can use the MediaWiki API to build applications interacting with sites like Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Labs is a project aimed to help volunteers get involved in Wikimedia operations and software development, and to make it easier for system administrators and developers to try out improvements to Wikimedia infrastructure, including MediaWiki. Wikitech is a site for internal technical documentation of Wikimedia infrastructure, and it is connected with the Wikimedia Labs project.

The Foundation Wiki is a local wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for use by Foundation staff and personnel. Accounts are available to experienced community editors that need them with reasonable purpose but editing is otherwise disabled. It is mainly used to maintain the Foundation's accounting of itself.

The Simple English is an English edition of the online encyclopedia primarily written in Basic English. Launched on November 17, 2003, the site has the stated aim of providing an encyclopedia for "people with different needs, such as students, children, adults with learning difficulties and people who are trying to learn English". It has often been accused of having "lost its focus".

Founded in March 2001 the German it is the second-oldest and, with over 1,805,000 articles, the third-largest edition of Wikipedia, behind the English Wikipedia and the Swedish Wikipedia. It also has the second-largest number of edits.

Started in May 2001 the Swedish Wikipedia it is the fourth-oldest edition of . It is currently the second largest by article-count, after a highly controversial bot operation created millions of taxonomic stubs on the site.

The Dutch Wikipedia was started in June 2001. It is the third largest and was the fourth edition to exceed 1 million articles, after the English, German and French editions. Like the Swedish Wikipedia it has embraced bot-made articles.

The French Wikipedia was started in March 2001, and has about 1,614,000 articles as of April 2015, making it the fifth-largest overall. It has the third-largest number of edits. It was also the third edition, after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, to exceed 1 million encyclopedia articles, on 23 September 2010.

Waray-Waray, a language spoken by some in the Phillipines, has one of the largest s, coming in at sixth. This came about as a result of an aggressive and controversial bot article-making operation inherited from the Swedish Wikipedia.

The Russian has over 1,213,000 articles and was founded on 20 May 2001. It is the 7th largest Wikipedia by the number of articles and 5th by number of edits. It is the largest Wikipedia written in a Slavic language.

Cebuano, a language spoken by some in the Philippines has one of the largest Wikipedias, coming in at eighth. This came about as a result of an aggressive and controversial bot article-making operation inherited from the Swedish Wikipedia.

The Italian Wikipedia was created on May 11, 2001 and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of 2013 it has over 1,193,000 articles and more than 1,189,000 registered accounts. It is the 8th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles.

The Vietnamese Wikipedia has, as of April 2015, 1,132,000 articles. It is the largest Wikipedia in a non-European language. However, 67% of its articles have been created by bots, following the Swedish Wikipedia's example.

The Polish Wikipedia, founded on September 26, 2001, now has around 1,106,000 articles, making it the 12th-largest Wikipedia edition overall. It is also the second-largest edition in a Slavic language by the number of articles.

The Japanese Wikipedia has over 962,000 articles as of April 2015. Started in September 2002, the edition attained the 200,000 article mark in April 2006 and the 500,000 article mark in June 2008.

The Chinese Wikipedia is the (Standard) Chinese language edition. Started in October 2002, the Chinese had over 800,000 articles as of 13 December 2014.

The Ukrainian Wikipedia is the Ukrainian language edition of Wikipedia. The first article was written on January 30, 2004.

The Catalan Wikipedia was created on 16 March 2001, just a few minutes after the first non-English Wikipedia, the German edition. With about 459,000 articles, it is currently the 17th-largest as measured by the number of articles.

The Persian Wikipedia was started in December 2003. It passed 1,000 articles on December 16, 2004 and 200,000 articles on July 10, 2012.

The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia is the 20th largest in the world. This was locked in early 2005 due to inactivity, but was later re-opened. As of 25 March 2015, the Serbo-Croatian edition has more than 394,000 articles.

The Finnish Wikipedia is the 20th largest with about 370,000 articles as of April 2015. It is the only encyclopedia in Finnish which is still updated. The Finnish language project was started in late 2002.

The Indonesian Wikipedia is the fifth fastest-growing in an Asian language after Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Turkish language s. Its first article was written on May 30, 2003. As of May 2014, there are over 350,000 articles.

The Arabic Wikipedia was started on 9 July 2003. As of April 2015, it has over 350,000 articles. The Arabic Wikipedia is currently the 23rd largest edition of by article count, and was the first Semitic language to exceed 100,000 articles. It has been cited as a high-priority target for growth activities by the Wikimedia Foundation in the past.

