Wikipedia:Glossary - Wikipedia
Jump to content
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Glossary of terms commonly used on Wikipedia
Abbreviations
Edit summaries
Glossary
HTML
Shortcuts
Templates
Wikitext
Directory
Shortcuts
WP:G
WP:G
WP:TERM
WP:TERM
For abbreviations used in edit summaries, see
Wikipedia:Edit summary legend
. For common shorthands used at AfD, see
Wikipedia:Guide to deletion
. For common abbreviations used within Wikipedia, see
Wikipedia:Wikipedia abbreviations
. For abbreviations used in articles, see
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (abbreviations)
. For the proposed guideline, see
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Glossaries
"WP:TERM" and "WP:G" redirect here. For the use of terms in articles, see
Wikipedia:Manual of Style § Words as words
. For CSD starting with G, see
Wikipedia:Speedy deletion § General
This is a
glossary of terms commonly used on Wikipedia
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
!$@
Shorthand for the word "not".
: – en:, de:, es:, fr:, ja:, etc.
The English-, German-, Spanish-, French-, Japanese-, etc.-language Wikipedia. For a full list of codes, see
List of Wikipedias
or
m:List of Wikipedias
The character ø has been used in
edit summaries
to mean a
Null edit
, except that if you can see the edit summary, then it was a
dummy edit
instead of a null edit.
!=
"Is not equal to". This usage comes from the
relational operator
in programming languages such as
and
C++
!vote
A response to a proposal, e.g.
support
or
oppose
, but in a Wikimedia context where the consensus-seeking decision process does not normally lead to a tally and a majority would not be binding. The expression is read as "not-vote", and imitates the
use of the exclamation point in computing
to mean 'not' in many programming languages. See also
Wikipedia:Polling is not a substitute for discussion § Not-votes
and the essay
Don't vote on everything
. To ensure that your !vote will have weight when a consensus is not expected to be easy, it must be accompanied with an argument why you !vote this way.
Used in
edit summaries
to show minor addition to text.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
0–9
0RR
Abbreviation for "zero-revert rule", a restriction disallowing an editor from
§ reverting
edits. It may be entered into voluntarily, or imposed upon an editor (possibly by
ArbCom
).
See
Wikipedia:Revert only when necessary § Zero-revert rule
1RR
Abbreviation for "one-revert rule", a restriction limiting an editor to one revert. It may be entered into voluntarily, or imposed upon an editor (possibly by
ArbCom
).
See
Wikipedia:Revert only when necessary § One-revert rule
2RR
Abbreviation for "two-revert rule", a restriction limiting an editor to two reverts.
3RR
Abbreviation for "three-revert rule", a restriction that generally applies to editors, limiting them to three reverts on an article within a 24-hour period.
5C
Abbreviation for the "five C's" of
copyediting
– making the article clear, correct, concise, comprehensible, and consistent.
5P
Abbreviation for "
Five pillars of Wikipedia
".
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Abcdise
Shorthand for "alphabetize"; a term sometimes used in
edit summaries
to indicate that the edit was to sort list or other items into alphabetical order.
The art of making it possible for everyone to use Wikipedia, regardless of disability or other circumstance.
Actionable
In
featured content
promotion discussions, all objections to promotion must be
actionable
–which is to say, it must be possible to make changes (or "actions") so the specified problem can be resolved. For example, objecting on the basis that the citations need improvement is actionable because it is possible to make improvements in this area: more and better citations can be added, the citation style and syntax can be improved, etc. An example of an
unactionable
objection is that the topic is too controversial; Wikipedia editors can do nothing to change how controversial the topic is.
Admin
Short for
administrator
. A user with extra technical privileges for "custodial" work on Wikipedia – specifically, deleting and protecting pages, and blocking abusive users. Synonym:
§ sysop
. Not to be confused with a system administrator of a computer system, such as a
Wikimedia system administrator
AELECT
, ADE
Abbreviation for "
Administrator elections
", the alternative process to
Requests for adminship
for becoming an administrator. The process occurs every 5 months.
AfC
Abbreviation for "
Articles for creation
", a project which reviews some articles created via the
Article wizard
AfD
Abbreviation for "
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion
". The AfD of an article refers to the discussion by Wikipedians as to whether the article should be kept or deleted.
See
Wikipedia:Guide to deletion
for explanation of some terms used on AfD.
AGF
Abbreviation for "
assume good faith
", a guideline whereby one should not assume an unwanted or disputed edit was done maliciously.
See also
Hanlon's razor
AIV
Abbreviation for "
Administrator intervention against vandalism
", a place and procedure for notifying
Wikipedia administrators
about urgent cases of vandalism.
Alt text
Text equivalent of an image, for people or computer systems who cannot see it.
AN
Abbreviation for "
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard
", a discussion location for
Wikipedia administrators
Anchor
Wikipedia
defines
an
anchor
as either the starting point or the ending point of a link.
In practice, usage of the term
anchor
at Wikipedia usually refers to the destination anchor, i.e., the landing place of a link.
ANI
, AN/I
Abbreviation for "
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents
", where
Wikipedia administrators
discuss issues which may or may not need urgent administrator attention.
Anon
Abbreviation for "anonymous user" and synonym for the deprecated
§ IP user
account type. As a user does not necessarily lose their anonymity by registering or logging in, this term should be avoided.
Anyone can edit
See the
§ Encyclopedia that anyone can edit
AOTW
Abbreviation of
Wikipedia:Article of the week
, the former appellation of
Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week
ArbCom
Abbreviation for
Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee
Arbitration
The final step in the
dispute resolution
process.
See also
Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee
(ARBCOM).
Arb
Short for
arbitrator
– a member of the
Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee
Archive
§ Subpage
of a
§ Talk page
to which some parts of the discussion are transferred, to reduce the size of the Talk page. Rarely, the term may refer to the
Wikipedia:Historical archive
page, for outdated historical material.
See also:
Help:Archiving a talk page
Article
An encyclopedia entry. All articles are pages, but there are also pages that are not articles, such as this one.
See also
Wikipedia:What is an article
Astroturf
Used only as a verb,
astroturfing
refers to attempts at creating the impression of a
grassroots
movement by the use of
sock puppets and meat puppets
to make an idea, poll, article, or deletion discussion seem to have more support than it actually has; alternatively, the practice of making entries on sites such as Wikipedia to make an idea seem to have more support. In effect, a technique for "stacking the deck".
ATD
Abbreviation for "Alternatives to Deletion", frequently used at
Articles for deletion
discussions to refer to closures other than "Delete"
AUSC
The former
Audit Subcommittee
. Monitored and oversaw
§ Checkuser
and
Oversight
use, and handled complaints concerning use of those privileges. Dissolved in 2016.
Autoconfirmed
newly registered user
is still subject to some of the same restrictions as anonymous users – for example, inability to move articles or edit semi-protected pages, although some restrictions, such as the restriction on anonymous users creating pages, are lifted. When a user is autoconfirmed, these restrictions end. Currently, a new user must make ten edits and wait four days to be autoconfirmed.
AWB
Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser
, a semi-automated Wikipedia editor.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Babel
babel
is a user language template aiding multilingual communication by making it easier to contact someone who speaks a certain language.
BAD
Abbreviation for
Wikipedia:List of bad article ideas
Bad faith nomination
A bad faith nomination is the nomination of a page, or more pages (usually for deletion at
§ AFD
) for disingenuous reasons such as
making a point
or
§ Vandalism
Balancing the Main Page
Copy editing
the content on various
Main Page
sections such that text on the left
Today's featured article
Did you know
column and the right
In the news
On this day
column are "balanced", i.e. there is minimal blank space below both. Depending on the circumstances, this may also involve
temporarily
posting an additional hook or event onto one of the Main Page sections, beyond what the maximum number is stated on that particular section's guidelines.
Ban
Banning is the last-resort action by which someone is prevented from editing Wikipedia for a certain length of time, limited or unlimited. Typical reasons for banning include a long history of biased edits (violation of
§ NPOV
), persistent adding of incorrect or doubtful material, refusal to cooperate with others, or extreme incivility and threats. Banned users are not necessarily blocked; however, it is one mechanism to enforce a ban. Any username or IP judged to be the same person can be blocked without any further reason. See also:
§ Block
Banner
A banner is a template that is placed across the top of any page to indicate the page's type, details about its maintenance, etc. Banners are usually created using the
mbox family of templates
. They are often specifically
linked to a WikiProject
to indicate that the article or category falls within the jurisdiction of that project, but may also be related to article maintenance or protection. "Banner" may also simply mean the administrator who
bans
a troublesome editor.
Bar
placeholder name
. See
§ Foo
Bare URL
A reference including only the
URL
(web address) with no other text (publication name, article title, date, author, etc). See
Wikipedia:Bare URLs
. Such references are liable to
link rot
and should be avoided.
Barnstar
Barnstars
are a light-hearted system of awards given to Wikipedian editors by other editors to acknowledge good work or other positive contributions to Wikipedia. They take the form of an image posted to an editor's
§ Talk page
, usually in the form of a five-pointed star. There is a wide variety of different types of barnstar, each indicating a different reason for the award having been given.
BASC
The
Ban Appeals Subcommittee
, where users formerly could appeal against their ban (or long-term block) after all other appeal processes have failed for them.
base name
In regard to page titles a base name (sometimes "basename") is an
undisambiguated
title. For example, in a title like
Training Day
(Potter Payper album)
the base name is "Training Day". Words like "base" and "name" are very common and when used together may have other meanings in different contexts. Base name can be used to refer to the
magic word
{{BASEPAGENAME}}.
battlegrounding
An oppositional Talk page behavioral style; see
WP:BATTLEGROUND
Be bold
The exhortation that users should try to improve articles and fix mistakes themselves by editing, rather than complain about them. See
Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages
BEANS
An allusion to the
essay
on not warning people about things they would never have imagined doing (it just gives them ideas):
Don't stuff beans up your nose
. Akin to the
Streisand effect
Best practice
The ideal thing to do in a particular situation. The best practice might or might not be the typical practice, and it may be unattainable in some circumstances.
Bit
Most often refers to an account being given the
administrator
rights. When a user "gets the admin bit" they have just become an administrator. Also known as a "
flag
" or the "admin flag".
See
§ Mop
and
Wikipedia:User access levels
Bitey
Being impolite or worse to a newcomer to Wikipedia. Also seen in the forms
bite
biter
, and
bitten
. From the
guideline
name,
Wikipedia:Don't bite the newcomers
and its shortcut,
WP:BITE
. Related to
Wikipedia:Assume good faith
and
Wikipedia:Welcoming committee
BJAODN
Abbreviation for
Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
, a now-inactive page. The verb,
BJAODNed
, refers to the act of something being posted on the page with that name, and was often used at Wikipedia namespace articles involving heavy user participation, such as the Reference desk or AfD/TfD pages.
Blanking
Removing all content from a page. Newcomers often do this accidentally. On the other hand, if blanking an article is done in bad faith, it is
§ Vandalism
. Newcomers often mistake blanking for
deletion
. If someone wants their new article removed, they should simply add
{{
db-g7
}}
or
{{
delete
}}
to it and an administrator will delete the page.
Block
Action by an administrator, removing from a certain IP address or username the ability to edit Wikipedia. Usually done against addresses that have engaged in vandalism or against users who have been banned – see
Wikipedia:Blocking policy
See
§ Ban
BLP
Abbreviation for
Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons
– official Wikipedia policy, whereby articles about living people must be handled with great care.
Blue link
wikilink
to an article that already exists shows up blue (or purple if it has been recently visited by that reader/editor).
See
§ Sea of blue
§ Red link
, and
WikiProject Red Link Recovery
Blurb
A one-sentence summary of a recent news item for
§ ITN
Body
The part of an article containing detailed content about the article topic (as specified by the
article title
). The body is preceded by the
lead section
(if any) and may be followed by
sections containing appendices
. For
short articles
with no lead or appendices, the body may be the entire article, with any
end matter
following after.
Boilerplate text
A standard message which can be added to an article using a
template
. For example,
{{
stub
}}
is expanded to the following:
This article is a
stub
. You can
help
Wikipedia by
expanding it
See
Boilerplate (text)
BoN
Abbreviation for "bunch of numbers".
See
§ IP
Boomerang
A situation when the reporter is blocked following their own reports, particularly in
ANI
Bot
A program that automatically or semi-automatically adds or edits Wikipedia-pages.
See
Wikipedia:Bots/Dictionary
§ Vandalbot
BRD
Bold, Revert, Discuss. A commonly cited explanation of
§ Be bold
saying that the process is to make changes boldly, revert unhelpful changes, and discuss any disagreements rather than
§ Edit war
by repeatedly counter-reverting.
Broken link
A link to a nonexistent page, usually colored
red
, depending on your settings. May also refer to
dead links
See
§ Edit link
§ Red link
, and
Wikipedia:Red link
Broken redirect
Redirect to a non-existing page. Common opinion is that these should be removed.
Bump
To update the posted
WP:ITN
item with newly available information and bring it higher (bump) among other items accordingly.
Bureaucrat
A Wikipedia Administrator who has been entrusted with promoting users to Administrator status.
See
§ Crat
and
Wikipedia:Bureaucrats
BURO
Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Cabal
Sometimes assumed to be a secretive organization responsible for the development of Wikipedia or for clandestinely enforcing certain ways of editing one disagrees with. The word is commonly used as a sarcastic hint to
lighten up
when discussions seem to become a little too paranoid. Discussions involving the term may have links to
POV / NPOV
issues,
§ Admin
problems, or pretty much anything to do with the foundation of Wikipedia. The term
TINC
("There Is No Cabal") is occasionally encountered, used humorously in such a way as to suggest that maybe there is a cabal after all. The term is comparable to the use of the term
SMOF
in science fiction fandom.
See also
m:Cabal
There Is No Cabal
Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal
WP:CABAL
CamelCase
CamelCase
(camel case or camel-case, originally known as medial capitals) is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter is either upper or lower case – as in "LaBelle", BackColor, or "McDonald's". See also
Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia
Campaigning
The inappropriate
§ canvassing
technique of attempting to sway the person reading a notification message about an ongoing discussion, through the use of tone, wording, or intent.
Canvass
Canvassing is the inappropriate notification of a community discussion with the intention of influencing its outcome. Canvassing is considered
disruptive
since it compromises the
consensus building
process. Canvassing comes in various types, including
§ Campaigning
§ Votestacking
, and
§ Spamming
. See
Wikipedia:Canvassing
Cat
"Category" or "categorize". Often pluralized as "cats" or "cats."
Category
A category is a collection of pages automatically formed by the Wikipedia servers by analyzing category tags in articles. Category tags look like this:
Category:Computers
. The part after the ":" is the name of the Category. Adding a category tag causes a link to the category page to go to the bottom of the tagged page and results in the page being added to the category listing, also called category page. A list of basic categories to browse through can be found at
Category:Main topic classifications
Category declaration
, category tag
A category name placed at the bottom of any page and the wiki-syntax of doing this. Pages are placed into categories by the use of the category declarations. Some people refer to category declarations as category tags. A category declaration looks like [[Category:Foo bar]] where foo bar is name of the category and serves as the title of the category page.
CC BY-SA
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
. Wikipedia's articles are released under this license.
See also
Wikipedia:Copyrights
CCI
Contributor copyright investigations
CE, c/e
Copy-edit
CfD
The
Wikipedia:Categories for discussion
page (previously known as
Wikipedia:Categories for deletion
).
CfM
Category for merging
CfR
Category for renaming
Chatty
A term used for articles which seem to present their content in the manner of a casual conversation with the reader. Chatty articles may need
cleanup
CheckUser
An access level with which a user can see the IP addresses of logged-in users, usually to determine if someone is using
sockpuppets
to violate policy. Currently granted only to certain members of the
Arbitration Committee
and some other trusted users.
Child
A parent–child relationship describes two items that are in a
hierarchical relationship
with each other, often as part of a
tree structure
. Examples at Wikipedia include a
§ category
and its
§ subcategories
, or a
§ parent article
and its
§ child article
(s).
Child article
An article which is one of two or more articles related in a hierarchical fashion, and subsidiary to another article known as the
§ parent article
. The article
Causes of World War II
is a child article of
World War II
. See
§ Summary style
CIR
Competence Is Required. An essay commonly cited to point out that even well-intentioned editors (see
Assume Good Faith
) can be disruptive if they frequently get things wrong.
Circular reference
A reference which cites another page within Wikipedia which in its turn cites the first one. See "
Circular reference
". Often circular references create a
logical fallacy
. Another type of circular references is a wikilink in some page to a page which is a redirect to the first one. While mostly harmless, the latter ones are useless and annoying.
See also:
§ Self-link
Circular redirect
Also called self-redirect. A
redirect
which
wikilinks
back to itself, either directly or via a chain of redirects. A special case of
§ Circular reference
Cirrus
The search box at the top of every page allows you to find information at Wikipedia and other
§ Wikimedia projects
using Cirrus search. While it is most commonly used simply to find articles or text in articles, it also has powerful advanced search options and filters enabling highly targeted queries.
Citation
A descriptive string which uniquely identifies a source of information (book, article, webpage, etc.) for the purpose of verifying article content. This descriptive text may be placed at the end of the article (a
general reference
) or after specific material (an
inline citation
). Material without an inline citation is
§ uncited
. Material that is
cited
may or may not be
§ verifiable
in the cited source, depending upon whether the cited source is reliable for this content and contains information that
matches the article content
. (Even if it is not verifiable in the cited source(s), it's possible that it is verifiable in an uncited source.) Synonym: a
reference
Citing sources
. A
§ Footnote
using
...
tags is the most popular way to cite sources.
Citation spam
The illegitimate use of citations, footnotes, or references, typically placed in multiple articles by a single contributor in order to promote a higher profile for a publication, achieve recognition, or a
search advantage
by appearing in Wikipedia. Synonym: refspam.
