Wikipedia Reader's Guide: The Missing Manual

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In mid-2007, a major survey found that more than a third of Americans regularly consulted Wikipedia. Since then, that percentage has probably grown, just as Wikipedia has—at the rate of several thousand new articles every day, plus the lengthening of articles via more than 100 edits every minute.

In January 2008, O’Reilly published Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. That book is a how-to manual for folks who want to edit Wikipedia articles and become more active in the Wikipedia community. This pocket guide is mostly about understanding and making the most of Wikipedia as a reader. But it also includes most of the first chapter of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual—Editing Your First Article—for when you’re ready to consider the next step: contributing to the largest collective writing project in the world.

So, why do people contribute to Wikipedia? The question is relevant to you as a reader, because a writer’s motivation offers some clues about the writing’s trustworthiness. The reasons vary from person to person, and usually are a mixture of factors, but here are a couple:

As a way of helping other people understand the world—and perhaps changing the world as a result.
To give back to the community that provides a valuable resource by contributing to it.
Clear, factual writing is challenging, interesting, and often fun. Working jointly with others on improving articles in Wikipedia is intrinsically rewarding.

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 about a month, 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.

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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 about a month, 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.

The Foundation has only about a dozen employees, including a couple of programmers. It buys hardware, designs and implements the core software, and pays for the network bandwidth that makes Wikipedia and its sister projects possible. But it doesn’t have the resources to do any of the writing for those projects. All the writing (known in the community as editing) is done by people who get no money for their efforts, though plenty of personal satisfaction.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. You don’t have to register to edit articles. If you do register, you don’t even have to provide an email address (although you should, in case you forget your password). Because of the variety and number of editors, Wikipedia is immense in scope—2.3 million articles as of April 2008, and over 1 billion words (more than 25 times as many as the next largest English-language , the Encyclopaedia Britannica). By the same token, Wikipedia is—and will continue to be—a work in

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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 in December 2005. In that article, a group of experts compared 42 articles in Wikipedia to the corresponding articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their conclusion: “The number of errors in a typical Wikipedia science article is not substantially more than in Encyclopaedia Britannica.” (The actual count was 162 errors vs. 123.) That comparison is now more than 2 years old, and editors have continued to improve those 42 articles as well as all the others that were in the encyclopedia back then. (For a full list of outside reviews of Wikipedia, see the Wikipedia page Wikipedia:External peer review.)

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 changes haven’t made much of a dent in the problem of accuracy.

So, should you trust Wikipedia? That should depend somewhat on the article. If you see a star in the upper right corner (see ), indicating a featured article, you can be virtually certain that what you’ll read is correct, and that the cited sources back up what’s in the article.

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There are two basic ways to find interesting articles in Wikipedia: Do a search, or browse, starting from the Main Page. Wikipedia has lots of organizing features depending on how you want to browse, like overviews, portals, lists, indexes, and categories. But for a bit of amusement, you can also try a couple of unusual ways to go from article to article, as discussed in this section.

On the left side of each Wikipedia page, you’ll find a box labeled “search”, with two buttons—Go and Search. Wikipedia’s search engine is widely acknowledged to be not particularly good. Your best bet to find what you want is to type the title you’re looking for into the search box, and then click Go (or press Enter). If you’re right, and Wikipedia finds an exact match, you’ll be at that article. If it doesn’t find an exact match, Wikipedia provides you with a link to “create this page”, which you should ignore if you’re searching only for reading purposes. It also provides you some search results. shows the result of a failed search for the title Institute of Institutional Research, including the start of some best guess results).

If you click “Search” for curiosity’s sake, you’ll just get some so-so search results. For example, if you search for Reagan wife, the article Nancy Reagan shows up 6th and Jane Wyman shows up 16th. Worse, the context Wikipedia’s result page shows is terrible. With a Google search, by contrast, you can get these two names from the context shown for the first result without even having to click a link.

Figure : When Wikipedia can’t find an exact match to a Go request, it provides search results, but it also offers a link to create an article with the same name as the word or phrase you entered.