The Czech Wikipedia was created on May 3, 2002 at the request of a Czech editor of the Esperanto edition. On July 24, 2014 the Czech reached 300,000 articles.

The Korean Wikipedia was founded in October 2002 and reached ten thousand articles on 4 June 2005. As of 10 April 2015, it has 310,600 articles and is the 26th largest .

Wikia is a free web hosting service and a Wiki hosting service for wikis that hosts several hundred thousand wikis using MediaWiki. Its operator, Wikia, Inc., is a for-profit Delaware company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, respectively the founder and former board chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Citizendium is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of . A result of the catastrophic fall-out between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, its March 2007 public launch aimed to improve on the model by providing increased reliability: by requiring virtually all contributors to use their real names, by strictly moderating the project for unprofessional behavior, and through the use of "approved articles". A alternative that never took off, the site remains live but is all but forgotten today.

Nupedia was the precursor to Wikipedia. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, while both were at Bomis. Nupedia lasted from March 2000 until September 2003. It is mostly known now as the predecessor of Wikipedia, but Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating.

The Edit filter is a tool used to allow trusted users to set specific controls on user activity and create automated reactions for certain behaviors. Edits that trigger an edit filter are listed in a log. Originally named the "Abuse filter" (though no longer referred to as such, as not all filters are for abuse), the extension allows automatic filters/heuristics to be applied to all edits.

Administrators many technically block users from editing Wikipedia, a measure applicable to user accounts, IP addresses, and ranges of IP addresses for definite or indefinite periods of time. Blocked users can continue to access Wikipedia, but cannot edit. Blocks are used to prevent damage or disruption to Wikipedia.

Categories are intended to group together pages on similar subjects. they help readers to find, and navigate around, a subject area, to see pages sorted by title, and to thus find article relationships.

The CheckUser tool is a special function on Wikipedia accessible to a select group of highly trusted users. The tool allows its users to query the Wikimedia servers in order to ascertain the IP addresses used by a Wikipedia user account, as well as other technical data stored by the server about a user account or IP address. Wikipedia's Checkuser team uses the tool in order to establish whether two or more accounts are being operated by one individual or group of people, and then to protect Wikipedia against disruptive or abusive behaviour.

Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops, are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the technical ability to perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia, including the ability to block and unblock user accounts and IP addresses from editing, protect and unprotect pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages without restriction, and use certain other tools. Administrators assume these responsibilities as volunteers who go through a community review process.

Oversight on Wikipedia (also known as suppression) is a form of enhanced deletion which, unlike normal deletion, expunges information from any form of usual access even by administrators. It is used within strict limits to remove defamatory material, to protect privacy, and sometimes to remove serious copyright violations, from any page or log entry (including, if required, the list of users) on the English Wikipedia.

Code review is the process by which submissions to the MediaWiki core at the technical heart of the projects is reviewed and approved by other editors and WMF staff members. There have been and continue to be concerns about the speed with which code review is conducted—and the resultant backlog.

The Wikimedia Foundation's mobile engineering team maintains the two Foundation applications for Wikipedia, one each available on Android and on iOS.

Deletion of a Wikipedia article removes the current version and all previous versions from public view. Page blanking can be performed (or reverted) by any user, but only administrators can perform deletion, view deleted pages, and reverse ("undelete") any deletion. All such actions are recorded in the deletion log, and deletion statistics are recorded at WP:Deletion statistics.

The EmailUser feature allows registered users, if they wish, to exchange emails. The contents of emails between users are private. As a result, limited help is given if the feature is abused, other than disabling it, and the contents of such emails cannot be checked by others for appropriateness as easily as communications left on users' talk pages. The feature can be disabled for any user by an administrator as part of blocking, although this is not usually done unless the facility is abused.

Editcounters are tools which allow a user to sum up and analyze their edits or those of others. X!'s edit tool is historically the most popular one; users suffering from an obsession with their editcount are dubbed as having "editcountitis".

Flow is a project of the Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation to build a modern discussion and collaboration system for all Wikimedia projects. Flow will eventually replace the current Wikipedia talk page system and will provide features that are present on most modern websites, but which are not possible to implement in wikitext.

The GeoData extension allows articles to specify their geographical coordinates and publishes these coordinates via the HTTP API.

HHVM is a PHP interpreter tool that was deployed on Wikimedia servers in 2014, decreasing the loading time for: any page you view while logged in, and for saving pages that you've edited whether you are logged in or not. It was originally developed by Facebook.