Civility
Behavior can be civil without being warm, friendly, or agreeable, as long as it provides a fair basis for social interactions and decisions (e.g., treating others as you would be treated, not lying, not being overtly rude, not
trolling
or provoking people just for the
excitement
).
CLS
Cats, lists, boxes
Cleanup
The process of repairing articles that contain errors of grammar, are poorly formatted, or contain irrelevant material.
See also:
Wikipedia:Cleanup process
Climbing the Reichstag
A humorous way of indicating that an editor has over-reacted during an argument such as an edit-war in order to gain some advantage. This has similar consequences to – and is as unwelcome as –
WP:POINT
(qv).
See also:
Activities of "Fathers for Justice"
Wikipedia:No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man
cmt
cm
Comment.
CNR
Same as
§ XNR
COI
Acronym for
Wikipedia:Conflict of interest
COIN
Acronym for
Wikipedia:Conflict of interest noticeboard
Comment out
To hide from normal display whilst retaining the material for editors to see. This is done by inserting the characters
at the end. These character strings are used to
delimit
comments in HTML code.
Commons
Wikimedia Commons
is an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files.
Community Portal
One of Wikipedia's main pages for editor communication. It can often be found linked to on the sidebar (on the left side in most skins), and is a page that lists important notices, the collaboration of the week, outstanding tasks that need to be addressed, and several other useful bits of information and resources. The Community Portal is useful for picking an article or topic to work on or read.
Consensus
WP:CON
The mechanism by which all decisions on Wikipedia are nominally made. Not the same as a "majority vote" (cf
Polling is not a substitute for discussion
) nor unanimity.
Container category
A category which is intended to contain only subcategories, and have no articles placed in it. An example would be
Category:Architecture in the United States by state or territory
Contentious topic
A topic that has attracted persistent
disruptive editing
and has been designated as contentious by
§ ArbCom
. Wikipedia's editing policies and guidelines are enforced more strictly for a contentious topic. A list of them can be found
here
Contribs
, contributions
Edits in wikipedia, supposed to be useful, unlike
vandalism
. See
Help:User contributions
Contributor
See
§ Editor
Convenience links
Links to unofficial copies of reliable sources (not to the original publisher) in addition to a formal citation of the reliable source. Has the advantage over books, paid websites, and websites that need registration of easy accessibility. Sometimes disputed because of violations of copyright, linking to partisan websites, possible distortions or those reliable sources, or because it may contain comments on the reputable sources other editors do not like.
Copyedit
, ce
A change to an article that affects only formatting, grammar, and other presentational aspects.
See also
Wikipedia:Basic copyediting
Copyvio
Copyright violation
. Usually used in an edit summary when deleting copyrighted material added without complying with Wikipedia copyright verification procedures.
See also
§ CV
Wikipedia:Copyrights
Cosmetic edit
"WP:SUBSTANTIVE" redirects here. For the guidelines on titling royalty articles, see
WP:NCSUBSTANTIVE
. For the essay on geographical content, see
WP:GEOSUBSTANTIVE
An edit that has no substantial effect on how a page is actually structured or how it appears (visually or aurally) to readers –that is, changes that are only apparent to editors looking at the
wikitext
. By contrast, a
substantive edit
is one that does alter the resulting page.
See also
WP:SUBSTANTIVEBOT
COTW
Collaboration of the week
, an article needing improvement that is selected by vote to be the subject of widespread cooperative editing for a week.
Crat
, 'Crat
Short for
§ Bureaucrat
Cross-namespace redirects
§ Redirect
which links from one type of
§ Namespace
to another. Examples include words in the article namespace which redirect to project pages in the Wikipedia namespace. Although they are not considered standard practice, some are created to facilitate searching, especially for new users.
See also
§ XNR
§ CNR
Wikipedia:Namespace
and
Wikipedia:Cross-namespace redirects
(essay).
Cruft
A somewhat dismissive term used to describe an article or group of articles that are too focused on a specific topic, covering it in too much detail for a general encyclopedia. The term is often used as a suffix for terms such as
Fancruft
(cruft articles, usually about fictional subjects, significant only to a specific group of
fans
) and
Listcruft
(crufty list articles). Cruft articles are often on topics such as minor characters from television series, or very specific lists of songs (such as "List of songs which includes the word 'death' in the lyrics"). Cruft is often deleted or merged into other articles by the Wikipedia community.
CS1
An abbreviation for
Citation Style 1
, a collection of
reference citation
templates that can be modified to create different styles for different referenced materials.
CSB
WikiProject Countering systemic bias
or, more rarely, an adjective for a topic of concern to the WikiProject, e.g., "This does not seem to be a CSB article." Systemic bias is the tendency for Wikipedia articles to be biased towards a European or American view of things, simply because most editors are European or American.
CSD
WP:CSD
Criteria for speedy deletion
, a policy detailing the circumstances when articles etc. can be removed from Wikipedia without discussion. Also lists the templates needed to nominate something for speedy deletion.
CTOP
See
§ Contentious topic
Current
On a user's list of contributions,
(current)
indicates that the article has not been edited by anyone else since the user last edited it.
Current version
The
(current version)
of a page is the page as it is normally seen. Other versions exist in the
page history
and can be viewed and
permalinked
but do not normally show in searches.
Cut-and-paste move
Moving a complete page by taking the text of the page, and putting it into the edit window for the second page. Usually done by novices to rename a page. The correct way of page renaming is the 'Move page' option. Cut-n-paste move is generally a bad idea because it splits the edit history of the page. Cut and paste moves can be fixed by administrators.
See also
Wikipedia:How to fix cut and paste moves
CV
Abbreviation of
§ Copyvio
CVG
Computer and video games
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Dab, WP:D
Abbreviation of
§ Disambiguation
(or disambiguate[d]) (from the
Wikipedia:Disambiguation
shortcut
WP:DAB
).
Dabify
To convert (typically a redirect) into a disambiguation page.
Dablink, DAB link, etc.
1. Abbreviation of "disambiguation link"; a link that leads to a
§ Disambiguation page
2. To
disambiguate
§ Link
within the text of a page.
3. A link at the top of an article to one or more other articles with similar titles (a
§ Hatnote
), or the addition of such.
DAB page, dab page
Same as
§ Disambiguation page
Data dump
To import material from outside sources into Wikipedia without editing, formatting and linking (
Wikifying
). This is frowned upon by most
Wikipedians
, and is often a
§ Copyvio
Db, DB
1. An abbreviation for "delete because". Almost all
templates
that are used to
request speedy deletion
according to
the procedure
have this prefix (e.g.,
{{
db-advert
}}
{{
db-nonsense
}}
{{
db-band
}}
See also
§ Speedy
2. Wikipedia's
database
Dead-end page
A page that has no links to existing other pages, except interlanguage links.
Special:Deadendpages
lists them, but this function is disabled in some Wikimedia projects for performance reasons.
De-admin
See
§ Desysop
De-bold
To remove a phrase's bold typeface, because it is not the first reference to the title or a synonym of the topic (which should be bold), or because it is not the topic of the article at all. Common situations when one would de-bold include: bold foreign words (should instead be italicized) and bold Wikilinks (which, according to current
Manual of Style
, should be plain).
See also
un-bold
Declined
One of several possible article assessments of a
§ draft
submitted by an editor for
§ AFC
review. "Declined" means that the draft in its current form is not suitable as an article or is not ready to be placed into
§ mainspace
as part of Wikipedia's online encyclopedia and might be deleted if it were submitted to
§ AFD
, but with further work might eventually be accepted as an article. Contrast:
§ Rejected
Deleted edit
§ reverted
edit.
An edit that is no longer listed in an editor's contributions because the page has subsequently been deleted.
Deletionist
Someone who actively attempts to delete pages others prefer to keep. Deletionism is the idea that Wikipedia should be selective in the topics it covers and should remove articles that do not meet certain standards. Often used as a derogatory term. The term 'inclusionist' for the opposite party is less used.
See also
m:deletionism
m:inclusionism
, and
Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia
DENY
Used to mark reversions of edits by known
long-term vandals
, or
obvious
or proven
sockpuppets
of blocked users (see
WP:DENY
).
Delrev
, DRV
Abbreviation for
Deletion review
. Not to be confused with
§ Revdel
Deorphan, De-orphan
To make a page no longer an
§ Orphan
See also
Wikipedia:Orphan
Deprecated
1. (
historical
) Techie-speak for "tolerated in or supported by a system but not recommended (i.e., beware: may well be on the way out)".
2. The term is also used to refer to pages, templates or categories that have been
orphaned
or are no longer used.
3. In non-technical English, the word means, "deplored or strongly disapproved of".
Desc
Abbreviation for "description". Often used in edit summaries.
Destination
The
destination
of a name is the page or section to which it takes the reader in the
main namespace
. If the page by that name is a
redirect
, then the redirect target is the destination. Otherwise (typically if the page is an
article
or a
disambiguation page
) the page itself is the destination.
Desysop
Take away someone's sysop (
§ Administrator
) status.
Used very rarely
, in cases where someone has voluntarily elected to resign such status, or is judged to have
misused their admin powers
See also
Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship
Developer, dev
Usually capitalized. A user who can make direct changes to Wikipedia's underlying software and possibly also the database, often being one of the
§ MediaWiki
developers
(see next definition)
or other
Wikimedia Foundation
technicians. Technically, it is the highest user access level, but Developer privileges are generally used only at request. Sometimes referred to by other terms such as "system administrators" or "sysadmins", to distinguish from MediaWiki developers.
See also
m:Developers
for a list of developers and further information.
Usually not capitalized. One of the developers of the
§ MediaWiki
software; often but not always a Wikipedia Developer
(in the above sense)
De-wikify, dewikify
To remove (de-link) some of the
wikification
of an article. This can be done to remove
self-references
or excessive common-noun wikification (also known as the
§ Sea of blue
effect).
Dicdef, dictdef, dic def, dic-def
Short for a dictionary definition. This term is commonly used on
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion
when referring to an article that is more similar to a dictionary article than an encyclopedia one. Usually a reason for transwikifying to
Wiktionary
See also
Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary
Diff
The difference between two versions of page, as displayed using the
Page history
feature, or from
Recent Changes
. The versions to compare are encoded in the
URL
, so you can make a link by copying and pasting it, for instance when discussing a change on an article's talk page.
Disambiguation
, disambig
The process of resolving the conflict that occurs when articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title.
See also
§ Dab
Disambiguation page, DAB page, dab page
A page that contains various meanings of a word, and refers to the pages where the various meanings are defined. In cases when there is a prevailing meaning of the term, disambiguation pages are named "subject (disambiguation)" when there is a
primary topic
. See (
Wikipedia:Disambiguation
Disambiguator, disambiguation tag
The extra text added to an ambiguous
§ base name
to form an unambiguous
article title
. Also known as a "
qualifier
".
DMCA takedown request
filing
to the
Wikimedia Foundation
asking them to remove an image or other content from Wikimedia on the grounds that it constitutes a copyright violation and the host has responsibility for that under the U.S.'s
DMCA
law.
Double redirect
§ Redirect
which leads to another redirect. Counterintuitively, this will not bring one to the final destination, so it needs to be eliminated by linking directly to the target redirect. Double redirects are generated when moving a page that has redirects leading to it.
See also
§ Repoint
Draft
Drafts are pages that are not yet part of Wikipedia's online encyclopedia where new articles can be created and developed that are not subject to all of the requirements of an encyclopedic article, giving editors time to construct the article, receive feedback, and ensure the draft complies with
Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines
. Drafts are typically developed in the
Draft namespace
(draftspace) which is a special area of Wikipedia dedicated to the development of drafts. Drafts may also be developed in userspace, as a
§ userspace draft
. When a draft is ready and compliant with requirements, it may be moved to
§ mainspace
or submitted to
§ AFC
for review.
DRV
See
§ Delrev
Duck
See
the duck test
Dupe
Short for a duplicate article. Often used when identifying a duplicate page that needs to be
merged
with another.
DYK
An abbreviation for
Template:Did you know
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
EC
, e/c
§ Edit conflict
, or
WP:Extended confirmed
Edit conflict
Also, rarely "edconf". Appears if an edit is made to the page between when one opens it for editing and completes the edit. The later edit does not take effect, but the editor is prompted to merge their edit with the earlier one. Edit conflicts should not be confused with
edit wars
Editcountitis
A humorous term for having an unhealthy obsession with the number of edits a person makes to Wikipedia, usually applied to one trying to make as many edits as possible. Often cited on
Requests for Adminship
regarding people who judge people on sheer edit count rather than personal merit.
Edit creep
The tendency for high quality articles to degrade over time. Articles usually achieve
good article
or
featured article
recognition because a small core of people knew the subject well and researched it carefully. Subsequently, new readers continue to alter the page. The average contribution may weaken the piece through bad copyediting, poor syntax, recitation of popular misconceptions, or giving undue weight to a subordinate topic.
(By way of analogy to
scope creep
.)
Edit link
See
§ Broken link
Edit summary
The contents of the "Summary:" field below the edit box on the "Edit this page" page.
Editor
Anyone who writes or modifies Wikipedia articles. That includes you.
Other terms with the same meaning:
contributor
user
Edit request
/ER
A proposed change submitted by someone who cannot or should not implement the changes.
Edit war
Two or more parties continually making their preferred changes to a page, each persistently undoing the changes made by the opposite party. Often, an edit war is the result of an argument that could not be resolved on a talk page. Edit wars are not permitted and may lead to blocks.
Sometimes termed "revert war", see also the
§ three-revert rule
Enc
Short for "encyclopedic" or "encyclopedic value". For example, used on
featured pictures
discussions.
Encyclopedia that anyone can edit
A core principle of Wikipedia, enshrined in the
Five pillars
, is that Wikipedia is the "Encyclopedia that anyone can edit".
Eponymous
An eponymous category is a category that has the same name as an article and vice versa. For example
George W. Bush
and the eponymous
Category:George W. Bush
Essay
A page that consists of the generally accepted opinions of the authors, rather than verifiable fact.
Expand
, expansion
To expand a template means to replace the use of a template in the
§ wikicode
with the result of invoking the template for display to the reader. The Wikimedia software automatically replaces a template in the wikicode of an article with the result of the template invocation in the page Html so a reader may view it. For example, if you code
{{Convert|15|miles|km}}
in the wikicode of an article, when you view the page it will say "
15 miles (24 km)
" in place of the template invocation. The wikicode itself remains unchanged. The value returned by the template—what you see when viewing the article—is called the
expansion
of the template. See
Help:Template#Terminology
Expand
can also mean to
replace an abbreviation
or initialism with the term it refers to.
External link
A link to a website not owned by
§ Wikimedia
. The alternatives are an
internal link
wikilink
or
free link
within Wikipedia, and an
§ interwiki link
to a
§ sister project
. See also
Wikipedia:External links
Wikipedia:Spam
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
FA
Featured article
, an article that has been selected as representing "the best of Wikipedia". Articles become featured articles when a
§ FAC
gets consensus for promotion.
FAC
Featured article candidate
, an article that has been proposed for consideration to be
featured
as one of the best in Wikipedia.
Fancruft
See
§ Cruft
FAR
Featured article review
, a process for the improvement or delisting of
featured articles
that may no longer meet the
quality standards
for "featured" status, either because the featured article criteria, the article's topic, or the article itself changed. The process begins with a discussion on the article's talk page. If the issues are not resolved, a user may list the article on FAR, where a discussion takes place to help identify and address areas where improvement may be needed. After the discussion, if no consensus emerges to keep the article featured, the review moves on to the next stage,
featured article removal candidates
FARC
). Here, the article's "featured" status is considered for removal.
FfD, FFD
An abbreviation for
Files for discussion
FIST
Free Image Search Tool
, which will look for free images for articles, either manually listed or by category.
Float, floating
To add coding to a template, image, or other feature so it appears in a specific position on the page.
See
Wikipedia:Picture tutorial § Thumbnails
Help:Table § Floating table
, and
Help:Section § Floating the TOC
for examples.
fmt
Format. Abbreviation commonly used in edit summaries to signify formatting of the page, or
wikification
FoF
Finding of Fact, one of the sections of an Arbitration Decision
Foo
placeholder name
, used to provide a generic example. Thus, "an article on the culture of Foo", means "an article on the culture of any of the places under discussion, or any that it may also apply to". When two placeholders are required, Bar is usually used as the second (e.g., "an article on the Foo of Bar").
See also
Foobar
Footnote
A labeled string of text rendered at the bottom of an article page by the Wikimedia software, and linked to by one or more superscript markers (usually numeric) in the running text of the article. Footnotes are generated by embedding footnote text inside tags in the wikitext of the article. When the text string is a
§ Citation
, then it is called a
citation footnote
; otherwise an
explanatory footnote
. See
Help:Footnotes
footnote marker
– the bracketed, superscripted number, letter, or word; like these dummy examples.
[1]
[a]
[Note 1]
footnote label
– the part between the brackets; following the above example: '1', 'a', or 'Note 1'.
footnote
– the full note or reference, displayed automatically in an ordered list in the
Notes and references
appendix of the page. Each entry begins with the footnote label in plain text.
Forest fire
flame war
which spreads, seemingly uncontrollably, beyond the pages where it began into unrelated articles' talk pages. A forest fire becomes progressively more difficult for any user to keep track of. On Wikipedia, this is less of a problem than on other
wikis
, due to well-established boundaries for
user conduct
, clear guidelines for
article content
, and a formal
dispute resolution process
See also
wildfire
and
MeatBall:ForestFire
Fork
A splitting of an entity to satisfy different groups of people – in Wikipedia, this can either mean a project-wide split, in which a group of users decides to take a project database and continue with it on their own site (which is perfectly legal under the
§ GFDL
, and one of an editor's least disputed
rights
), or the split of an article, usually to accommodate different
POVs
. The latter is often called a
POV fork
and generally regarded as highly undesirable.