If you don’t arrive at an article page when you click Go, and you don’t find what you’re looking for in the search results toward the bottom of the page, your next best move is to switch to another search engine. Wikipedia makes this very easy for you—just change “MediaWiki search” to another menu choice, as shown in .

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Sooner or later, you’re going to want to look something up on Wikipedia when you’re not front of your laptop or desktop computer. Say you’re touring Yellowstone National Park and want to find out about that geyser you’re looking at. If you can get to the Web from your PDA or cell phone, then you can read Wikipedia just like any other Web site—that’s a matter of course. But if your browser does a bad job of displaying Wikipedia articles, you have some options. And if you don’t have mobile Web access, you can still use Wikipedia on the road by downloading what you want to read.

If your PDA or cell phone gives you Web access, it almost certainly has special Web browser software designed to fit large Web pages onto a small screen. But that browser is designed to make best guesses for the billions of pages on the Web, which means it doesn’t understand the structure of Wikipedia pages.

Figure : The starting page of en.wap.wikipedia.org has a Go button but not a Search option. That makes it challenging to find an article if you’re not sure of the exact name, and less than useful if you’re just browsing.

If you want to read Wikipedia articles from a mobile device, the best thing to do is to go to a special web page as a starting point—a page that does understand how Wikipedia pages are set up—and go from there to the article you want. One such place is http://en.wap.wikipedia.org, an “official” Wikipedia site (see ).

The page Wikipedia:WAP access lists some other starting points from which you can also access mobile-tailored versions of Wikipedia articles. Here are two to consider:

wapedia.mobi, which uses a separate (but current) database of Wikipedia articles. It has its own search engine, and (via the small “languages” link on the starting page) you can also read articles in virtually all other language versions of Wikipedia (see ).

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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 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, compared to about two million articles in Wikipedia). Still, there’s much confusion about Wikipedia’s scope.

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

The Wikimedia Foundation has seven projects that are parallel to Wikipedia, plus a project called the Commons, where pictures and other freely-usable media are stored for use by all projects in all languages ().

Figure : The Wikimedia Foundation has eight parallel projects, the oldest of which is Wikipedia, plus the Commons, a central repository of pictures and other media.

T

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.
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 choose to work with Wikipedia articles, which are more widely viewed.

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If you go to the Wikipedia project’s home page, wikpedia.org (as opposed to the English language Wikipedia site, en.wikipedia.org), you’ll see a globe with a list of ten languages surrounding it—the ten language versions of Wikipedia with the largest number of articles. Scroll down, and you’ll see more than 200 other languages. If you select something other than English, you’ll be reading a completely different Wikipedia.

If you see ??? for one of the ten surrounding languages, that’s Japanese. Your computer’s set of fonts doesn’t know how to display the characters.

It would be great if Wikipedia had a universal translator so an article created in or improved in one language Wikipedia would automatically appear in all the other language Wikipedias, but that’s still a fantasy (at the moment). The reality is that editors of each Wikipedia generally use sources in their own language, which vary widely. Editors also focus their efforts on articles that most interest them and the readers of that language, which vary widely, and they spend relatively little time translating articles from one language Wikipedia to

There’s another, more focused way to jump into another Wikipedia, useful if you happen to be able to read two or more languages. When you’re looking at an article, you’ll see, on the left side of the screen, a box labeled “languages”. (You may need to scroll down to see it, and minor articles typically won’t have the box at all.) There you’ll find links to exactly the same topic in other language editions of Wikipedia. For example, Figure shows a box with five links for the article “Luberon,” an area of three mountain ranges in France.

Figure : The English Wikipedia article “Luberon” has links to five articles about that topic that appear in other language Wikipedias: German, French, Italian, Norwegian (nynorsk), and Occitan.

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As mentioned earlier, Wikipedia calls itself “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. If you don’t think that you personally have anything to add to it, you’re wrong—Wikipedia is still far from complete. You—as a reader—can help when you see an article with a problem, or if you have suggestions for sources for improving an article, or if you search for an article and don’t find it.

