Wikipedia:Tutorial (Related site links)
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Welcome to the Wikipedia Tutorial. This is intended for users who have already learned about Wikipedia through the Introduction and are ready to get started. After reading this series of pages you will gain the basic skills and knowledge you'll need as you become a Wikipedian. For a hands-on tutorial, you can also attend one of our Wikipedia Bootcamps.
Each page will discuss a useful feature of the wiki software, a piece of style and content guidance, information about the Wikipedia community, or important Wikipedia policies and conventions.
Keep in mind that this is a tutorial, not a definitive policy page or an extensive manual. If you want more details, throughout the tutorial there are wiki links to other Wikipedia pages. Those pages have more information on the topics here. If you want to read them as you go along, you might want to open them in a separate window.
There will be links to "sandbox" pages where you can practice what you're learning. Try things out and play around. Nobody will get upset if you mess up an experiment in these practice areas, so play around and see what you can do.
Note: This Tutorial assumes you are using the default page layout. If you are logged in and have changed your preferences, the location of links on the screen may be different.
Ready? OK, let's begin!
| This article is part of the Wikipedia Tutorial |
| Tutorial pages... |
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Front page |
| See also... |
Wikipedia has related sites for non-encyclopedic content.
Contents |
Related sites
Wikipedia is for prose articles about subjects considered encyclopedic (along with some topics that would typically be found in an almanac).
Any article that simply defines a word, or short phrase, as you would find in a typical dictionary, and that can't be expanded into an encyclopedic entry, should be contributed to Wikipedia's sister project, Wiktionary.
Original source text, such as from a public domain book that you want to post to make it more accessible, should be contributed to one of Wikipedia's other sister projects, Wikisource.
For a list of all related projects, see the Complete list of Wikimedia projects.
Linking to the related sites
Say you have an uncommon word in an article that you write, that you think people might not understand. So you're tempted to try and link to it on Wikipedia, but there isn't enough to say about that word to make a real encyclopedia entry.
Link to its Wiktionary entry. (If Wiktionary doesn't have it yet, do everyone a favor and add it, even if it's just a brief definition. Other Wiktionarians will help flesh it out.)
Instead of the whole URL, you can use a wiki link similar to a regular Wikipedia link but with a special prefix. For example,
- [[wiktionary:house]]
will link to the Wiktionary definition of the word "house". In your article it will appear as:
you can hide the "wiktionary:" part by adding a "pipe" (vertical bar) character:
- [[wiktionary:house|house]]
as explained on the previous page, so that the result is:
The other projects have similar shortcuts. For more examples, see How to link to Wikimedia projects.
Cross-server links
You are viewing this article on the English version of Wikipedia, but there are Wikipedia editions with articles written in many other languages. To link from the English Wikipedia to the German article on Michael Jackson, type:
- [[:de:Michael Jackson]]
(Be sure to use the leading colon.)
It will appear as:
Similarly, to link from the German Wikipedia back to the article on Michael Jackson in English, type:
- [[:en:Michael Jackson]]
It will appear as:
Because of the large number of articles hosted on Wikipedia (currently 46 in English alone — over 2,500,000 in total), each of the approximately 100 different Wikipedia languages has its own server. For a full list of Wikipedia languages and their shortcuts see Complete Wikipedia list.
The Meta site
There is one main site that serves as a common area to coordinate development of all these sites, Meta-Wikimedia. The Meta and Wikipedia sites can be linked to in a similar manner:
- One may link to the Meta by typing something such as:
- [[meta:Wikimedia News]]
- One may link back to the English 'pedia from Meta by typing something such as:
- [[wikipedia:Michael Jackson]]
- To link to a separate project in a different language, one would type something like:
- [[w:de:Michael Jackson]]
Experiment
Try it! Here's the /sandbox/ for this page.
Continue with the tutorial.