(Not a) forum
Saying that Wikipedia is
"not a forum"
is a friendly reminder that discussions should stay focused on the articles themselves or other processes within Wikipedia, and not about the topic of the articles. The phrase was coined in reference to
internet forums
FP
Featured pictures
, a picture that has been selected as representing "the best of Wikipedia". Pictures become featured pictures when a
FPC
gets consensus for promotion.
FPC
Featured picture candidate
, a picture that has been proposed for consideration to be
featured
as one of the best in Wikipedia.
Free link
A link pointing to another page within Wikipedia or its
§ sister projects
by using the wiki markup double square-brackets "[[" and "]]". Sometimes they are referred to as
wikilink
s or
internal link
s. Unless otherwise specified in a user's monobook.css, these links usually show up as
blue
if they are working and you haven't visited them before,
red
if they are
broken
, and
purple
if they are working and you have visited them before; note that they do not have the arrow symbol characteristic of an external link.
Friendly notices
A contributor who sends friendly notices as a means of
§ Canvassing
appropriately must ensure these
neutrally
worded notifications are sent to a small number of editors, intending to improve rather than to influence a discussion and while avoiding
excessive cross-posting
. See
Wikipedia:Canvassing
Full title
The
§ base name
of an article plus any
disambiguators
. For example, the
full title
of the article at
top (clothing)
is
top (clothing)
, consisting of the
base name
top
and the
disambiguator
(clothing)
. If there are no disambiguators, the full title is identical to the base name.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
GA
Good article
. Hence
GAN
Good article nomination
and
GAR
Good article reassessment
gadget
gadget
is a JavaScript tool that can be enabled from your Wikipedia preferences.
Gdanzig
An edit war over which of several possible names should be used for a place. The word is a portmanteau of
Gdańsk
and
Danzig
, the two names about which a venerable edit war ensued. See
Talk:Gdansk/Vote
geostub
WP:stub
article about a geographical location
GF
See
§ AGF
GFDL
GNU Free Documentation License
. Many of Wikipedia's articles are released under this license.
See also
Wikipedia:Copyrights
GFE
1. A
good faith
edit.
2. A good faith editor.
Ghits, G-hits, GHits
"Google hits" – the number of results returned on searches for a particular word or phrase using the
Google
search engine. Sometimes used as a very rough assessment of notability on
§ AFD
. See also
§ Google test
glock
Short for
global lock
, a block where the user is banned from every WikiMedia site
gloss
, glosses, glossing
In editing, a
gloss
is brief explanation that accompanies a text. It can also refer to the addition, modification, or deletion of
hyperlinks like this one
gnome
A wikipedia editor who primarily engages in
gnoming
: making minor, but helpful edits.
Godwin's Law
Godwin's Law
is concerned with
logical fallacies
such as
reductio ad Hitlerum
, wherein an idea is unduly dismissed or rejected on the ground of it being associated with persons generally considered "evil".
Godwin's Law states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the
probability
of a comparison involving
Nazis
or
Hitler
approaches 1." It is often cited as soon as it occurs as a flag that discussions have gone on too long or gotten out of hand on a particular topic.
good hand, bad hand
Using one resource only for good things and a second, similar resource only for bad things, thereby deflecting any criticism from the first resource by attracting it with the second. In short, keeping one hand clean by using only the other hand for all dirty things.
On Wikipedia, used in phrasing such as, "A good hand, bad hand situation," usually referring to the behavior made under two editor accounts. See
Wikipedia:Sock puppetry § Inappropriate uses of alternative accounts
, in particular the bullet point with direct shortcuts
WP:GHBH
WP:HAND
Google test
Running sections or titles of articles through the
Google
search engine for various purposes. The four most common are to check for copyright violations, to determine which term among several is the most widely used, to decide whether a person is sufficiently notable to warrant an article and to check whether a questionable and obscure topic is real (as opposed to the idiosyncratic invention of a particular individual).
See also
§ Ghits
and
Wikipedia:Google test
GPL
GNU General Public License
Wikipedia's software
is released under this license.
gr
Grammar. Used in
edit summaries
to indicate that a grammar problem is being corrected.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Hagiography
Wording that is excessively fulsome, adulatory or glowing in a biographical article, to the point of violating
§ NPOV
Handwaving, armwaving
An assertion not supported by evidence; most frequently seen in
articles for deletion
discussions, when editors may assert that a subject is
notable
, but fail to make a convincing case. Such arguments are usually given less weight.
See also
Handwave
Hashtag
A tag that begins with a hash ("#"); sometimes used in
edit summaries
as part of editing campaigns. Use
CamelCase
for accessibility. There's a
hashtag search tool
Hatnote
A short note placed at the top of an article before the primary topic.
Hard redirect
Equivalent to the usual
§ Redirect
, used to differentiate it from the
§ Soft redirect
Hat
1. A collapsed (section of) discussion enclosed by
{{
hat
}}
Template:Hidden archive top
) and
{{
hab
}}
Template:Hidden archive bottom
) templates.
See: Hatted, Hatting
2. A specific user right, in the context of
Wikipedia:Hat collecting
Hatted, Hatting
Refers to using
{{
hat
}}
Template:Hidden archive top
) to close and collapse a discussion to discourage further editing, without removing it completely from the page.
Help desk
One of several pages where users can ask for help editing or reading Wikipedia. The main one is
WP:Help Desk
WP:Teahouse
is especially for beginners.
History
All previous versions of an article, from its creation to its current state. Also called
page history
See also:
Help:Page history
Hook
A short entry at
Wikipedia:Did you know
Hopelessly POV
Describing an article which, in the opinion of some Wikipedians, is so closely tied to a particular point of view as to be inherently in violation of
Wikipedia policy
and unable to be made neutral. Other Wikipedians consider the accusation "hopelessly POV" as being merely an excuse to suppress certain points of view.
HTH
Short for
Hope this helps
. Seen at the end of a talk page comment by a responder trying to answer a user question. Often considered sarcastic.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
IANAL
, IANaL
An abbreviation for "I Am Not a Lawyer", indicating that an editor is about to give their opinion on a legal matter as they understand it, although they are not professionally qualified to do so, and may not fully understand the law in question. May be generalized to other fields, e.g.,
IANAA
(administrator),
IANAD
(doctor).
IAR
Ignore All Rules
A policy which states simply "If a
rule
prevents you from improving or maintaining
Wikipedia
ignore it
." There are several essays on what this means, including
Wikipedia:What "Ignore all rules" means
, and an encyclopedic
article on the topic
IAW
An abbreviation for "in accordance with", as in "IAW [[WP:RS]]".
IBAN
, I-BAN
An abbreviation referring to an
interaction ban
between two or more editors, usually used to reduce or eliminate a conflict.
ICBH
An abbreviation for I couldn't be happier.
IfD
, IFD
An abbreviation for
Images and media for deletion
, the old name for
Files for discussion
Iff
If and only if
Inactive
Describes a user that has not edited Wikipedia for some time, with or without announcing that they have
§ retired
. User
accounts are never deleted
, and an inactive editor can return to editing at any time.
§ Administrators
who are inactive over a year may have their
permissions administratively removed
. See also
§ Retiring
Inclusionist
A user who is of the opinion that Wikipedia should contain as much information as possible, often regardless of presentation or notability. There are varying degrees of
Inclusionism
– radical Inclusionists vote "Keep" on every
§ AfD
they come across, while more moderate ones merely express their desire for a wide variety of topics to be covered, even if they do not fit the standard criteria for inclusion in an encyclopedia, or if the articles in question have quality problems.
Indef
Short for
indef
inite block
Infobox
A consistently formatted table which is present in articles with a common subject. See
Help:Infobox
and
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (infoboxes)
for a how-to guide.
See also:
§ Navbox
§ Taxobox
Internal link
See
§ Free link
§ Wikilink
Interwiki
A link to a
§ sister project
; this can be an
interlanguage link
to a corresponding article in a
different language
in Wikipedia, or a link to a project such as Wikibooks, Meta, etc. The abbreviations
iw
or
i/w
are often used in
edit summaries
when an interwiki link has been added or changed.
IOT
Abbreviation for "In order to".
IP user
, IP editor, IP contributor, IP
a type of legacy
user account
, formerly used to uniquely identify
§ unregistered editors
by their
IP address
, and deprecated in late 2025 with the introduction of
§ temporary accounts
Synonym:
§ Anon
IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet
, widely used on Wikipedia to indicate pronunciation.
See also
Help:IPA
Help:IPA/English
, the more detailed
IPA chart for English dialects
, and
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation)
IRC
Internet Relay Chat
IRL
Abbreviation for "
In real life
".
Isolated, isolated article
An
isolated article
is an article that cannot be reached via a series of links from the
Main Page
See also
§ Orphan
ITN
Abbreviation for
Wikipedia:In the news
i/w
, iw
See
§ Interwiki
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Janitor
See
§ Admin
Jimbo
Jimmy Wales
, co-founder of Wikipedia.
Kill
/ Kill with fire / Kill with a stick / Kill with a
§ Silver bullet
Dysphemisms
for "deleting" a page, expressing some disgust for the existence of the page.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Language link
See
§ Interwiki
Laundry list
See
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Embedded lists
and
Wikipedia:WikiProject Laundromat
Lead
, Lede
The introduction or "lead paragraph" of a Wikipedia article; the section before the table of contents and first heading.
LCV
LGV
Edit summary abbreviation for Last Correct Version or Last Good Version (typically after a series of problematic edits).
Lightweight source
A source that only performs basic or token fact-checking; it should not be used to cite exceptional claims.
Link
See
Help:Menu/Links
clarification needed
Link farm
Link farms are articles or sections of articles consisting entirely of external or internal links. Some pages consisting of internal links are acceptable (such as disambiguation pages and list articles); others are likely to be candidates for deletion, as are any consisting entirely of external links.
Link rot
Because websites change over time, many external links from Wikipedia to other sites cannot be guaranteed to remain active. When an article's links becomes outdated and no longer work, the article is said to have undergone
link rot
List, list article
See
Wikipedia:Lists
Listcruft
See
§ Cruft
Listify
To delete a category and turn the contents into a list. Sometimes used in
§ CFD
discussions as shorthand for "this group of articles would be better if presented as a list, rather than as a category".
Lk
Landmarks: Major landmarks; also used as an abbreviation for "link" (see above).
LTA
Long Term Abuse
Lugo
A meme associated with stagnation or the lack of sufficient updates on the
Main page
. It originated from an incident in 2008, when an image of President of Paraguay
Fernando Lugo
stayed up on the
In the news
section for well over a week.
See also:
Wikipedia:Lugo's law
and
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-31/Dispatches
– Wikipedia Signpost article on the process and history of
In the news.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
On the
Recent changes
page,
(lower case, bold) indicates a
§ Minor edit
Magic word
a symbol that is recognized by the
MediaWiki
software and, when seen in the non-commented text of the page, triggers the software to use the symbol directly instead of displaying it or
transcluding
a page with that name.
Main Page
The page to which every user not specifying an article is redirected. The
Main Page
contains links to current events, presents certain articles (like a
featured article
of the day and links to Wikipedia's newest articles), and serves as an entry point to browsing all articles by topic or other classification. Links to
§ sister projects
and other-language Wikipedias are also a prominent feature on the Main Page. Due to its high exposure, all content on the Main Page is
protected
Main Page balance
See
§ Balancing the Main Page
Mainspace
The main article
§ Namespace
(i.e., not a talk page, not a "Wikipedia:" page, not a "User:" page, etc.).
Malplaced disambiguation page
When an ambiguous
base name
page title, such as "Foo", redirects to a page named "Foo (disambiguation)", the Foo page is said to be "malplaced". In this case, Foo (disambiguation) should be moved to the Foo title.
See
Wikipedia:Malplaced disambiguation pages
Markup
See
§ Wiki markup
MC
The former Mediation Committee.
See
Wikipedia:Mediation Committee
ME
A minor edit to an article.
Meat puppet
An account created only for the illegitimate strengthening of another user's position in votes or discussions. Unlike a
§ Sock puppet
, the account is used by another person. Meat puppets are treated exactly like sock puppets in most cases, making the distinction between them largely academic.
MedCab
The Mediation Cabal.
See
Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal
MedCom
The former Mediation Committee.
See
Wikipedia:Mediation Committee
Mediation
An attempt by a third party to resolve an edit war or other conflict between users. There existed a
Wikipedia:Mediation Committee
which can do so on a more or less official basis as the penultimate step in the
dispute resolution
process, and a
Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal
which acts as an informal alternative.
See also:
Wikipedia:What is mediation?
Wikipedia:Mediation
MediaWiki
The software behind Wikipedia and its
§ sister projects
, as well as several projects not related to Wikimedia, and a namespace.
Contrast
§ Wikimedia
See also
Wikipedia:MediaWiki
Wikipedia:MediaWiki namespace
MEDRS
MEDical Reliable Source
Meh
Common edit summary used by many Wikipedians. Generally used for minor edits that no one is expected to care about. Also use (in edit summary or directly in talk page posts) in response to posts the editor feels are uninteresting or pointless, or proposals not worth considering.
Mentee
all new Wikipedia editors are assigned a
§ mentor
when they sign up. The new editor's role, vis-a-vis the mentor, is as their
mentee
Mentor
an experienced Wikipedia editor who volunteers to answer new users' questions about editing Wikipedia, by
signing up
for the
Wikipedia Growth Team mentorship program
Merge
Taking the text of two pages, and turning it into a single page.
See
Help:Merging
Mergist
A user who adheres to the principle of
Mergism
, which is a compromise between the
§ Inclusionist
and
§ Deletionist
principles. A Mergist is of the opinion that while many topics merit inclusion, not every topic deserves its own article, and tries to combine these "side" topics into longer, less specific articles.
Meta
A separate
wiki
[1]
) used to discuss general Wikimedia matters. In the past, this has been called
Metapedia
Meta Wikipedia
Meta Wikimedia
, and many other combinations.
Meta page
, meta-page
A page that provides information about Wikipedia. Meta pages are more correctly referred to as
project namespace
pages. Meta pages should not be confused with a page on Meta-Wikimedia.
MfD
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion
Minor edit
A minor edit is one the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. An edit of this kind is marked in its page's revision history with a lower case, bolded "m" character (
).
Mirror
A website other than Wikipedia that uses content originally from Wikipedia as a source for at least some of its content.
See also
Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks
Mop
A term used to refer to administrator duties (compare
Janitor
). Often seen in the phrase
to give someone a mop
(i.e., to make someone into an administrator).
MOS
short for the
Wikipedia:Manual of style
often found in compound forms such as "MOSNUM" ("Manual of Style/Dates and numbers") and "MOSCAPS" ("Manual of Style/Capital letters").
See also
§ NC
seen in
§ edit summaries
to indicate that a change has been made to make an item comply with Wikipedia's Manual of Style
Move
Changing the name and location of an article because of a misspelling, violation of naming convention, misnomer, or inaccuracy. Involves either renaming the page or moving it and constructing a redirect to keep the original link intact.
See also
Help:Renaming (moving) a page
Move war
An
edit war
in which two (or more, but almost always two) editors move a page back and forth. This may be the result of a dispute over the proper title for the page, or a dispute over whether the page should be in article space or moved into draft space for improvement.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
On the
Recent changes
page,
(upper case, bold) – with a red exclamation mark –
indicates a new page or article that has not yet been patrolled.
N/a
An abbreviation for
new article
, often used in edit summaries. Easily confused with the common non-Wiki use, "not applicable" or "not available".
NAC
An abbreviation for
non-admin closure
. Signifies a closure of a discussion which was performed by someone without
§ Admin
privileges.
Namespace
A way to classify pages. Wikipedia has namespaces for encyclopedia articles, pages about Wikipedia (
project namespace
),
user pages
(User:), special pages (Special:),
§ Template
pages (Template:), and
talk pages
(Talk:, Wikipedia talk:, and User talk:), among others.
See also
Wikipedia:Namespace
Name drop
A concern in
Notability
discussions when a source mentions a subject only by name without going into any other detail
Navbox
, Navigation template
navbox
is a type of template placed at the bottom articles to enable the reader to navigate easily to other articles on related topics.
See also:
§ Infobox
§ Taxobox
NC
Found in
edit summaries
to indicate that a change has been made to make an item comply with Wikipedia's standard naming conventions.
See also
§ MOS
Wikipedia:Article titles
Newbie test
, Noob test
An edit made by a newcomer to Wikipedia, just to see if "Edit this page"
really
does what it sounds like. Newcomers should use
Wikipedia:Sandbox
for this purpose.
See also
Wikipedia:Introduction
NN
, non-notable
Abbreviation found in comments at
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion
and in edit summaries, indicating that the article's subject is
not
notable
enough for a Wikipedia entry. A subject is non-notable if editors agree
not
to have an article about this subject. Their decision is usually based on things like not finding enough reliable sources to write a decent encyclopedia article, but it can also be based on things like a desire to present a small subject as part of a larger one.
nom
Short for "nomination" or "nominator". Often found on deletion
process pages
as part of the phrase
Delete per nom
, indicating a voter's assent to and/or agreement with the main nomination for deletion.
NOR
The Wikipedia policy that
No Original Research
is allowed in citing sources in articles.
Notability
, Notable
A "
test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article
". A notable topic is one that "
is suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received
significant coverage
in
reliable sources
that are
independent
of the subject.
" Note that notability is a property of a
§ topic
, and has nothing to do with the content or quality of an article, or whether an article exists for the topic.
Notice board
A page that acts as a forum for a group of users, who use it to coordinate their editing. Most notice boards are by geographic location, like the
UK Wikipedians' notice board
; a notable exception is the
Administrators' noticeboard
NPA
No Personal Attacks
. A special case of
civility
, saying that criticism must be directed at content and editing behavior, not at editors personally.
