Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Directories and Indexes

The Help:Contents page and its FAQ brethren provide fairly tightly organized information. By contrast, two directories offer a jumping-off point for a much larger number of instructional pages. One, the Wikipedia:Department directory (shortcut: WP:DIR), with more than 150 links to specific pages, is organized by categories of general Wikipedia functions (Figure C-3).

Figure C-3. The Department directory page organizes more than 150 links to specific pages (more than two dozen links are shown here, at the top of the directory) into rough categories called departments. While there’s no such thing as a department in Wikipedia (even informally), the groupings are a handy way to find your way around.

Figure C-3 also has a top bar, similar to the one in Figure C-1. One of the links listed there is to Wikipedia:Quick directory (shortcut: WP:QUICK). Figure C-4 shows the Quick Directory.

Figure C-4. The Quick Directory gives you a good overview of the ecology of Wikipedia, with relatively few links to follow.

The newest addition tool within Wikipedia for finding information is the Editor’s Index to Wikipedia (shortcut: WP:EIW). Figure C-5 is a snapshot of part of this index, which has over 3,000 entries.

Figure C-5. The beginning of section “A” of the Editor’s Index to Wikipedia ...