When you’re thinking about fixing or adding to a Wikipedia article, make sure you have reliable sources at your fingertips first, as described in , below.

If you see vandalism in a Wikipedia article, it could easily have just happened, and an editor is in the process of fixing it. Wait 5 minutes or so, and then refresh your browser window (or leave the page and return). If it’s still not gone, you can ask editors to help. Similarly, when you see something in an article that’s incorrect or obviously missing (perhaps you had a question that you expected the article to answer), you can always ask about the problem, which makes it much more likely that active editors will fix it.

Asking about something in (or missing from) an article is an easy six-step process:

At the top of the article, you’ll see a tab called “discussion”. Click it.

The article’s talk (discussion) page opens.
Do a quick scan of the talk (discussion) page to see if your issue or question has already been asked.

If so, you don’t need to post anything; you’re done.

But if you’re looking at something that looks like an error message, which starts, “Wikipedia does not have a talk page with this exact title. Before creating this page, please verify that an article called ... ”, don’t worry—this message means that your question couldn’t possibly have been previously asked, because the talk page didn’t even exist. You can go on to step 3.

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Anyone can edit Wikipedia—including you. That’s right. There’s no fee, and you don’t have to register. You don’t even have to have an email account (but if you’re reading this book, you probably do). All Wikipedia articles are collaborative efforts, and you can jump right in and add your own knowledge with just a few clicks and some typing.

This chapter explains what you see when you look at an article in Wikipedia’s editing window and how to practice, preview, and save your edits. You’ll also learn a few more basic editing skills—how to create a link from one article to another, and how to edit a section of an article rather than the whole article. Once you’ve got these skills under your belt, you’re ready for the first step in for-real Wikipedia editing: identifying an article in need of an edit.

You can dive right in and start editing without setting up a Wikipedia account (that is, getting a user name). However, there are advantages to having a user name—increased privacy and the ability to create new articles and a personal user page, to name two.

Experienced Wikipedia editors understand one thing above all else: Wikipedia is a collaboration. There’s no need to be intimidated, because you’ve got the support of an entire community of researchers, fact-checkers, and proofreaders. the following points in mind will get you into the right mindset for effective editing:

You don’t need to know everything about Wikipedia to edit an article. Wikipedia has literally hundreds of pages of policy, guidelines, and how-to information on topics such as capitalization, categorization, citations, copyrights, disclaimers, foreign language characters, headings, indentation, links, lists, neutrality, pronunciation, quotations, tags, and templates, to name just a few. If you don’t get something exactly right, don’t worry—no one else gets everything right every time, either.

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Experienced Wikipedia editors understand one thing above all else: Wikipedia is a collaboration. There’s no need to be intimidated, because you’ve got the support of an entire community of researchers, fact-checkers, and proofreaders. the following points in mind will get you into the right mindset for effective editing:

You don’t need to know everything about Wikipedia to edit an article. Wikipedia has literally hundreds of pages of policy, guidelines, and how-to information on topics such as capitalization, categorization, citations, copyrights, disclaimers, foreign language characters, headings, indentation, links, lists, neutrality, pronunciation, quotations, tags, and templates, to name just a few. If you don’t get something exactly right, don’t worry—no one else gets everything right every time, either.
You don’t need to know everything about your subject to edit an article. If you add something that’s constructive and 90-percent right, that’s far better than not doing an edit at all. As in sports, you don’t need to hit a home run or score a goal on every play to be a valuable contributor. If you don’t get something exactly right, someone else is likely to come along and help by fixing or finishing it.
You can contribute without editing at all. If you see a problem in an article, but you don’t (yet) know how to fix it, or you do know how to fix it, but you can’t edit the article (some articles are fully protected, typically for short periods of time), you can still help by posting a constructive comment on the article’s talk (discussion) page. If you don’t want to or can’t edit an article directly, you can still help to improve it.