NPOV
Neutral point of view
, or the agreement to present possibly subjective content in an objective, neutral, and substantiated manner, so as not to cause edit wars between opposing sides. As a verb, to remove biased statements or slanted phrasing. As an adjective, it indicates that an article complies with Wikipedia's NPOV policy.
NPP
Wikipedia:New Pages Patrol
Null edit
A null edit is made when an editor opens the edit window of a document then re-saves the page without having made any text changes. This is sometimes done as a lazy way to
purge
– to update the functioning of templates (which require articles containing them to be edited in order for any changes to take effect). The term also applies to making a very small, non-substantive change (e.g., removing an unneeded blank line or adding one) in order to get the article history to register a change, for the purpose of leaving an edit summary that responds to a previous one.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
OBE
Abbreviation for Overcome By Events or Overtaken By Events.
Office actions
May refer to administrative interventions on Wikipedia by WMF staff. See
Wikipedia:Office actions
Off-topic
Used to describes article content or discussion commentary that doesn't correspond to the topic of the section or page on which it appears. A criticism of venue, not accuracy.
OP
Abbreviation for
§ Original post
(or "Original poster"). Can also stand for
Open Proxy
. Or, in the context of
§ IRC
, "op" can refer to "ChanOp" (Channel Operator), and to "get ops" or "be opped" means to attain a higher access level within a channel.
Open tasks
§ Template
(found at
{{
opentask
}}
) that lists several more or less janitorial tasks that are pending or needed. It is found on the
§ Community Portal
as well as on many
user pages
. The term is also occasionally used within individual WikiProjects to refer to work which has been discussed but which still needs to be completed.
Open Ticket Request System
Refers to the people and software that surround the handling of email sent to the
Wikimedia Foundation
Orange tag
tag
on an article, indicating content issues, such as
{{
Unreferenced
}}
and
{{
Weasel
}}
. It is called so because of the corresponding colors of the border of the tag. On the scale it is between style issues (yellow, e.g.
{{
Buzzword
}}
) and deletion (red, e.g.
{{
db
}}
). Frequently used in
WP:ITN/C
discussions.
Original post, original poster
In a discussion
§ Thread
, refers to the topic/person/message which started the discussion. Depending on context, OP may stand for either "original post" (the message which started the thread), or "original poster" (the person who started the thread). Often used on Wikipedia's discussion pages and commonly seen on the
WP:Reference desk
Original research
In Wikipedia,
original research
(sometimes abbreviated
OR
) is material that has not been published already by a reputable source. As an encyclopedia,
Wikipedia is not
the appropriate place to publish original research, nor can Wikipedia articles be used for substantiation of Wikipedia's own article content. Do not confuse
original research
with
§ uncited
content. If someone can find a published reliable source for the content, it's not original research.
Original Wikipedia
Wikipedia before moderating its features to better fit mobile screens. Navigational boxes and other maps are shown on desktop and laptop and have become optional on mobile.
Orphan
, orphan article, orphaned article, orphan image, orphaned image
An
orphaned article
is an article with no links from other pages in the main article
§ Namespace
. An
orphaned image
is an image with no links from any pages at all. You can view lists of
orphaned articles
and
images
Category:Orphaned articles
contains orphaned articles organized by month.
See also
Wikiproject Orphanage
O/T
, OT
See
§ Off topic
OTD
Abbreviation for
On This Day
, a selection of anniversaries that are displayed on the main page.
OTRS
Abbreviation for
§ Open Ticket Request System
See also
Wikipedia:Volunteer Response Team
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Page
Any individual topic within Wikipedia; the
web page
without the top, bottom and sidebars. Pages include articles, stubs, redirects, disambiguation pages, user pages, talk pages, files, documentation and
special pages
Parent
A parent–child relationship describes two items that are in a
hierarchical relationship
with each other, often as part of a
tree structure
. Examples at Wikipedia include a
§ category
and its
§ subcategories
, or a
§ parent article
and its
§ child article
(s).
Parent category
A larger, more general category of which the category under discussion is a subcategory (for example,
Category:Aquatic organisms
is a parent category of
Category:Fish
). Compare
§ Child
. See also
Help:Categorization
Parent article
An article which is one of two or more articles related in a
one-to-many
hierarchical fashion, and which contains one or more other articles subsidiary to it which are known as
§ Child articles
. The article
World War II
is the parent article of
Causes of World War II
Pacific War
, and numerous other child articles. See
§ Summary style
Parent-only category
A category which contains only subcategories.
Patent nonsense
A pejorative applied to articles that are either completely unintelligible or totally irrelevant. Patent nonsense is one of the more obvious but less common reasons for
speedy deletion
Patrol
Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol
and/or
Wikipedia:New page patrol
. May also be used as a synonym for "review closely".
Passing mention
A concern in
Notability
discussions involving a source that mentions a topic without going into any significant detail. See
§ name drop
PD
Abbreviation for
Public domain
: material not presently under copyright protection and thus available for use without permission.
Peer Review
A request to have fellow Wikipedians review and help improve an article. Wikipedia has a page specifically for posting such a request and offering up your work for review.
Permastub
Any
§ Stub
article which is unlikely to grow to a more respectable size; an article on a subject about which little can ever be written. These articles are often potential candidates for
merging
into larger articles.
Permcat
permanent
category
– that is, a category into which an article is assigned to aid reader navigation, as opposed to a temporary assignment relating to a process such as
§ Cleanup
or
stub sorting
Permalink
, permanent link
A link to a specific version of a Wikipedia page, which will not reflect later edits to the page.
Permissions
A right assigned to a user enabling them to make a specific kinds of edit or perform certain operations that are otherwise unavailable to general editors. Some permissions are assigned automatically by seniority, others are assigned by volunteers, or
may be requested
Per nom
A comment on a page such as
§ RFA
or
§ AFD
may be accompanied by the note "per nom", which means "for the reasons given by the nominator". Similarly, a comment may be noted "per X" where X is the name of one of the other commenters, or a reference to some page that explains the reasoning.
See also
Wikipedia:What does "per" mean?
Personal attack
A comment that is not directed at content, but rather insults, demeans or threatens another editor (or a group of editors) personally, with obvious malice. To maintain a friendly and productive atmosphere, personal attacks are forbidden per Wikipedia
§ Policy
and may be grounds for
blocking
in serious and/or repeated cases.
See also:
Wikipedia:No personal attacks
Wikipedia:Remove personal attacks
Petscan
an external search tool that can find pages in combinations of categories, with many optional filters such as page age, size, templates used, and much more. Formerly known as Catscan.
Phase I
The
wiki software
UseModWiki
. Wikipedia used this software before January 25, 2002.
Phase II
The wiki software written by
User:Magnus Manske
and adopted by Wikipedia after
January 25
2002
Magnus Manske Day
).
Phase III
A rewritten and improved version of the Phase II software. It was eventually renamed to
MediaWiki
. Wikipedia currently uses MediaWiki version 1.46.0-wmf.24 (0f9d7d2) (see also
Special:Version
).
See also
Wikipedia:MediaWiki
m:MediaWiki
Phase IV
A dream proposal for the next generation of Wikipedia software made back when complete rewrites were in vogue. Development is now focused on incremental progress.
See also
m:Wikipedia4
pipe
, pipe character
Another name for the vertical bar character,
, Html entity
|
or
|
Also used as a synonym for
§ piped link
piped link
A link where the text displayed in the article is not the name of the link target. Such links are created using the
pipe character
"|" e.g., [[Target article|Displayed text]]. The
pipe trick
is a software feature that generates the displayed text for the editor in certain circumstances. Piped links may also be used to sort pages in categories by other than their name, e.g., if [[Category:Foo|Bar]] is placed on an article, the article will be listed alphabetically at "Bar" in category "Foo", irrespective of its title.
See also
Help:Pipe trick
, and
m:Help:Piped link § Automatic conversion of the wikitext
POINT,
WP:POINT
"Thou shalt not deliberately skew any page, nor create or nominate for deletion any page, nor in any other way vandalize Wikipedia, in order to try to prove your point!".
See also
Wikipedia:Don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point
Pokémon test
A heuristic for assessing the relevance or legitimacy of prospective article topics, which holds that any topic more notable than the most obscure species of Pokémon may deserve a Wikipedia article.
Portal
Portal
POTD
Picture of the day
POV
Point of view
. Originally referred to each of many perspectives on an issue, which may need to be considered and balanced in an encyclopedic article. Today, more often used as a synonym for "
biased
", as in "That reply was POV, not neutral".
POV warrior
An editor who aggressively distorts coverage of certain topics to suit their biases despite community norms of neutrality and the Wikipedia policy of
§ NPOV
Prejudice
As in,
"delete without prejudice"
and variations, based on the
legal term
. Deletion without prejudice indicates there is a problem with the present version of the article (e.g., lack of sources) and re-creation of the article is viable if that problem is fixed. Deletion
with
prejudice indicates that there's a problem with the subject of the article, and that it should not be recreated in any form (although
deletion review
can overturn this).
Primary landing page
The page at the
base name
, to which
wikilinks
to that name will therefore link.
Process page
§ Wikispace
page dedicated to discussion and (usually) voting on specific pages or users, or for similar administrative reasons. Examples include
§ CFD
§ RFA
, and
§ AFD
Prod
, PROD
Proposed deletion
. A process by which articles that do not qualify for
§ speedy deletion
but are able to be uncontroversially deleted can be removed from Wikipedia without going through a full
§ AfD
process. Can be used as a verb (
To prod an article
).
See also
Wikipedia:Guide to deletion
Project
See
§ WikiProject
Project namespace
The
project namespace
is a
namespace
dedicated to providing information about Wikipedia. Pages in the project namespace always start with "Wikipedia:".
Proseline
From "prose" and "timeline": chronological list of events narrated in a prose form, usually a lot of paragraphs that begin with a date or time ("On January 21, 2008, 'proseline' was added to the Wikipedia glossary page
..."). Usually occurs in articles about ongoing events where editors are adding information as it becomes available. Generally seen as bad style that should be avoided.
Protected page
This term indicates a page that cannot be edited except by administrators, or in some cases, established users. Usually this is done to cool down an edit war.
See also
Wikipedia:This page is protected
Protologism
A word still in the embryo stage of language development and remains too obscure to be classified as a neologism. A successful protologism becomes a
neologism
. The term
protologism
has been adopted as
jargon
for use within
Wiki communities
, but is not in common usage outside this context. "Protologism" itself can be considered either a protologism or neologism. Coined by
Mikhail Epstein
from Greek
protos
, first + Greek
logos
, word.
See also
protologism
and
list of protologisms
The Pump
A nickname for
Wikipedia:Village pump
See also
§ VP
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Quack
See
§ Duck
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
RA
Wikipedia:Requested articles
, a place to ask people to create articles that should exist but do not.
RAA
equest for
dministrator
ttention
Random page
The Random page link is on the left of each page for most
skins
. It will take you to a Wikipedia article that is chosen by a computer algorithm without any deliberate pattern or meaning to the choice.
Randy in Boise
A generic name for editors who don't give enough deference to experts.
RBI
An abbreviation for an administrator approach for dealing with
§ vandalism
and
trolling
, and for the Wikipedia essay explaining it:
WP:Revert, block, ignore
RC
An abbreviation for
§ Recent changes
RC Patrol
A group of volunteer editors who examine
§ Recent changes
logs for vandalism and other undesirable edits.
Re
Abbreviation for Remark, Reply, or Regarding.
Re-creation
A posting of the same or substantially the same text as a deleted article by a new user, or of the same text or different text of a deleted article by the original creator. Sometimes misspelled "recreation".
Recent changes
A dynamically generated page (found at
Special:Recentchanges
) that lists all edits in descending chronological order. Sometimes abbreviated as RC. Recent changes are checked regularly by editors doing
RC patrol
, which means checking all suspicious edits to catch
§ Vandalism
as early as possible. Other ways of watching recent changes are the
Recentchanges IRC channel
, or
CryptoDerk's Vandal Fighter
, which announce changes in realtime.
Redirect
, redir, rd
A page title which, when requested, sends the reader to another page. This is used for synonyms and ease of linking. The name of the redirected page is shown under the title of the resulting target page. For example,
impressionist
might redirect to
impressionism
For an introduction to what a redirect is, see
Help:Redirect
. For the guidelines on handling redirects on Wikipedia, see
Wikipedia:Redirect
Red link
wikilink
to an article that does not exist shows up red.
See also
§ Blue link
WikiProject Red Link Recovery
, and
Wikipedia:Red link
Ref
Abbreviation for
§ reference
(with the plural abbreviation being refs) or refer.
Refactor
To restructure a document, usually applied to the ordering and summarizing of
talk pages
See also:
Wikipedia:Refactoring talk pages
Reference
Several meanings, depending on context. Sometimes used as a synonym for
§ Source
or as a synonym for
§ Citation
. In the plural,
References
may refer to the dedicated section found near the bottom of almost every Wikipedia article, where the
§ Footnotes
are rendered. Because of the multiple meanings, it's not always clear how to entitle the article section that contains the footnotes or references; for a discussion, see
MOS:NOTES
Refine
Used at
Redirects for discussion
to mean changing a
§ redirect
to point to a specific section of the page it already leads to. For example changing the redirect
List of members of the Beatles
from redirecting to the
The Beatles
article generally to specifically lead to
The Beatles § Personnel
, the section of the article where that list is located.
See also
§ retarget
Refspam
Abbreviated synonym of
§ Citation spam
Reincarnation
A new user account created by a
banned
user to evade the
§ Block
. See
§ Sock puppet
Rejected
One of several possible article assessments of a
§ draft
submitted by an editor for
§ AFC
review. "Rejected" means that in the opinion of the reviewer, the
§ topic
of the draft is entirely unsuitable for Wikipedia, and it is not just a question of improving the draft, as no amount of additional work is likely to help it meet the threshold of inclusion. Further work on the draft is likely to be a waste of time. Contrast:
§ Declined
Reliable source
A source that editors are willing to "rely on" for a particular statement:
This link to his Twitter account is a reliable source for this material about what he posted that day.
All sources are reliable for some statements (e.g., "His reply on Twitter contained four words"); no source is reliable for any or all types of statements (e.g., a 1997 biology textbook is not a reliable source for last year's Eurovision winner). See
WP:RSCONTEXT
A source that is likely to be accepted by editors for most normal uses in an article, due to its
generally desirable characteristics
, such as a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy:
Before you start the article, see if you can find some reliable sources.
See
Wikipedia:Reliable sources
(shortcut:
WP:RS
).
Rename
"Renaming" may refer to a variety of operations on Wikipedia, including a
§ page move
, see
Help:Rename
; or to
changing one's username
Render
How a page appears on the computer screen, used especially on Wikipedia (in the form "rendered page") when discussing how changes an editor makes in the edit window will appear once the page is saved. In the context of the World Wide Web,
rendering
is the operation performed by the user's browser of converting the Web document (in
HTML
XML
, etc., plus image and other included files) into the visible page on the user's screen.
Repoint
To change the destination article of a
§ Redirect
, either to avoid a
§ Double redirect
or to change the redirect so it leads to a more appropriate article. The term
§ Retarget
is also frequently used.
Req
Abbreviation for "Request".
Rescope
To change the subject matter of an article, a template or (most frequently) a category to one that is more acceptable for editorial or encyclopedic purposes. If by doing so the subject area is broadened, the term
upscope
is sometimes used.
Retarget
See
§ Repoint
Retired
Describes an editor who has left Wikipedia. See
Wikipedia:Retiring
See
§ Inactive
Revdel
Abbreviation for
Revision deletion
Not to be confused with
§ Delrev
, which is short for Deletion review, a completely different process.
Revert
An edit that reverses edits made by someone else, thus restoring the prior version. The term is sometimes used to imply that something more stringent than
undoing
was done, such as a
§ rollback
See also
Help:Reverting
Revert war
See
§ Edit war
RfA
Can mean
Wikipedia:Requests for adminship
or (rarely)
Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration
, depending on the context. The latter is frequently abbreviated
RfAr
to avoid the ambiguity.
RfA cliché #1
Sometimes used in support at
Wikipedia:Requests for adminship
, to indicate that one thought the candidate already was an admin. See also
§ ITHAWO
RfAr
Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration
RfB
Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship
RfC
Wikipedia:Requests for comment
, part of the
dispute resolution
process. A request for comment is an informal process for soliciting input from Wikipedians about a question of article content or a user's conduct.
RfD
The
Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion
page.
RfM
Request for
§ Mediation
, which was part of the
dispute resolution
process (at the discontinued
Wikipedia:Requests for mediation
).
RHS
The right-hand side of the
§ Main page
. On en-wiki, includes
§ ITN
and
OTD
RL
See
§ IRL
Rm
Remove. Used in edit summaries to indicate that a particular piece of text or formatting has been deleted.
RM
A requested move (
WP:RM
), a formal process to propose and discuss the renaming of a page.
Rmv
1. Remove (
§ Rm
) vandalism. Used in edit summaries when good edits were made after vandalism, requiring the editor to sort out the vandalism, as opposed to a simple reversion.
See also
§ Rvv
2.
Same as
§ Rm
Rogue admin
Accusatory term for a Wikipedia
§ Administrator
, suggesting that the accused person systematically abuses their administrative access. Such accusations are rarely found to be justified or particularly productive.
See also
§ Rouge admin
Rollback
To change a page back to the version before the last edit.
§ Administrators
and
§ Rollbackers
have special tools to do this more easily. See
Wikipedia:Rollback feature
Rollbacker
A class of users who can use the
§ Rollback
feature. This feature is automatically enabled for all administrators.
Rouge admin
A misspelling of "
§ Rogue admin
" occasionally used by vandals and trolls. Now used jokingly by many Wikipedia administrators, usually to describe themselves performing actions that the affected users may not like (such as blocking vandals and deleting bogus pages).