Huggle is a fast diff browser application intended for dealing with vandalism or other unconstructive edits on Wikimedia projects, written in C++. Anyone can download Huggle, but rollback permission is required to use it on the English Wikipedia.

Twinkle is a set of JavaScript functions that gives autoconfirmed registered users many extra options to assist them in common Wikipedia maintenance tasks, and to help them deal with acts of vandalism or unconstructive edits. It provides users with three types of rollback functions and includes a full library of speedy deletion functions, user warnings and welcomes, maintenance tags, semi-automatic reporting of vandals, and much, much more. In addition, it gives administrators even more tools to help them carry out their duties.

The image filter was a proposed and partially developed but later abandoned image filtering tool which came about following the emergence of public concerns about controversial content on Wikipedia in 2010 following a blacklisting by the Internet Watch Society.

IPv6 is a new Internet connection standard which will greatly increase the allocation of IP addresses above the amount relegated by the IPv4 standard.

LiquidThreads is an unmaintained MediaWiki extension that implements a new discussion page system. The original code was developed under sponsorship from the Google Summer of Code 2006, the Commonwealth of Learning, and Wikia, later continued by Andrew Garrett. It is used on some Wikimedia wikis. It is to be replaced by Flow.

Although it is possible to edit anonymously, anonymous editors are subject to increased scrutiny and cannot apply for more advanced user-rights as they gain the trust of the community. Editing from an account instead is heavily encouraged of all. The log-in interface and its symbolic meaning have been the subject of technical development and extensive community debate.

Lua is a programming language that is now available, via the Scribunto MediaWiki extension, on the English Wikipedia. It replaces the creaking infrastructure of parser functions in the heavy lifting behind many of the templates on Wikipedia, and has contributed to significant increases in loading speed throughout the projects.

The Scribunto (Latin: "they shall write") extension allows for embedding scripting languages in MediaWiki. Currently the only supported scripting language is Lua.

The Wikimedia Foundation has a number of mailing lists which are open to anyone who subscribes. Many important conversations about and amongst the movement have taken place on the mailing list, and they are the first point of contact between Foundation staff and heavily-involved community members.

Media Viewer is a new component of the MediaWiki and Wikipedia user interface, introduced in early 2014. It changes the way images are displayed when you click on them on the desktop version of Wikipedia. The development state of the tool, alongside the related but separate VisualEditor, has been the source of extraordinary amounts of friction between multiple Wikipedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation engineering team developing it.

Moodbar was an experimental feature aimed at getting quick feedback on the editing experience of new editors. It was part of the New Editor Engagement initiatives. It was mothballed after criticism that it added to editor backlogs whilst failing to generate actionable feedback for said editors.

New pages patrol is a process by which newly created articles are checked for obvious problems. The aim to to see that every page gets checked in a timely manner and is given a boost on its way to becoming a quality article, and that Wikipedia is not deluged with poor-quality articles and totally inappropriate pages.

nofollow was a possible HTML attribute that would affect the way that site linking from one site to another impacted search engine rankings. This attribute determines whether Wikipedia has any influence on the search engine ranking of any page linked to by Wikipedia. Whether to enable or disable nofollow was a technical discussion held by the community in 2005.

OAuth is a means of giving outside ("connected") applications the ability to perform edits and other actions on your behalf. Using this authentication protocol, you can authorize ("grant") a connected application the ability to act on your behalf without the need to divulge your password. The OAuth protocol is widely used by other websites, including major sites such as Google and Flickr.

An essential function of managing an encyclopedia is adding to it.

Parsoid is an application which can translate back and forth, at runtime, between MediaWiki's wikitext syntax and an equivalent HTML/RDFa document model with enhanced support for automated processing and rich editing. It has been under development by a team at the Wikimedia Foundation since 2012. It is currently used extensively by VisualEditor and Flow, as well as a growing list of other applications.

VisualEditor is a rich-text editor that allows people to contribute without having to learn wikimarkup. It was first made available in an opt-in release on the English-language Wikipedia in December 2012. As of April 2015, it is available by default to users of about 76% of the language editions of Wikipedias and as an opt-in beta feature to the rest. The software development and release cycle of VisualEditor has been a major source of friction between the Wikimedia Foundation and the editing community.