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Even if you’ve done a lot of writing and editing with various types of software in the past, you’ll need some practice with Wikipedia’s tools. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a page called the sandbox, where editors can practice without worrying about damaging anything. In this chapter, you’ll do your work in the sandbox, rather than editing actual articles.

Remember as you go through the book (or whenever you’re editing), if you encounter a feature that you don’t fully understand, you can always go to the sandbox and do some testing there. You won’t break anything, and you can experiment as much as you want until you figure out exactly how things work. You can even practice duplicating the actual edits that are shown throughout this book.

From any page in Wikipedia, you can get to the sandbox in one of two ways:

In the “search” box on the left side of the screen, type WP:SAND, and press Return. Make sure to type it with all capital letters and no space after the colon.

WP:SAND is a shortcut, and you’ll see others like it throughout the book. If you feel you need to burn a few more calories, type in the search box the full name of the page you want to go to, in this case Wikipedia:Sandbox. Also note that Shift+Alt+F [Shift-Control-F on a Mac] will take you directly to the search box.
Click the “edit this page” tab at the top of any page to go directly into edit mode. You’ll see, toward the bottom of the screen (scroll down if necessary), “Your changes will be visible immediately.” Immediately below, it says “For testing, please use the sandbox instead.” The word “sandbox” is a bolded link—just .

Both ways get you to the sandbox quickly. Just use whichever method you find easier to remember. shows the sandbox before editing starts.

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Editing in Wikipedia is much like using a very basic text editor, with a few word-processing tools thrown in. You type text into the edit box (less commonly written editbox), and then click buttons to preview and finally save your work.

You edit Wikipedia articles in a big, white text box in the middle of the window. To get to that box, you must go into edit mode.

In the search box on the left side of the screen, type WP:SAND, and press Return to go to the sandbox.

You’ll do all your work in this chapter in the sandbox, so you won’t actually change any Wikipedia articles.
From the sandbox page (), click the “edit this page” tab.

You’re now in edit mode, complete with the edit box shown in .

Figure : The sandbox, in edit mode. The text in the box (the edit box) is only an example—what you see will depend on what the other editors have just done to the page. The edit toolbar along the top of the edit box is standard; it provides one-click options for the most common kinds of formatting of content. Also standard is all the text between the sentences “It will be deleted” and “Your changes will be visible immediately.”

If the bottom of looks intimidating, don’t worry: There are only about two dozen items that editors actually use, except in exceedingly rare circumstances.

Figure : The edit box after deleting all but the top three lines. Now the edit box is ready for you to add text. Of what remains, the first line is a template (see ), and the second and third lines are an invisible comment—visible, that is, only when you’re in edit mode.

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Earlier in this chapter, you learned how to create section headers, and to format text as bold or italic (see ). Such formatting is called wiki markup. As you continue through this book, you’ll learn about every type of markup you’re likely to encounter. As a new editor, though, you need to learn three things right away: to recognize the types of markup, how templates are used, and how to create links between articles.

Besides headings, bold, and italic text, you’ll encounter the following types of markup as you edit articles:

{{pagename}} or {{pagename | info1 | info2 }} or {{pagename | this= info 1 | that= info2}}.The double curly brackets indicate a template. An example of a template appeared in and was discussed immediately thereafter. Templates are discussed in more detail later in this chapter ().
[[Article name]] or [[Article name| other name]]. Double square brackets create internal links (wikilinks), which are hyperlinks between pages in Wikipedia.
[http:url] or [http:url some text]. Single square brackets around a URL create external links. This formatting is discussed in Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
<ref> text possibly with a URL </ref> and <references />. These are footnote tags—the text between the tags is the footnote itself—plus the instruction to Wikipedia as to where to display the footnotes. Footnotes are also described in detail in Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
<blockquote> text </blockquote> and <math> numbers and symbols</math>. In articles, you’ll find a few other types of paired tags besides the <ref> tags for footnotes; blockquote and math tags are among the more common. Tags normally come in pairs, and the ending tag must have a slash character (“/”) as its second character if it is to work properly.