Round-robin move
Page move that swaps the titles of two pages using a third location as a temporary container. See
WP:ROUNDROBIN
RS
Wikipedia:Reliable sources
– a guideline that articles should be based on reliable published sources.
Rv
§ Revert
. An edit summary indicating the page has been reverted to a previous version, often because of
vandalism
See also
Help:Reverting
Rvt
Same as
§ Rv
Rvv
§ Revert
of vandalism.
See also
§ Rv
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
s/word1/word2/
Replace
word1
with
word2
. Used in edit summaries. It is a reference to the command for "find and replace" in languages such as
sed
and
Perl
. "s/
word1
word2
/" means "replace all occurrences of
word1
with
word2
" (
stands for "substitute").
Salt
, salted
(From "
salting the earth
".) Administrators can prevent the creation of pages through the
page protection interface
and if so the page title is said to have been "salted." This is useful for articles that have been deleted but repeatedly recreated with undesired content. See also
WP:SALT
Sandbox
sandbox
is a page users may edit however they want. Though it is meant to help users experiment and gain familiarity with
§ Wiki markup
, the public sandbox at
Wikipedia:Sandbox
is often filled with strange things and
patent nonsense
. In addition to the public sandbox, users may create private sandboxes on
subpages
of their
user page
Scap
A scap occurs when
§ MediaWiki
, the software that runs Wikipedia, is updated. Scap stands for "
sync-common-all-php
", the internal script used to deploy the update.
Sea of blue
The undesirable result of placement of two or more wikilinked terms adjacent to each other, with no intervening plaintext, so they look like a single link, as in
[[Ireland|Irish]] [[Chess]] [[Championship]]
Irish
Chess
Championship
).
Section editing
Using one of the '[edit]' links to the right of each section's title, one can get an edit window containing only the section of the page that's
below
the [edit] link. This makes it easier to find the exact spot where one wants to edit, and helps you avoid an
§ Edit conflict
. You can turn section editing off in your
preferences
under the "Enable section editing via [edit] links" option.
Self-link
A Wikilink contained in an article that points the reader to that same article, e.g., linking
Vice President
in the article "
Vice President
". Such links are automatically displayed as
strongly emphasized text
rather than links, but the more complex case of a link which
redirects
to the same article is not, and should be de-
wikified
in most cases. See also:
§ Circular reference
§ Internal link
Self-ref
When used in terms like "no self-refs", this refers to the guideline
Wikipedia:Self-references to avoid
whereby articles should generally not refer to the Wikipedia project directly or implicitly. Self-ref can also refer to the template
{{selfref}}
Self-redirect
See
§ Circular redirect
Self-revert
An editor self-reverts when they
revert
or undo an edit they had previously made. This may be because the editor was merely making a test, or because the editor later realised their edit was faulty, or because they wish to show good faith after a
three-revert rule
violation or awareness of
other revert restrictions
See
§ Revert
Set index articles
set index article
(SIA) is a
list article
about a set of items of a specific type that also share the same (or similar) name.
Not to be confused with a
§ Disambiguation page
Setindexify
To turn a page into a set index article
SfD
The
Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion
page; abolished in 2012.
Sharpen cat
To place an article within a more specific category, e.g., placing a biography article from
Category:Kenya
into
Category:Kenyan people
. In addition,
sh cat
in edit summaries.
Shortcut
§ Redirect
used within
§ Wikispace
to enable editors to get to a project page more quickly. See also
Wikipedia:Shortcut
for the policy on these redirects, and
Wikipedia:List of shortcuts
for a complete list.
SIA
See
§ Set index article
Silver bullet
From fantasy literature; see
silver bullet
, sometimes the only or preferred method of killing monsters. In deletion discussions,
Delete with a silver bullet
implies the page to be deleted is a monster.
Single-purpose account
An editor whose editing is limited to one very narrow area or set of articles, or whose edits to many articles appear to be for a common purpose. If that single purpose is disruptive (e.g., vote stacking, or attacking some user) the account tends to be indefinitely blocked. See also
§ Vandalism-only account
Sister projects
See
§ Wikimedia sister projects
Skin
The appearance theme in
Special:Preferences
. Currently, five are available: Vector legacy, Vector 2022, Timeless, MonoBook and MinervaNeue.
Sleeper
An informal term for an account that appears to be dormant. May become active at any time as long as it is compliant with Wikipedia
policy and guidelines
, but sometimes becomes an issue in
§ Sockpuppetry
. Also
sleeper account
SME
An acronym for
subject matter expert
Smerge
A contraction of "slight
merge
" or "selective merge", sometimes used in
Articles for deletion
discussions. This is for when a topic deserves mention in another article, but not to the extent and detail that is already included (a partial
merge and redirect
).
Snap
To
§ Retarget
a double redirect to point to the ultimate target.
SNG
A Subject-specific
§ Notability
guideline, see
Category:Wikipedia notability guidelines
snowball clause
snowball delete
Sometimes entries on
process pages
are closed early when it becomes obvious they have "a snowball's chance in Hell" of passing the process. This removal is "per the Snowball clause". The verb "snowballing" is sometimes used for this action. Later
snowball keep
came into the usage in
§ AfD
pages, by analogy. Abbreviated as
snow keep
snow close
A verb meaning to close a discussion, per the
snowball clause
. Can be used as a noun ("The
Willy on Wheels
RfA was an instant SNOWCLOSE") or a verb ("The
Main Page
AfD nomination was SNOWCLOSEd after two minutes").
Sockmaster
The first account of a user that operates multiple sockpuppet accounts
Sockpuppet
, sock
Another user account created secretly by an existing Wikipedian, generally to
evade bans or blocks
or to manufacture the illusion of support in a vote or argument. Also, particularly on
§ AfD
, a friend of an existing Wikipedian who has created an account solely for the purpose of supporting that Wikipedian in a vote (this special case is often called a
§ Meat puppet
). It is not always possible to tell the difference.
Soft redirect
, soft 404
A very short article or page that essentially points the reader in the direction of another page. Used in cases where a normal redirect is inappropriate for various reasons (e.g., it is a cross-wiki redirect). Contrast:
§ redirect
Sort key
A device to make an article file alphabetically (in a category or other list of articles) other than by the article title, e.g., "John Smith" under "Smith, John", or "The Who" under "Who, The". Can be assigned to a specific category, or as a {{
DEFAULTSORT
:}}. See also
Help:Category § Sort key
Source
The person, place, or thing that the information in an article came from. The source might be reliable or unreliable for that particular information. Frequently, in discussions, the word
source
is specifically used to mean one of these specific aspects of a source:
The work itself (the article, book: "That book looks like a useful source for this article.") and works like it ("An obituary can be a useful biographical source", "A recent source is better than an old one")
The creator of the work (the writer, journalist: "What do we know about that source's reputation?") and people like them ("A medical researcher is a better source than a journalist for..").
The publication (for example, the newspaper, journal, magazine: "That source covers the arts.") and publications like them ("A newspaper is not a reliable source for medical facts").
The publisher of the work (for example, Random House or Cambridge University Press: "That source publishes reference works.") and publishers like them ("An academic publisher is a good source of reference works").
sp
Short for
spelling correction
or
space
. Used in
edit summaries
SPA
Short for
§ Single-purpose account
. See also
§ VOA
Spam
In Wikipedia context, any
promotional content in an article
, whether in the
§ body
of the article,
external links
citations
, or elsewhere.
Spamming
The inappropriate
canvassing
technique of attempting to sway consensus by posting an excessive number of messages to individual users, or to users with no significant connection to a community discussion.
Speedy
Abbreviation for
§ Speedy delete
(or "speedy rename" as appropriate). Can also be used as a verb – e.g.,
"I think the article should be speedied"
. "Speedy" on Wikipedia does not mean "now, immediately", but rather something that can be done without further discussion.
Speedy delete
Deletion of a page without prior discussion. Pages can be speedily deleted only under very specific circumstances; see
Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion
for those.
Speedy keep
The closing of a vote on a deletion wikispace page (like
§ AFD
) before the normal end of the voting period. This happens when the nomination has been faulty (e.g., a
§ Bad faith nomination
) or when there is overwhelming evidence that the page should be kept (e.g., overwhelming support for keeping it, or a history of deletion attempts that all ended the same way).
Split
Separating a single page into two or more pages.
Sprot
Short for
semi-protect
[ion]
. Articles that are semi-protected cannot be edited by unregistered or newly registered users.
Stealth canvassing
WP:STEALTH
The inappropriate
§ canvassing
technique of notifying editors off-wiki about ongoing Talk page discussions.
Steward
A user who has been empowered to change any user's status on any Wikimedia Foundation project, including granting and revoking Administrator status and granting
§ Bureaucrat
status. See also
Wikipedia:Administrators § Stewards
Stillborn
Having failed to initiate. Used in deletion discussions, for instance of a WikiProject that never had members except its originator.
Strike out
, strike-through
To place text in strikeout (HTML...
or...
) tags. This is very rarely used in articles, but is relatively common in votes and discussions when a contributor changes their opinion. As not to cause confusion, the outdated comments are struck out (
like this
). The inserted material (HTML
) tag is sometimes used with it to show a replacement for the struck material (
like this
). Generally, one should strike out only one's own comments. Some editors prefer to simply remove or alter their updated material, though this is discouraged if others have responded to it and their responses would no longer make sense after the change.
Note
will not exist in HTML 5/XHTML 2, so
is recommended.
Stub
An article considered too short to give an adequate introduction to a subject (often one paragraph or less). Stubs are marked with stub templates, a specific type of
§ Cleanup
template, which add the articles to stub categories sorted by subject matter. See also
Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub
and
Wikiproject Stub Sorting
Stubify
To turn an article into a stub because majority of it was unusable
Sub-article
1. An article that has been split from an original, larger main article to keep the main article readable and to better develop the sub-topic of the split into a richer article in its own right. Contrast
§ Subpage
. See also
Wikipedia:Summary style
2. A page in multi-page list that was split to reduce list article size. See also
Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists
Subject page
In
mainspace
, this is the article page as opposed to its
§ Talk page
. In other namespaces the subject pages are the content pages as opposed to their talk pages.
Subpage
A page connected to a
§ parent
page, such as
Page name/Arguments
. You can create subpages only in certain namespaces. Do not use subpages in the main article space.
Contrast
§ Subarticle
. See also
Wikipedia:Subpages
Subst
, subst'ing
Short for "
substituting
" a template which permanently copies the substituted content and breaks the link with the source template page. Contrast
§ Transclusion
, a live updated reference to the source template page.
Subscription
Subscription
is a feature which adds a [subscribe] link to discussion section headings on Talk pages, which enables users to receive a
notification
to
topics they subscribe to
Substub
A very short
§ Stub
article, typically only one sentence.
Succession box
A type of
§ Template
, usually placed at the foot of an article, linking to articles on the immediate predecessors of and successors to the subject of the article. Thus, for example, an article on the tenth president of
§ Foo
would be linked by succession box to articles on the ninth and eleventh presidents.
Compare
§ Infobox
Suckpoppet
Sockpuppet
or
Sockpuppetry
, silly typo occasionally used esp. in deletion discussions to indicate the page under discussion is of illegitimate origin and should be deleted
SUL
Abbreviation for
"Single user login"
, which refers to the process of unifying individual accounts with the same name across Wikimedia projects into one global account.
Summary style
Summary style is an
editing guideline
comprising an organizational approach for writing articles on topics that are
too large to contain in a single article
. Summary style calls for the creation of a hierarchy of articles, with the main topic, called the
§ Parent article
, sitting at the top of a pyramid, with one or more
§ Child articles
beneath it. An example is the topic
World War
II
: this is represented in Wikipedia in summary style, with the parent article
World War II
at the top, and many child articles, such as
Causes of World War II
Pacific War
, and many others subsidiary to it. See
Wikipedia:Summary style
Super Mario problem
A problem that arises during
arbitration
when conduct that would normally get a non-administrator
banned
only gets an
administrator
desysopped
. It is named after the
Super Mario Bros.
video game: when Super Mario gets hit, he turns back into small Mario; when small Mario takes the same hit, he dies. There is an
essay
about the problem.
Supervote
a term used in reference to a formal
discussion closure
that ought to reflect community opinion as shown in the discussion, but that instead reflects the opinion of the closer.
SWAG
Scientific Wild-Ass Guess
Sysop
A less-used name for
Administrator
. See also
§ Desysop
. and the
Sysop
article.
Systemic bias
In Wikipedian terms, this refers to the preponderance of Wikipedia articles relating to subjects specific to English-speaking and/or Western countries, as opposed to those from the rest of the world. It may also refer to a bias for articles that may be of particular interest to those who have an affinity towards computers and the Internet, since they are more likely to edit Wikipedia. See also
WikiProject Countering systemic bias
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
TA
An abbreviation of
§ Temporary account
Tag
MediaWiki tag
, brief message applied next to certain revisions by the software.
An
HTML element
See also
Help:HTML in wikitext
and
Help:Table
A metadata item attached to an entity, such as
File copyright tags
like 'license' or 'source'.
§ template call
that marks a page as having some property, such as needing maintenance, or marks part of a page, or marks a place in a page, such as the beginning of a closed discussion
§ category declaration
(verb) To apply a tag to a page.
#tag – a
§ magic word
which allows you to
evaluate
§ subst
or magic word inside a
§ ref
or other tag; see
Help:Magic words#mwtag
§ Hashtag
Talk page
A page reserved for discussion of the page with which it is associated, such as the article page. All pages within Wikipedia (except pages in the Special namespace, and talk pages themselves) have talk pages attached to them (accessed via the "Talk" link at the top).
Talk page stalker
A humorous term for an editor who involves themselves in discussions on other users' talk pages (often after a previous conversation with that user has left the page on the editor's Watchlist). TPS involvement should be constructive or humorous, and is distinguished from
§ Wikihounding
Target
The page a
§ link
leads to.
See also
§ destination
§ pipe
, and
§ retarget
Taskforce
A smaller group of editors in a WikiProject dedicated to a more specific field within the scope of the parent project. Task forces are located on WikiProject subpages. They generally have a less formal bureaucratic structure than full-fledged WikiProjects.
See also
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces
Taxobox
A type of
§ Infobox
, a taxobox is a
taxonomy
table positioned on the right side of an entry for a species or organism (or for a
genus
or
family
), giving a chart of the
kingdom
phylum
, etc. of the creature. Taxoboxes are also used for similar standardized tables.
Template
A way of automatically including the contents of one page within another page, used for
§ Boilerplate text
, navigational aids, etc.
See also:
Wikipedia:Template namespace
Templatise
To delete a list or category and turn the contents into a
§ Template
, usually either a
§ Navbox
or
§ Infobox
. Sometimes used in
§ CFD
discussions as shorthand for "this group of articles would be better if presented in template form rather than as a category."
See also:
listify
Temporary account
a type of
user account
introduced to English Wikipedia in late 2025 to provide increased privacy to
§ unregistered editors
, replacing the older system of
§ IP users
, now deprecated.
Test edit
See
§ Newbie test
TfD, TFD
The
Wikipedia:Templates for discussion
page.
Thread
talk page discussion
, usually with more than two indented replies. May refer to either a complete second level section (i.e., a section with heading surrounded by ==) of posts as is defined by talk page archiving bots. For this type of thread, the age is the time interval from the most recent post to current time. It can also refer to an individual sequence of indented paragraphs.
Three-revert rule
See
§ 3RR
TLDR
, tl;dr
Short for "Too long; didn't read". For example where a reply to a query is
very
long and detailed.
See
Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read
TINC
Short for "there is no cabal".
See
§ Cabal
Tl
Short for "template". Also the name of a specific template,
{{
tl
}}
– which provides a link to the page of a given template without calling it.
TNT
The essay
Wikipedia:Blow it up and start over
, which states that a page that is hopelessly irreparable but could be useful can be deleted and replaced by a new one, or the action of carrying out its doctrine.
TOC
An article (or other page)'s
table of contents
, which lists the subsection headings within the page. This is usually close to the top left of the page, but may be placed at the top right,
floated
, or omitted entirely.
Topic
Loosely, the main subject of an article or a discussion. More concretely:
A unique subject that can be described and discussed, regardless whether Wikipedia has an article about it. Compare:
§ Notability
A term used to urge article writers to avoid adding irrelevant content to an article (
WP:TOPIC
) or a discussion (
WP:TALKOFFTOPIC
).
A synonym for a talk page section; e.g. "
Make a new heading for a new topic
"; see also
these examples
Contrast
§ off-topic
TPA
Talk page access. When an editor is
blocked
, they typically retain the ability to write on their own talk page, as that is the first resort for
appealing their block
or requesting clarification about it. However, a blocked editor who abuses this privilege can have their
talk page access removed
as well.
Trainwreck
A nomination of a group of related pages for deletion or renaming which fails due to the disparate nature or worth of the pages. The deletion process often becomes messy with editors wishing to keep some pages but delete or rename others. Usually the discussion is closed as a procedural "keep", with some or all the pages later nominated separately. Examples include
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Warcraft character articles
and
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mayoral elections
. This can also happen in non-deletion discussions, for example
this discussion on Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)
Transclusion
Transclusion is the inclusion of the content of a document into another document by reference. On Wikipedia, it is done (typically for templates) by enclosing the pagename in curly brackets, e.g. Template:Nac is transcluded by typing
{{Nac}}
. Typically, transclusion uses the template functionality of MediaWiki to include the same content in multiple documents without having to edit those documents separately.
See also
Wikipedia:Transclusion costs and benefits
Translation
The English-language Wikipedia should have only pages in English. Non-English pages, listed on
Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English
, are subject to deletion unless translated.
See also:
Wikipedia:Translation
for requests for translations into English of pages from foreign-language Wikipedias.