Pending changes protection is a tool used to suppress vandalism and certain other persistent problems on Wikipedia while allowing good-faith users to submit their edits for review. Intended for infrequently edited articles that are experiencing high levels of such problematic edits from new or unregistered users, pending changes protection can be used as an alternative to semi-protection and full protection to allow unregistered and new users to edit pages, while keeping the edits hidden to most readers until they are accepted by a reviewer. There are relatively few articles on Wikipedia with this type of protection.

Wikipedia is built around the principle that anyone can edit it, and it therefore aims to have as many of its pages as possible open for public editing so that anyone can add material and correct errors. However, in some particular circumstances, because of a specifically identified likelihood of damage resulting if editing is left open, some individual pages may need to be subject to technical restrictions (often only temporary but sometimes indefinitely) on who is permitted to modify them. The placing of such restrictions on pages is called protection.

Wikipedia has its own search engine, with a search box into which search terms are typed, and a search results page.

Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are run from several racks full of servers. In early years keeping the servers paid for, running, and maintained was the primary technical task before the community.

A template is a Wikipedia page created to be included in other pages. Templates usually contain repetitive material that might need to show up on any number of articles or pages. They are commonly used for boilerplate messages, standard warnings or notices, infoboxes, navigational boxes, and similar purposes.

The Wikimedia Toolserver was a collaborative platform providing Unix hosting for various software tools written and used by Wikimedia editors. The service was operated by Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. with assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation. The Toolserver was closed down on July 1, 2014, replaced by Wikimedia Labs.

The various Wikimedia projects maintain their own local copies of a "upload wizard", a tool to guide users through the process of uploading images. The best iteration of such a tool—unsurprisingly—is on Commons, the Wikimedia image repository.

Images are one of the many types of media used on Wikipedia and may be photos, drawings, logos, or graphs. All images that are used must be legal in the United States, where Wikimedia's servers are located. Images are stored on the Wikipedia website or the partner Wikimedia Commons website. All free content is stored on "Commons" and images that have a copyright are stored on Wikipedia, under a fair use rationale.

MediaWiki software has support for certain public-domain video codecs, with a notable (community-advocated) absence of support for the heavily copyrighted MP4 standard. Wikipedia incorporates some video into its encyclopedic content.

WebCite is a free, on-demand, external web archiving service. It is commonly used by Wikipedia editors to reduce link rot by preserving a copy of an online source that can be accessed if the original page is moved, changes, or disappears. Not all web pages can be archived, however.

WikiLove is a term that refers to a general spirit of collegiality and mutual understanding among wiki users. It was coined over time on the mailing lists. Building on that, the WikiLove extension is a feature designed to make it easy and fun to publicly express appreciation for other users. WikiLove can be invoked from any user page by clicking the "Heart" icon.

Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries (such as for maintenance). A number of initiatives have existed, past and present, to package Wikipedia into a usable and useful offline form.

WikiScanner (also known as Wikipedia Scanner) was a publicly searchable database that linked millions of anonymous edits on the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia to the organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on the owners of the associated block of IP addresses. Created in 2007 the tool inspired many others like it, but has since gone offline.

Unified login or SUL (single user login) is a mechanism which allows users to use a single global login on most of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. This allows users to maintain a consistent identity throughout Wikimedia and work on different projects without having to sign up and log in to each project individually.

User accounts which begin to make uncharacteristic vandalism edits are blocked on contact. This usually means that these accounts got "hacked", ae. their passwords were cracked by a user other than the actual owner of the account. It can be difficult to conclusively prove that an account is one's own after-the-fact, and hacked accounts with high-end user-rights—administrators and above in particular—can cause serious damage.

In January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia—a free, open content encyclopedia that enjoyed rapid growth and popularity; as Wikipedia's public profile grew, he became the project's promoter and spokesman. He is historically cited as a co-founder of Wikipedia, though he has disputed the "co-" designation, declaring himself the sole founder.

Larry Sanger is the former editor-in-chief of Nupedia, chief organizer (2001–02) of its successor, Wikipedia, and founding editor-in-chief of Citizendium. From his position at Nupedia, he assembled the process for article development. Sanger proposed implementing a wiki, which led directly to the creation of Wikipedia. Initially Wikipedia was a complementary project for Nupedia. He was Wikipedia's early community leader and established many of its original policies. Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and has since been critical of the project. He states that, despite its merits, Wikipedia lacks credibility due to, among other things, a lack of respect for expertise. In October 2006, Sanger started a somewhat similar encyclopedia to Wikipedia, Citizendium.