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Inexperienced editors often work on entire articles in edit mode even though they’re making changes only to one section of that article. Not only does this make it more difficult for other editors to understand what an editor did, but it also significantly increases the chances of an edit conflict. So, an important rule of editing is: Don’t edit an entire page if you’re changing only one section of the page.

You’ll know an article has sections if you see a table of contents near the top of the article. Even if there is no table of contents, if you see headings within an article, then the article has sections that can be edited. shows an article with no table of contents but with three headings that indicate sections that can be edited.

Figure : An article with three sections that can be separately edited. To edit a specific section, click an “edit” link on the right side of the page.

If you click one of the three “edit” links in , then the edit box shows only the text in the section, not the text of the entire article. That makes it easier to edit (less text in the edit box), and it significantly lessens the likelihood of an edit conflict, because if another editor is editing a different section, your two edits can’t collide.

Sometimes editing an entire article at once is necessary—for example, if you’re moving sections around, or moving text from one section to another. But often when you plan to edit two or three sections of an article, you can efficiently do these as separate edits of individual sections, rather than editing the entire article. If nothing else, it makes previewing much easier (but the preview shows only part of the article, not the entire article).

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From the previous section, you know the importance of editing only a section rather than an entire article, whenever possible. But you may have noticed that in there was no [edit] link for the first sentence in the article, what Wikipedia calls the lead section. So, it appears that if you want to edit that section, you have to click the “edit this page” tab, just as if you wanted to edit the entire article.

In fact, it is possible to edit only the lead section of an article, though most editors don’t know how. There are actually three different options:

The manual way is to click the [edit] link for a section below the lead section, then go to the URL at the top of the screen and change the number at the end of the URL to “0”. (The lead section of an article is always numbered section “0”.) Press Enter, and you’re then editing the lead section.
The most complicated way is to add JavaScript code to your personal JavaScript page, to give you either a special tab (the “0” tab) or an “edit” link. You can find these scripts in the “Navigating to Edit page” section of the page Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts (shortcut: WP:JS). (Note: To do so, you must be a registered editor.)
The easiest way is to click the “my preferences” link on the upper right of the page (which you won’t see unless you have a registered account and are logged in), go to the “Gadgets” tab. Select “Add an [edit] link for the introduction section of a page”, and then click the Save button. Thereafter, whenever you’re editing an article, you’ll see something similar to Figure 2-11.

Figure : After you’ve selected the option to add an edit link for the lead section on the Gadgets tab of the “My preferences” page, you see a new edit link to the right of the title of every article. Clicking that link will open the top section of the article for editing. (If you don’t see such a link, make sure you bypassed your browser’s cache as described at the bottom of the Gadgets tab.)

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Now that you’ve read about the basics of editing, and (hopefully) followed the step-by-step instructions for doing a sandbox edit, you’re almost ready to start editing actual articles. Before you do so, you need to understand a bit more about the rules of Wikipedia. Then you’ll be prepared to find some articles that you can improve.

Taken to an extreme, there are basically two kinds of edits (other than removing vandalism, spam, and other problematic material):

You can change the wording and/or formatting of an article, leaving the information in the article more or less intact.
You can add new information.

It’s worthwhile to do a bit of research about correct documenting of sources in Wikipedia articles before you start adding new information, but if you want to jump right into wordsmithing, read on.

Wikipedia has three core policies for content. Two of them, no original research and verifiability, can be overlooked for the moment (though you can read about them in detail in Wikipedia: The Missing Manual). The third, neutral point of view, is worth mentioning now, because wordsmithing is often about a point of view.

Consider, for a moment, the goal of the people doing public relations or in a marketing department: to write about organizations, products and services, and leaders in a way that casts them in the best possible light. Or consider the wording of a press release by a political party, which tries to make the opposition look as bad as possible. In both of these situations, the writers have what Wikipedians call an extreme point of view (POV). By contrast, Wikipedia’s policies require editors to follow these principles:

Present significant viewpoints in proportion to the (published) prominence of each. Fringe theories, for example, deserve much less space (word count) in an article than mainstream/conventional theories.

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