Transwiki
Move a page to another Wikimedia project, in particular
Wiktionary
Wikibooks
, or
Wikisource
See also
m:Transwiki
and
Wikipedia:WikiProject Transwiki
. The verb is
to transwikify
Tranche Alpha
Said of
Arbitration Committee
members whose term does not expire in a given year and hence not up for re-election. Perhaps derived from french "
tranche
", to cut.
Troll
A user who incites or engages in disruptive behavior (
trolling
). There are some people who enjoy causing conflict, and there are those who make a hobby of it. However, these are few and one should
always
assume good faith
in other editors. Calling someone a troll in a dispute is a bad idea; it has an effect similar to
calling someone a Nazi
– no further meaningful debate is likely to occur.
See also
m:What is a troll?
Trout
, trout-slapping
A rebuke.
Tweak
A small edit. See
Tweaking
Tyop
A silly misspelling of
typo
. Used as an edit summary when correcting typos.
See also
Wikipedia:typo
Typofix
A contraction of typo and fix. Any other word may be used in the place of typo to form -fix words.
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
UAA
Usernames for Administrator Attention
. A noticeboard at which clearly problematic usernames are raised to be dealt with.
umbrella nomination
A nomination (e.g., on
CfD
) that contains several items (e.g., categories) which are normally nominated individually. Can become a
trainwreck
Unactionable
See
§ Actionable
uncited
Material in an article that is not followed by an
inline citation
. The uncited material may be
§ verifiable
(editors could locate a reliable source that supports this material, if they tried to) or
§ unverifiable
(nobody can find a reliable source that
directly supports
this material). Uncited material can be
challenged
(e.g., via the addition of a
{{
citation needed
}}
tag) if someone is concerned that it may be unverifiable.
Undisambiguated
An article title without a
disambiguator
is said to be the
undisambiguated
title or
base name
. For example
Joker (film)
is a disambiguated title, while the title
Joker
is undisambiguated.
Unencyclopedic
Saying something is unencyclopedic implies that it would not be expected to appear in an encyclopedia, and thus in Wikipedia. (One must remember however that Wikipedia is
not a paper encyclopedia
, hence does not have the space/length limitations of a paper encyclopedia).
Unnecessary disambiguation
Adding a
§ Disambiguator
to a
basename
in a title of an article when it is not necessary to
disambiguate
this title from other titles on WP, either because it is the only use of that basename as a title on WP, or because the article's subject is the
primary topic
for that basename.
Unregistered user
§ user
who has not
created an account
See
§ Temporary account
unverifiable
Material in an article for which editors are unable to find any reliable sources that could be cited to support it. Unverifiable information may be
§ cited
(e.g., to an unreliable source or to a source that
doesn't support
the material) or
§ uncited
. Determining whether material is truly unverifiable may require substantial effort.
Un-wiki
Going against the character of a
Wiki
. Usually, saying something is "un-wiki" means it makes editing more difficult (or impossible).
Un-wikify, unwikify
Same as
§ De-wikify
UPE
Acronym for Undisclosed Paid Editing. See
WP:COI
for conflict of interest concerns.
Upmerge
A term frequently used on
categories for discussion
, it means "merge into parent category". In the case of stub types, this usually means to keep any associated template but to link it with the parent category rather than the category under discussion. In contexts such as
WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals
, creating an
upmerged template
means a stub template, only, feeding into a more general stub type.
Upscope
portmanteau
of
§ Upmerge
and
§ Rescope
See
§ Rescope
User
See
§ Editor
Userbox
A small box which is stored in the template space, and which includes a small piece of information about a user (such as "This user likes cheese"). Many users use userboxes on their user page, although some look down upon it.
See also
Wikipedia:Userboxes
Userfy
Wikipedia:Userfication
is the process by which material posted in a Wikipedia article, project, or template space is moved into the
user space
: into a user page or
§ Subpage
. A common case is where an inexperienced user who is not a notable person has created an article about themself. The article would be deleted after userfying – moving its content to a user page.
User page
A personal page for
Wikipedians
. Most people use their pages to introduce themselves and to keep various personal notes and lists. They are also used by Wikipedians to communicate with each other via the user talk pages. The process of Registration does not generate user pages automatically. A user page is linked to as [[User:SomeUserNameHere|SomeUserNameHere]] and appears as
SomeUserNameHere
Userspace draft
A draft created in a user's "userspace". See
Help:Userspace draft
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Vandal
One who engages in significant amounts of
§ Vandalism
. (Adjective:
Vandalic
Vandalbot
Some kind of
§ Bot
being used for vandalism or spamming. Recognizable by the fact that one or a few temporary accounts make many similar clearly vandalistic edits in a short time. In the worst cases, these have created or vandalized hundreds of pages in several Wikipedias in only minutes.
See also
m:Vandalbot
Vandalism
Deliberate defacement of Wikipedia pages. This can be by deleting text or writing nonsense, bad language, etc. The term is sometimes improperly used to discredit the views of an opponent in
edit wars
. Vandalism can be reported at
Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism
Vandalism-only account
§ single-purpose
registered account
that is used only to
§ vandalize
Wikipedia. See the essay,
Wikipedia:Vandalism-only account
VandalProof
A no longer used tool for finding and removing vandalism.
See also
User:AmiDaniel/VandalProof
verifiable
Something that people are "able" to "verify". Specifically within the meaning of the
Wikipedia:Verifiability
policy, it is information that someone (although
not necessarily you
) could, with enough effort and expense, determine has been
published
in a
§ reliable source
, even if no source is provided in the article. Contrast
§ uncited
VFD
Used to refer to the "Votes for deletion" page. Although this has been replaced with
§ AFD
WP:AFD
), you may still see the term in older talk pages.
Village pump
The main community forum of Wikipedia (found at
Wikipedia:Village pump
), where proposals, policy changes, technical problems and other internals are announced and discussed in front of a wider audience than a topic-specific page would have.
Visual Editor
WYSIWYG
(word processor-like) editing interface, as distinct from the
code editor
VOA
See
§ Vandalism-only account
vote
See
§ !vote
Votestacking
The inappropriate
§ canvassing
technique of attempting to sway
§ Consensus
by selectively notifying editors who have or are thought to have a predetermined point of view or opinion, and thus encouraging them to participate in a discussion.
VP
Shorthand for
§ Village pump
or for
§ VandalProof
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
Wall of text
An unusually long paragraph, presenting a solid block of text. Used in a negative sense, and most typically in the context of opinions in a discussion.
See also
Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read
TLDR
, TL:DR, WP:TLDR)
Walled garden
A set of pages or articles that link to one another but aren't interlinked with the rest of the encyclopedia.
Watcher
An editor who has a particular page on their watchlist. Example usage: "
User:Jimbo Wales
has over 3,000 watchers."
Watchlist
A set of pages selected by the user, who can then click on
Watchlist
in the links next to the user's username to see recent changes to those pages.
See also
Help:Watching pages
Weasel words
Phrases such as "Some say that
..." or "It has been argued
..." which introduce a point of view without attributing it more specifically. See also
WP:Neutral point of view § Attributing and specifying biased statements
Wheel war
A dispute between Wikipedia
administrators
who use the privileges of Wikipedia administrators (such as
blocking
) as weapons in an
§ Edit war
See also
Wheel war
Wiki
Any website that allows easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language. Wikipedia is the most well known example of a wiki.
WikiBlame
tool
for searching past versions of a particular article for a particular string of text. Usually used to determine who added the string of text. It is an external tool, available at
wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php
or via the "Revision history search" link on the article's history page.
Wikibooks
§ Wikimedia sister project
which works to develop free textbooks, manuals, and other texts online.
Not to be confused with
Wikipedia books (PDFs made of multiple articles)
WikiProject Wikipedia-Books
WikiProject Books
, or
Wikipedia:Notability (books)
Wikibreak
, wikivacation
When a
Wikipedian
takes a break from
Wikipedia
Wikicode
See
§ Wiki markup
WikiCrime
, wikicrime
An egregious case of or clear pattern of editing that violates Wikipedia policies, such as
vandalism
spam
disruptive editing
tendentious editing
canvassing
hoaxing
adding unverifiable information
self-aggrandizement or promotion
removing well-sourced or adding unsourced information to suit personal biases
WikiFairy
, Wikifaerie
A Wikipedian who beautifies wiki entries by organizing messy articles, and adding style, color and graphics. The efforts of WikiFairies are normally welcome, though they do not necessarily create new articles or affect the substantive content of the articles they edit. WikiFairies are considered to be basically friendly, like
WikiGnomes
See also
§ WikiOgre
Wikify
To format using
§ Wiki markup
(as opposed to
plain text
or
HTML
). It commonly refers to adding internal links to material (
Wikilinks
) but is not limited to just that. To wikify an article could refer to applying any form of wiki-markup, such as standard headings and layout, including the addition of infoboxes and other templates, or bolding/italicizing of text. Noun:
wikification
; gerund:
wikifying
; practitioner:
wikifier
See also
Wikipedia:How to edit a page
Category:Articles with too few wikilinks
Wikify project
Wikipedia:Guide to layout
and
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking#Overlinking and underlinking
WikiGnome
A Wikipedian who makes minor, helpful edits without clamoring for attention or praise for what they did.
See also
§ WikiFairy
§ WikiOgre
WikiHate
Counterproductive editing attitude and behavior
, especially
tendentious
biased
and
personally antagonistic
types of
edit-warring
Wikihounding
The singling out of one or more editors, and joining discussions on multiple pages or topics they may edit or multiple debates where they contribute, in order to repeatedly confront or inhibit their work, with an apparent aim of creating irritation, annoyance or distress to the other editor. Note that editors can and do follow others in
good faith
with constructive intent; it is the manner and motivation which distinguishes wikihounding.
Wikilawyering
Attempting to inappropriately rely on technicalities in a
legalistic
manner with respect to
Wikipedia:Policies
or
Wikipedia:Arbitration
Wikilink
, wl, internal link
A link to another Wikipedia page or to an
§ Anchor
on the same page, as opposed to an
§ External link
. For policy, see
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking#Overlinking and underlinking
and
Wikipedia:Build the web
. For mechanics, see
Wikipedia:Canonicalization
Help:Section § Section linking
Help:Wiki markup § Links and URLs
, and
Wikipedia:Citing sources/Further considerations § Wikilinks to full references
See also
§ Free link
and
§ Piped link
WikiLove
, wikilove
A general spirit of collegiality and mutual understanding among Wikipedians. The term
pre-dates Wikipedia
. WikiLove is achieved through
wikiquette
civility
assumption of good faith
about other editors,
neutrality
, respect for
policies and guidelines
, and
calm editing and discussion
Wiki markup
, wikitext, wikicode
Markup-language code like
HTML
, but simplified and more convenient like a more powerful
BBCode
: for example, it uses three apostrophes on either site of text to create
'''boldfaced text'''
instead of
boldfaced text
Wiki markup is the source code stored in Wikipedia's database and shown in the edit box, and then rendered into HTML to appear correctly in a reader's
internet browser
Searching
by the Wikipedia software is done in the wikitext, as opposed to searching by external
search engines
, which is done in the resulting HTML. The size of a page is the size of the wikitext.
See also
Wiki markup
Help:Wiki markup
Wikipedia:How to edit a page
Wikipedia:Guide to layout
Wikimedia
Properly
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
(WMF), a non-profit organization that provides a legal, financial, and organizational framework for Wikipedia and its
§ sister projects
and provides the necessary hardware.
Contrast
§ MediaWiki
Wikimedia projects
Any of the publicly available
wikis
operated by the
§ Wikimedia Foundation
, including
Wikipedia
Wikicommons
Wiktionary
Wikidata
, and others. For the full list, see
Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects
. Also known as "Wikimedia sister projects", or in context, simply as "sister projects".
WikiOgre
A Wikipedian who makes large edits from time to time but generally keeps to
WikiGnomery
See also
§ WikiFairy
Wikipediholic
A Wikipedian who obsesses over the project to the point where interacting with Wikipedia becomes akin to a
psychological addiction
Wikipe-tan
, Wiki-tan
One of the personifications of Wikipedia. She is the mascot character of various WikiProjects.
Wikipipe
See
§ Pipe
Wikiportal
Pages intended to be the main pages for readers and editors interested in a specific area of knowledge, helping them to find the information on the specific topic and, for editors, to be inspired to develop the articles connected with it. Such editors might want to join a related
§ WikiProject
See also
Wikipedia:Portal
WikiProject
An active group of Wikipedia editors working together to improve a specific group of articles and
files
, usually those on one or more related topics. This often includes standardizing the content and style of the articles using an agreed upon standard format.
The members of a WikiProject might work to improve and maintain a
§ Wiki portal
of the same or related name.
Wikiquette
The etiquette of working with others on Wikipedia.
See also
Wikipedia:Etiquette
Wikiquote
§ Wikimedia sister project
to create a free online collection of quotations.
Wikislap
Providing someone with the URL of a Wikipedia article when they express a lack of knowledge about a particular topic.
Wikisource
§ Wikimedia sister project
to create a free online compendium of primary source texts.
Wikispace
The Wikipedia
namespace
. See
Wikipedia:Namespace § Pseudo-namespaces
and
Wikipedia:Shortcut directory
(also known as
WP:WP
).
Wikispam
Articles or sections created to promote a product or
meme
Spamming
also includes adding extraneous or irrelevant links to promote an outside site, particularly for commercial purposes. No type of spamming is allowed on Wikipedia.
Wikispecies
§ Wikimedia sister project
. It is a wiki-based,
species directory
which provides a solution to the problem that there is no central registration of
species
data in Wikipedia. Wikispecies provides a central, more extensive database for
taxonomy
. Wikispecies is aimed at the needs of scientific users rather than general users.
Wikistress
Personal stress or tension induced by editing Wikipedia, or more often by being involved in minor conflict with another editor. Some users maintain a Wikistress meter on their user page. See
the Wikistress template
the Bosch Wikistress Meter
, and
Wikistress
WikiTerrorism
A melodramatic term for the act of purposely trying to damage
Wikipedia
on a large scale. It can be
vandalism
, but it could include
trolling
edit warring
, or anything that could disrupt Wikipedia on a large scale. WikiTerrorism could also be "blitzing" Wikipedia, or vandalizing several articles in rapid succession. Such actions should be
reported immediately to administrators
and will usually be
blocked.
Some may consider this term in bad taste or hyperbolic.
wikitext
See
§ Wiki markup
Wiktionary
, wikt.
§ Wikimedia sister project
to create a free online dictionary of every language. Note that it is
not
spelled Wikitionary; there is no I between the K and the T.
WMF
See
§ Wikimedia
WP
1. Common abbreviation for
Wikipedia
, especially for pages in the Wikipedia
namespace
See also
Wikipedia:Namespace § Pseudo-namespaces
and
WP:WP
2. Also sometimes used as an abbreviation for
§ WikiProject
See also
§ WPP
WPP
Abbreviation for
§ WikiProject
Back to contents
Contents
!$@
0–9
JK
XYZ
See also
XYZ
XfD, XFD
Generic term for the collection of deletion discussion pages such as
MfD
AfD
CfD
RfD
FfD
, et al. where the "X" stands in for
iscellany,
rticle,
ategory,
edirect,
ile etc.; "fD" stands for "
or
eletion" (or
iscussion in some cases).
XNR
Acronym for
§ Cross-namespace redirects
. Used mainly at
Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion
to emphasize for deletion. Sometimes given as
§ CNR
XWiki
Abbreviation of "Cross-Wiki", used to describe something taking place on multiple Wikimedia sites because of a common source.
XTools
a suite of statistics tools about users, pages, and more.
See also
Wikipedia:Wikipedia abbreviations
Wikipedia:WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG!
Wikipedia:Edit summary legend
a supplemental glossary of formulaic
edit summaries
Wikipedia:Guide to deletion § Shorthands
Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia
Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines to cite in deletion debates
Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions
Wikipedia:WikiSpeak
Category:Wikipedia glossary items
{{
Glossary term
}}
Back to contents
Notes
Wikipedia's definition of an
anchor
at
Help:Link
is in accordance with the definition of the
W3C
, which
says
: "A link has two ends -- called anchors -- and a direction. The link starts at the 'source' anchor and points to the 'destination' anchor." The
anchor
in Html is the text enclosed by an A tag, and the starting point is the location of the A tag that defines the link. This 'source anchor' sense is rarely used at Wikipedia, which is inconsistent in how it does refer to source anchors, using various terms such as "
link text
", "
link label
", or "
display text
" of a wikilink.
Wikipedia directories and indexes
Administration
pages
Protocols
Policies
Guidelines
Manual of Style
Assistance
Help directory
FAQs
Interactive help
Reader's index
Tips
Styletips
Tools
The community
Portal
Discussions
Noticeboards
Essays
Editor's index
Departments
Maintenance
AI resources
WikiProjects
MediaWiki
Wikitext
HTML
Templates
Locutions
Abbreviations
Edit summaries
Glossary
Shortcuts
Encyclopedia
proper
Types
Overviews
Outlines
Lists
Portals
Glossaries
Categories
Indices
Featured
, good
Featured articles
Good articles
Featured lists
Featured pictures
Featured topics
Good topics
Topics
Current events
Reference
Culture
Geography
Health
History
Math
Nature
People
Philosophy
Religion
Society
Technology
LOC, bios, times
Academic disciplines
Anniversaries
Today
Sovereign states and dependent territories
Deaths this year
Timelines
Decades, centuries, and millennia
Indexes
A–Z index
Categories
Dewey Decimal classes
Library of Congress Classification
Spoken articles
Searching
Wikipedia editor navigation
Wikipedia key
policies and guidelines
(?)
Five pillars
Ignore all rules
Content
(?)
Verifiability
No original research
Neutral point of view
What Wikipedia is not
Biographies of living persons
Copyright violations
Image use
Article titles
Notability
Autobiographies
Citing sources
Reliable sources
Medicine
Do not include copies of lengthy primary sources
Plagiarism
Do not create hoaxes
Fringe theories
Patent nonsense
External links
Writing articles with large language models
LLM-assisted translation
Conduct
(?)
Civility
Consensus
Harassment
Vandalism
Ignore all rules
No personal attacks
Ownership of content
Edit warring
Dispute resolution
Sockpuppetry
No legal threats
Child protection
Paid-contribution disclosure
Assume good faith
Conflict of interest
Disruptive editing
Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point
Etiquette
Gaming the system
Please do not bite the newcomers
Courtesy vanishing
Responding to threats of harm
Talk page guidelines
Signatures
Deletion
(?)
Deletion policy
Proposed deletion
Biographies
Speedy deletion
Attack page
Oversight
Revision deletion
Enforcement
(?)
Administrators
Banning
Blocking
Page protection
Editing
(?)
Editing policy
Article size
Summary style
Be bold
Disambiguation
Hatnotes
Broad-concept article
Understandability
Style
Manual of Style
Contents
Dates and numbers
Images
Layout
Lead section
Linking
Lists
Classification
Categories, lists, and navigation templates
Categorization
Template namespace
Project content
(?)
Project namespace
WikiProjects
User pages
User boxes
Shortcuts
Subpages
WMF
(?)
Universal Code of Conduct
List of policies
Friendly space policy
Licensing and copyright
List of all policies and guidelines
List of policies
List of guidelines
Summaries of values and principles
Manual of Style
Overview
Contents
Tips
Content
Biography
Disambiguation pages
Organizing by subject area
Gender identity
Hidden text
Infoboxes
Linking
Self-references
Words to watch
Formatting
Abbreviations
Capitalization
Dates and numbers
Pronunciation
Spelling
Superscripts and subscripts
Text formatting
Titles of works
Images
Captions
Image placement
Icons
Images
Layout
Layout
Lead section
Tables
Trivia sections
Lists
Lists
Lists of works
Road junctions
Stand-alone lists
By topic area
Arts
Anime and manga
Comics
Film
Lyrics and poetry
Novels
Television
Video games
Visual arts
Writing about fiction
See also:
WikiProject style advice
Music
Music
Music samples
Record charts
Stringed instruments
See also:
WikiProject style advice
History
Blazons
Military history
See also:
WikiProject style advice
Legal
and cultural
Legal
Trademarks
See also:
WikiProject style advice
Regional
Specific naming conventions
Canada
China (and Chinese)
France (and French)
Hawaii
India
Indonesia
Ireland
Japan
Korea
Malaysia
Pakistan
Philippines
Poland
Singapore
See also:
WikiProject style advice
Religion
and education
Islam
Latter Day Saints
See also:
WikiProject style advice
Science
and technology
Mathematics
Medicine
Chemistry
Compound classes
Chemicals
References and external links
Safety
Structure drawing
Computer science
Taxonomy
See also:
WikiProject style advice
Sports
Cue sports
Snooker
See also:
WikiProject style advice
Related guidelines
Article size
Article titles
Categories, lists, and navigation templates
Categorization
Hatnotes
Subpages
Understandability
Category
Wikipedia
accounts
and
governance
Unregistered users
Why create an account?
Create an account
Request an account
Unregistered editors are human too
IP addresses are not people
IP hopper
Temporary accounts
Registered users
New account
Logging in
Reset passwords
Username policy
Changing username
Usernames for administrator attention
Unified login or SUL
Alternative account
Account security
Password strength requirements
User account security
Personal security practices
Two-factor authentication
2FA for AWB
Committed identity
On privacy, confidentiality and discretion
Compromised accounts
How to not get outed
Blocks, bans, sanctions,
global actions
Blocking policy
FAQ
Admin's guide
Tools
Autoblock
Appealing a block
Guide to appealing blocks
UTRS Unblock Ticket Request System
Unblock Wizard
Blocking IP addresses
Range blocks
IPv6
Open proxies
Banning policy
ArbCom appeals
Sanctions
Personal sanctions
General sanctions
Contentious topics
and
Log
Essay
Indef ≠ infinite
Long-term abuse
Standard offer
Global actions
Related to accounts
Sockpuppetry
Single-purpose account
Sleeper account
Spam-only account
Vandalism-only account
Wikibreak
Enforcer
Retiring
Courtesy vanishing
Clean start
Quiet return
Account deletion
User groups
and
global user groups
Requests for permissions
Admin instructions
Admin guide
Account creator
PERM
(Auto) confirmed
PERM
Autopatrolled
PERM
AutoWikiBrowser
PERM
Bot
Request
Edit filter helper
Request
Event coordinator
PERM
Extended confirmed
PERM
File mover
PERM
IP block exempt
Request
Mass message sender
PERM
New page reviewer
PERM
Page mover
PERM
Pending changes reviewer
PERM
Rollback
PERM
Template editor
PERM
Temporary account IP viewer
PERM
Global rights policy
Volunteer Response Team
Advanced user groups
Administrator
RfA
Bureaucrat
RfB
CheckUser
and
Oversight
Request
Edit filter manager
Request
Interface administrator
Request
Founder
Importer
Researcher
Committees
and related
Arbitration Committee
Bot approvals group
Functionaries
Clerks
SPI clerks
ArbCom clerks
Governance
Administration
FAQ
AI
Formal organization
Editorial oversight and control
Quality control
Wikimedia Foundation
Board
Founder's seat
Meta-Wiki
Proposals
WikiProjects
Elections
Policies and guidelines
Petitions
Noticeboards
Consensus
Dispute resolution
Reforms
Wikipedia community
For a listing of current collaborations, tasks, and news, see the
Community portal
For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the
Dashboard
General community
topics
Administration
News
The Signpost
Goings-on
In the media
Meetups
Mailing lists
Wikipedians
Statistics
The Wikipedia Library
Centralized discussion
Village pump
Idea lab
Policy
Proposals
Technical
Miscellaneous
WMF
Holidays
Bots
Contents
and
grading
Requested articles
Most-wanted articles
Images needing articles
Articles needing images
Articles for creation
WP:AFC/R
WP:AFC/C
Creating articles
Help
Vital articles
Articles for improvement
Peer review
Good article nominations
Featured article candidates
Lists
Pictures
Topics
Article translation
Pages
Main Page
Errors
WikiProjects
and
collaborations
Directory
Culture and the arts
Geographical
History and society
Science, technology and engineering
Wikipedia assistance and tasks
Patrols
Recent changes
Counter-Vandalism Unit
Organizations category
Awards
and
feedback
Reward board
Contests
A nice cup of tea and a sit down
Charitableness
WikiLove
Compliment before criticism
Kindness Campaign
Thanks!
Maintenance tasks
Task Center
Open tasks
Backlog
Category
Admin category
Edit requests
Category
Database reports
Category tracker
Dusty articles
Special pages
New pages
Recent changes
Controversial issues
Administrators
and
noticeboards
Administrators' noticeboard
Incidents
Edit warring
Vandalism
Admin dashboard
Admin requests
Closure
Page protection
User permissions
Sockpuppets
Open proxies
Revision deletion
Oversight
Request
Usernames
Changing
Title blacklist
OTRS
Bureaucrats'
Requests for adminship
and
bureaucratship
Arbitration Committee
Requests
Enforcement
Content dispute
resolution
Requests for comment
Third opinion
Dispute resolution noticeboard
Biographies of living persons
Conflict of interest
External links
Fringe theories
Neutral point of view
No original research
Reliable sources
Other noticeboards
and assistance
Regional notice boards
Requests for help
Category
Asking questions
Teahouse
Help desk
Reference desk
Adopt-a-user
Copyright assistance
Copyright investigations
Text problems
Media questions
Resource requests
Mergers
History mergers
Moves
Page importation
Spam
Blacklist
Whitelist
Bots
Education
General sanctions
Editor sanctions
Long-term abuse
Deletion
discussions
Guide
Admin
Today
Articles
Templates
Files
Categories
Redirects
Miscellany
Speedy
Proposed
BLP
Review
Undeletion
Arguments to avoid
Arguments to make
Article Rescue
Elections
and
voting
Requests for comment
meta
Wikimedia Foundation elections
WP Democracy
Milestones
Directories, indexes,
and summaries
Departments
Edit summary legend
Editor's index
Essays
FAQs
Glossary
Abbreviations
Help
Manual of Style
Simplified
Rules
Five pillars
Policies
Guidelines
Shortcuts
Templates
Citation templates
Tips
Today
Tools
Wiki markup
Media
Category
Templates
Wikipedia essays
(?)
Building, editing, and deletion
Philosophy
Articles are more important than policy
Articles must be written
All Five Pillars are equally important
Avoid vague introductions
Civil POV pushing
Cohesion
Competence is required
Concede lost arguments
Dissent is not disloyalty
Don't lie
Don't search for objections
Duty to comply
Editing Wikipedia is like visiting a foreign country
Editors will sometimes be wrong
Eight simple rules for editing our encyclopedia
Explanationism
External criticism of Wikipedia
Five pillars
Here to build an encyclopedia
Leave it to the experienced
Levels of competence
Levels of consensus
Most ideas are bad
Need
Not broken is ugly
Not editing because of Wikipedia restriction
Not every article can be a Featured Article
The one question
Oversimplification
Paradoxes
Paraphrasing
POV and OR from editors, sources, and fields
Process is important
Product, process, policy
Purpose
Reasonability rule
Systemic bias
There is no seniority
Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia
Tendentious editing
The role of policies in collaborative anarchy
The rules are principles
Trifecta
We are absolutely here to right great wrongs
Wikipedia in brief
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
Wikipedia is a community
Wikipedia is not RationalWiki
Article construction
100K featured articles
Abandoned stubs
Acronym overkill
Adding images improves the encyclopedia
Advanced text formatting
Akin's Laws of Article Writing
Alternatives to the "Expand" template
Amnesia test
A navbox on every page
An unfinished house is a real problem
Archive your sources
Article revisions
Articles have a half-life
Autosizing images
Avoid mission statements
Be neutral in form
Beef up that first revision
Blind men and an elephant
BOLD, revert, discuss cycle
Build content to endure
Cherrypicking
Chesterton's fence
Children's lit, adult new readers, & large-print books
Citation overkill
Citation underkill
Common-style fallacy
Concept cloud
Creating controversial content
Criticisms of society may be consistent with NPOV and reliability
Dictionaries as sources
Don't cite Wikipedia on Wikipedia
Don't demolish the house while it's still being built
Don't get hung up on minor details
Don't hope the house will build itself
Don't panic
Don't "teach the controversy"
Editing on mobile devices
Editors are not mindreaders
Encourage the newcomers
Endorsements (commercial)
Featured articles may have problems
Formatting bilateral relations articles
Formatting bilateral relations templates
Fruit of the poisonous tree
Give an article a chance
Gotfryd custom
How to write a featured article
Identifying and using independent sources
History sources
Law sources
Primary sources
Science sources
Style guides
Tertiary sources
Ignore STRONGNAT for date formats
Introduction to structurism
Link rot
Mine a source
Merge Test
Minors and persons judged incompetent
"Murder of" articles
Not every story/event/disaster needs a biography
Not everything needs a navbox
Not everything needs a template
Nothing is in stone
Obtain peer review comments
Organizing disambiguation pages by subject area
Permastub
Potential, not just current state
Presentism
Principle of Some Astonishment
The problem with elegant variation
Pro and con lists
Printability
Publicists
Put a little effort into it
Restoring part of a reverted edit
Robotic editing
Sham consensus
Source your plot summaries
Specialized-style fallacy
Stublet
Stub Makers
Run an edit-a-thon
Temporary versions of articles
Tertiary-source fallacy
There are no shortcuts to neutrality
There is no deadline
There is a deadline
The deadline is now
Try not to leave it a stub
What is a reliable source
Understanding Wikipedia's content standards
Walled garden
What an article should not include
Wikipedia is a work in progress
Wikipedia is not being written in an organized fashion
The world will not end tomorrow
Write the article first
Writing better articles
Writing article content
Avoid thread mode
Copyediting reception sections
Coup
Don't throw more litter onto the pile
Gender-neutral language
Myth vs fiction
Proseline
Reading in a flow state
Turning biology research into a Wikipedia article
Use our own words
We shouldn't be able to figure out your opinions
Write the article first
Writing about women
Writing better articles
Removing or
deleting content
Adjectives in your recommendations
AfD is not a war zone
Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions
Arguments to avoid in deletion reviews
Arguments to avoid in image deletion discussions
Arguments to make in deletion discussions
Avoid repeated arguments
Before commenting in a deletion discussion
But there must be sources!
Confusing arguments mean nothing
Content removal
Counting and sorting are not original research
Delete or merge
Delete the junk
Deletion is not cleanup
Does deletion help?
Don't attack the nominator
Don't confuse stub status with non-notability
Don't overuse shortcuts to policy and guidelines to win your argument
Emptying categories out of process
Follow the leader
How the presumption of notability works
How to save an article nominated for deletion
I just don't like it
Identifying blatant advertising
Identifying test edits
Immunity
Keep it concise
Liar liar pants on fire
No Encyclopedic Use
Notability is not everything
Nothing
Nothing is clear
Overzealous deletion
Relisting can be abusive
Relist bias
The Heymann Standard
Unopposed AFD discussion
Wikipedia is not Whack-A-Mole
Why was the page I created deleted?
What to do if your article gets tagged for speedy deletion
When in doubt, hide it in the woodwork
Zombie page
Civility
The basics
Accepting other users
Apology
Autistic editors
Being right isn't enough
Contributing to complicated discussions
Divisiveness
Don't retaliate
Editors' pronouns
Edit at your own pace
Encouraging the newcomers
Enjoy yourself
Expect no thanks
How to be civil
Maintaining a friendly space
Negotiation
Obsessive–compulsive disorder editors
Please say please
Relationships with academic editors
Thank you
Too long; didn't read
Truce
Unblock perspectives
We are all Wikipedians here
You have a right to remain silent
Philosophy
A thank you never hurts
A weak personal attack is still wrong
Advice for hotheads
An uncivil environment is a poor environment
Be the glue
Beware of the tigers!
Civility warnings
Deletion as revenge
Duty to comply
Failure
Forgive and forget
It's not the end of the world
Nobody cares
Most people who disagree with you on content are not vandals
On Wikipedia no one knows you're a dog
Old-fashioned Wikipedian values
Profanity, civility, and discussions
Revert notification opt-out
Shadowless Fists of Death!
Staying cool when the editing gets hot
The grey zone
The last word
There is no Divine Right of Editors
Most ideas are bad
Nothing is clear
Reader
The rules of polite discourse
There is no common sense
Two wrongs don't make a right
Wikipedia clichés
Wikipedia is not about winning
Wikipedia should not be a monopoly
Writing for the opponent
Dos
Assume good faith
Assume the assumption of good faith
Assume no clue
Avoid personal remarks
Avoid the word "vandal"
Be a humble article creator
Be excellent to one another
Be pragmatic
Beyond civility
Call a spade a spade
Candor
Deny recognition
Desist
Discussing cruft
Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass
Encourage full discussions
Get over it
How to lose
Imagine others complexly
Just drop it
Keep it concise
Keep it down to earth
Mind your own business
Say "MOBY"
Mutual withdrawal
Read before commenting
Read the room
Settle the process first
You can search, too
Don'ts
Wikipedia:Because I can
Civil POV pushing
Cyberbullying
Don't accuse someone of a personal attack for accusing of a personal attack
Don't be a fanatic
Don't be a jerk
Don't be an ostrich
Don't be ashamed
Don't be a WikiBigot
Don't be high-maintenance
Don't be inconsiderate
Don't be obnoxious
Don't be prejudiced
Don't be rude
Don't be the Fun Police
Don't bludgeon the process
Don't call a spade a spade
Don't call people by their real name
Don't call the kettle black
Don't call things cruft
Don't come down like a ton of bricks
Don't cry COI
Don't demand that editors solve the problems they identify
Don't eat the troll's food
Don't fight fire with fire
Don't give a fuck
Don't help too much
Don't ignore community consensus
Don't knit beside the guillotine
Don't make a smarmy valediction part of your signature
Don't remind others of past misdeeds
Don't shout
Don't spite your face
Don't take the bait
Don't template the regulars
Don't throw your toys out of the pram
Do not insult the vandals
Griefing
Hate is disruptive
Jew-tagging
Nationalist editing
No angry mastodons
just madmen
No ableism
No Nazis
No racists
No Confederates
No queerphobia
No, you can't have a pony
Passive aggression
POV railroad
Superhatting
There are no oracles
There's no need to guess someone's preferred pronouns
You can't squeeze blood from a turnip
UPPERCASE
WikiRelations
WikiBullying
WikiCrime
WikiHarassment
WikiHate
WikiLawyering
WikiLove
WikiPeace
Neutrality
Academic bias
Activist
Advocacy
Avoid thread mode
Be neutral in form
Blind men and an elephant
Cherrypicking
Civil POV pushing
Coatrack
Controversial articles
Creating controversial content
Criticisms of society may be consistent with NPOV and reliability
Criticism
Describing points of view
Don't "teach the controversy"
Endorsements
Let the reader decide
Inaccuracy
Myth vs fiction
NPOV dispute
Neutral and proportionate point of view
Not Wikipedia's fault
POV and OR from editors, sources, and fields
Partisans
Partisanship
Presentism
Pro and con lists
Systemic bias
Tendentious editing
There are no shortcuts to neutrality
Wikipedia:Truth
We are absolutely here to right great wrongs
We shouldn't be able to figure out your opinions
What is fringe?
Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat
Wikipedia is not RationalWiki
Yes, it is promotion
Notability
Advanced source searching
All high schools can be notable
Alternative outlets
Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions
Articles with a single source
Avoid template creep
Bare notability
Big events make key participants notable
Businesses with a single location
But it's true!
Common sourcing mistakes
Clones
Coatrack
Discriminate vs indiscriminate information
Drafts are not checked for notability or sanity
Every snowflake is unique
Existence ≠ Notability
Existence does not prove notability
Extracting the meaning of significant coverage
Google searches and numbers
How the presumption of notability works
High schools
Historical/Policy/Notability/Arguments
Inclusion is not an indicator of notability
Independent sources
Inherent notability
Insignificant
Just because BFDI has an article doesn't mean you can add fancruft about it
Masking the lack of notability
Make stubs
Minimum coverage
News coverage does not decrease notability
No amount of editing can overcome a lack of notability
No one cares about your garage band
No one really cares
Notability and tornadoes
Notability cannot be purchased
Notability comparison test
Notability is not everything
Notability is not a level playing field
Notability is not a matter of opinion
Notability is not relevance or reliability
Notability means impact
Notabilitymandering
Not all Vocaloid songs deserve their own article
Not every single thing Donald Trump does deserves an article
Obscurity ≠ Lack of notability
Offline sources
One sentence does not an article make
Overreliance upon Google
Perennial websites
Popularity ≠ Notability
Read the source
Red flags of non-notability
Reducing consensus to an algorithm
Run-of-the-mill
Solutions are mixtures and nothing else
Significance is not a formula
Source content comes first!
Sources must be out-of-universe
Subjective importance
Slow news day
Third-party sources
Trivial mentions
Video links
Vanispamcruftisement
What BLP1E is not
What is and is not routine coverage
What notability is not
What to include
Why was
BFDI
not on Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is not Crunchbase
Wikipedia is not here to tell the world about your noble cause
Wikipedia is not the place to post your résumé
Two prongs of merit
Two sources are good enough
Humorous
Adminitis
Ain't no rules says a dog can't play basketball
Akin's Laws of Article Writing
Alternatives to edit warring
ANI flu
Anti-Wikipedian
Anti-Wikipedianism
Articlecountitis
Asshole John rule
Assume bad faith
Assume faith
Assume good wraith
Assume stupidity
Assume that everyone's assuming good faith, assuming that you are assuming good faith
Avoid using the preview button
Avoid using wikilinks
Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense
Barnstaritis
Before they were notable
Be the fun police
BOLD, revert, revert, revert cycle
Boston Tea Party
Butterfly effect
CaPiTaLiZaTiOn MuCh?
Case against LLM-generated articles
Complete bollocks
Counting forks
Counting juntas
Crap
Delete the main page
Diffusing conflict
Don't stuff beans up your nose
Don't-give-a-fuckism
Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"!
Don't delete the main page
Editcountitis
Edits Per Day
Editsummarisis
Editing under the influence
Embrace Stop Signs
Emerson
Fart
Five Fs of Wikipedia
Seven Ages of Editor, by Will E. Spear-Shake
Go ahead, vandalize
How many Wikipedians does it take to change a lightbulb?
How to get away with UPE
How to put up a straight pole by pushing it at an angle
How to vandalize correctly
How to win a citation war
If you have a pulse
Ignore all essays
Ignore all user warnings
Ignore every single rule
Is that even an essay?
Keep beating the horse
List of really, really, really stupid article ideas that you really, really, really should not create
Mess with the templates
My local pond
Newcomers are delicious, so go ahead and bite them
Legal vandalism
List of jokes about Wikipedia
LTTAUTMAOK
No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man
No episcopal threats
No one cares about your garage band
No one really cares
No, really
No self attacks
Notability is not eternal
Oops Defense
Play the game
Please be a giant dick, so we can ban you
Please bite the newbies
Please do not murder the newcomers
Pledge of Tranquility
Project S.C.R.A.M.
R-e-s-p-e-c-t
Requests for medication
Requirements for adminship
Rouge admin
Rouge editor
Sarcasm is really helpful
Sausages for tasting
Spaling Muich?
Template madness
The first rule of Wikipedia
The Five Pillars of Untruth
The Night Before Wikimas
The Truth
Things that should not be surprising
The WikiBible
Watchlistitis
We are deletionist!
Why is
BFDI
on Wikipedia?
Why you shouldn't write articles with ChatGPT, according to ChatGPT
Wikipedia is an MMORPG
WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG!
Yes, falsely
Yes legal threats
Yes personal attacks
You don't have to be mad to work here, but
You should not write meaningless lists
About
About essays
Essay guide
Value of essays
Difference between policies, guidelines and essays
Don't cite essays as if they were policy
Avoid writing redundant essays
Finding an essay
Quote your own essay
Policies and guidelines
About policies and guidelines
Policies
Guidelines
How to contribute to Wikipedia guidance
Policy writing is hard
Essay search
Wikipedia technical help
Get personal technical help at
the Teahouse
help desk
village pump (technical)
talk pages
, or
IRC
General
technical help
Bypass cache
Keyboard shortcuts
Editing
CharInsert
Edit conflict
Edit toolbar
Reverting
How to create a page
IRC
Tutorial
Mobile access
Multilingual support
Page history
Page information
Page name
Help
Printing
Software notices
Editnotice
Special characters
Entering
User access levels
VisualEditor
Help
Special
page
–related
Special page help
AllPages
Edit filter
Emailing users
Logging in
Reset passwords
Logs
Moving a page
History merging
Non-admin and admin-only page moves
Notifications/Echo
FAQ
Page Curation
Page import
Pending changes
Random pages
Recent changes
Related changes
Searching
Linksearch
Tags
User contributions
Watchlist
What links here
Wikitext
Wikitext
Cheatsheet
Columns
Line-break handling
Lists
Magic words
For beginners
Conditional expressions
Switch parser function
Time function
Redirects
Sections and TOCs
Tables
Introduction
Basics
Advanced table formatting
Collapsing
Conditional tables
Sortable tables
Using colours
Links
and
diffs
Links
Interlanguage
Interwiki
Permanent
Diffs
Simplest diff guide
Simple diff and link guide
Complete diff and link guide
Colon trick
Link color
Pipe trick
URLs
Media files
Media help
Files
Creation and usage
Moving files to Commons
Images
Introduction to images
Picture tutorial
Preparing images for upload
Uploading images
Options to hide an image
Extended image syntax
SVG help
Gallery tag
Graphics tutorials
Basic bitmap image editing
How to improve image quality
Graphics Lab resources
Sound file markup
Visual file markup
Other graphics
Family trees
Graphs and charts
How to create
Barcharts
To scale charts
Math formulas
Math symbols
Musical scores
Musical symbols
Timeline
EasyTimeline syntax
WikiHiero syntax
Templates
and
Lua
modules
Templates
Advanced template coding
Template documentation
Template index
Template limits
Template sandbox and test cases
Citation templates
Lua help
Lua project
Resources
To do
Substitution
Purge
Job queue
Transclusion
Labeled section
Costs and benefits
Guide to Scribbling
Data structure
Namespaces
Main/Article
Category
Draft
File
File description page
Help
Portal
Project/Wikipedia
Talk
Archiving
Simple
Template
User
User page design
MediaWiki
Bug reports and feature requests
TimedMediaHandler extension
Module
Special
HTML
and
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets
HTML in wikitext
Catalogue of CSS classes
Common.js and common.css
Classes in microformats
Markup validation
Span tags
Useful styles
Customisation
and tools
Preferences
Gadgets
Skins
Citation tools
Cleaning up vandalism tools
Customizing watchlists
Hide pages
IRC Scripts
User scripts
Guide
List
Techniques
Safe mode
User style
Tools
Alternative browsing
Browser tools
Editing tools
Navigation shortcuts
Optimum tool set
Wikimedia Cloud Services
Beta Features at MediaWiki
Automated editing
AfC helper script
AntiVandal
AutoWikiBrowser
Bots
Creating
history
HotCat
Huggle
Interceptor
Navigation popups
RedWarn
Twinkle
Ultraviolet
WPCleaner
Inactive
igloo
STiki
See also:
Category:Wikipedia how-to
Category:Wikipedia information pages
Further navigation at:
Help pages
Administrators
Accounts
Bots
Referencing
Citation metadata
Templates
User scripts
Wikipedia referencing
Policies and guidelines
Verifiability
No original research
Biographies of living persons
Reliable sources
Medicine
Citing sources
Scientific citations
General advice
Citation needed
Combining sources
Offline sources
Referencing styles
Citing sources
Citation Style 1
Citation Style 2
Bluebook
Comics
Citation templates
Inline citations
Footnotes
Punctuation and footnotes
Shortened footnotes
Nesting footnotes
Help for beginners
Reference-tags
Citations quick reference
Introduction to referencing
Referencing with citation templates
Referencing without using templates
Referencing dos and don'ts
Citing Wikipedia
Advanced help
Cite link labels
Cite errors
Citation merging (bundling)
Cite messages
Converting between references formats
Reference display customization
References and page numbers
Guidance on source reviewing at FAC
Cite extension documentation
Footnote templates
Citation Style documentation
Multiple references
{{
Reflist
}}
{{
Refbegin
}}
Find references
How to find sources
Bibliographies
Wikipedia Library
Resource Exchange
Reference Desk
Book Sources
Free newspaper sources
Citation tools
(External links)
Citer
Citation bot
MakeRef
Refill
WayBack
OABot
Wikipedia templates
Main namespace
General
Cleanup
Verifiability and sources
Disputes
Hatnotes
Infoboxes
Links
External link templates
Linking country articles
Lists
Main page
Section
Sources of articles
Quick reference
Standard boxes
Stub types
Translation
Other namespaces
Compact TOC
Category
File
Talk
Template
User
Userboxes
User talk
Wikipedia
WikiProject banners
All namespaces
Deletion
Speedy
Formatting
Maintenance
Merging
Moving
Requested
Redirect pages
Functional index
Language codes
Splitting
Wikimedia sister projects
Navboxes
with templates
Archiving
Articles for deletion
Birth, death and age
Button
Category header
Citation and verifiability
Citation Style 1
Deletion review
Editnotice
Hatnotes
Help desk
Inline cleanup
Introduction cleanup
IPA
Math
Notice and warnings
Organization infoboxes
Proposed article mergers
Protection
Quotation
Redirects
Semantics
Speedy deletion
Notices
String-handling
Sup and sub-related
Top icon
Transwiki maintenance
Unicode
User talk pages
User noticeboard notices
Userboxes
User rights
Userspace linking
Userspace disclaimers
Wikibreak
WikiLove
Inline images
Wikipedia icons
Discussion icons
Comment icons
Emoji
Help pages
Template documentation
Examples of templates
Maintenance template removal
Requested templates
Template help
Quick guide
Favorite templates
Template namespace
Related topics
Editor navigation templates
WikiProject Templates
Index
Category
Category
Awards, decorations, and medals of Wikipedia
Awarded by co-founder
Jimmy Wales
Order of the Day
Wikimedian of the Year
also by country
Awards by WikiProject
WikiCup
Editor of the Week
W Award
Four Award
Triple Crown
Million Award
Impact
Precious
Barnstars and other personal awards
Barnstar awards
by topic
Personal user awards
Personal greetings and cheers
Awards by country
2.0
Ribbons
Awards by number of edits
Service awards
Incremental service awards
Administrative service awards
See also
WikiLove
Thanks!
Reward board
Contests
Merchandise giveaways
Wikipedia:Five Year Society
Wikipedia:Ten Year Society
Wikipedia:Fifteen Year Society
Wikipedia:Twenty Year Society
Wikipedia:Twenty-Five Year Society
WikiProject Wikipedia Awards
Kindness Campaign
Useful links
Daily pages
CAT:HELP
WP:ANI
WP:BLPN
WP:BOTN
WP:COIN
WP:DASH
WP:FTN
WP:HD
WP:MCQ
WP:NORN
WP:NPOVN
WP:PUMP
/A
/M
/P
/R
/T
WP:RD
/C
/E
/H
/L
/M
/MA
/S
WP:RFC
/MEDIA
/BIO
/ECON
/HIST
/LANG
/NAME
/PAG
/PHIL
/POLY
/SCI
/SOC
/STYLE
WP:RFF
WP:RSN
WP:SPI
WP:THIRD
WP:DRV
Things to do
CAT:BACKLOG
CAT:M
CAT:WRI
WP:AFC
WP:ASOF
WP:DPWL
WP:FAC
WP:FAR
WP:FPC
WP:GAN
WP:GAR
WP:KIND
WP:MISSING
WP:PR
WP:RD
WP:RP
WP:SPOKEN
WP:UW
WP:THQ
WP:VITAL
WP:WANTED
WP:WC
BrokenRedirects
Disambigs
LongPages
NewPages
OrphanPages
TagsPages
UncatImages
UncatPages
Resources
CAT:HOWTO
WP:AIDIR
WP:AWARD
WP:CATEGORY
WP:CAT-R
WP:CITE
WP:CITET
WP:COPYEDIT
WP:CUTPASTE
WP:CUV
WP:DEPT
WP:DFD
WP:DISAMBIG
WP:EDIT
WP:CITE
WP:FORMULA
WP:HAT
WP:ICT
WP:LAYOUT
WP:LIBRARY
WP:MAGIC
WP:MERGE
WP:PIFU
WP:PRECEDENT
WP:REDIRECT
WP:STYLE
WP:SUMMARY
WP:TEMPLATE
CatTree
PrefixIndex
Policies /
Guidelines
WP:3RR
WP:ADMIN
WP:AP
WP:APPEAL
WP:ATTACK
WP:AUTOBIO
WP:BAN
WP:BLANK
WP:BLOCK
WP:BOLD
WP:BOTPOL
WP:CANVASS
WP:CFORK
WP:CIVIL
WP:CONFLICT
WP:CONSENSUS
WP:COPYRIGHT
WP:DELETE
WP:DISCLAIM
WP:DISPUTE
WP:DISRUPTIVE
WP:DONTBITE
WP:DPR
WP:EP
WP:ETIQ
WP:EDITWAR
WP:FRINGE
WP:GAME
WP:GOOGLE
WP:HARASS
WP:HOAX
WP:IGNORE
WP:IUP
WP:LEAD
WP:LEGAL
WP:LIBEL
WP:LINKS
WP:CLNT
WP:LIVING
WP:LOGOS
WP:M
WP:NAME
WP:NONFREE
WP:NONSENSE
WP:NOT
WP:NOTE
WP:NPOV
WP:NPS
WP:OFFICE
WP:ORIGINAL
WP:OVERSIGHT
WP:OWN
WP:PACL
WP:PD
WP:PEACOCK
WP:PERFORM
WP:POINT
WP:POLLING
WP:PROD
WP:PROTECT
WP:RELIABLE
WP:SELF
WP:SOCK
WP:SPAM
WP:SPEEDY
WP:STUB
WP:TALK
WP:TP
WP:TRIVIA
WP:USERBOX
WP:USERNAME
WP:USERPAGE
WP:VANDAL
WP:VANISH
WP:VERIFY
WP:WEASEL
WP:WHEEL
Administrators
CAT:AB
CAT:CSD
CAT:PER
CAT:RFU
WP:AE
WP:AIV
WP:AN
WP:ANEW
WP:ARL
WP:CP
WP:DGFA
WP:NAS
WP:OP
WP:RFA
WP:RFARB
WP:RFM
WP:RFPP
WP:RM
WP:RSPAM
WP:UAA
BlockLog
DelLog
ProtectLog
Wikipedia editor navigation templates
Help page navboxes
Accounts
Administrators' guide
Basic information
Categorization
Citation metadata
CSS and JS files
Directories and indexes
Dos and don'ts
Essays
User essays
Handling miscellanea
Help desk searches
Help pages
IPA keys
Lists
Manual of Style
MediaWiki messages
Principles
Policies and guidelines
Referencing
Relevance and scope
Rule summaries
Sock puppetry
Speedy deletion navbox
Technical help
Templates
Quick templates
User scripts
Writing guides
Community navboxes
Active Wiki Fixup Projects
ArbCom Elections
Community
Core topics
Deletion debates
Goings-on
History of Wikipedia
In the media
Long term abuse
Noticeboards
Regional notice boards
Main Page topics
Meetups
Orders, decorations, and medals
Requested articles
Requested articles by country
Requests for permissions
RfA
RfA by year
RFC list
Silly things
Teahouse host pages
Transwiki maintenance
WikiFauna
Wikipediholism
WikiProjects
Other navboxes
Help desk searches
User toolbox
RfA/RfB
Wikipedia
Languages
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikipedia Library resources
The Wikipedia Library Navbox
All-in-one navboxes
Editor navigation
Useful links
Tools
Rule sidebars
Guideline list
Manual of Style
Notability guide
Policy list
Naming conventions
Conduct policy
Content policy
Deletion policy
Enforcement policy
Legal policy
Vandalism
Content
Other help sidebars
About Wikipedia
Article creation
Article resources
Contributing to Wikipedia
Disambiguation
Discussions
Editing
Essay
Featured article path
Glossaries
Linking and page manipulation
Namespaces
Processes
Reader help
Tutorials
User access levels
VisualEditor
Wiki markup
Wikipedian philosophies
Community sidebars
Active Wiki Fixup Projects
April Fool's Day Main Page
Arbitration Committee
Awards
Collaborations
Common decisions and arguments
CSD-categories
Deletion debates
Deletion tools
Dispute resolution
New Page Patrol
Reward Board
Resources for maintenance and collaboration
Sockpuppet investigations
Signpost
Translation department
WikiStats
WikiProjects
Bar-style headers
Bots
Community
Edit filter
Help pages
Mediation Committee
Programs
WikiProjects
For navboxes that link mostly to templates see the
template navbox
. See also
WikiProject navigation
and
meetup
categories.
Editor search boxes
Directories and indexes
Retrieved from "
Categories
Wikipedia directories
Wikipedia editor help
Wikipedia FAQs
Hidden categories:
Wikipedia semi-protected project pages
Wikipedia move-protected project pages
Wikipedia
Glossary
Add topic
US