Contents in Detail Introduction.............................................................................................................................. xvii Inside This Book ............................................................................................................................. xviii What You Should Know Going In ...................................................................................................xix Using This Book ............................................................................................................................... xix Our Approach to Understanding Wikipedia .................................................................................xx It’s Everyone’s Encyclopedia: Be Bold! .........................................................................................xxi Wikisyntax Cheatsheet..................................................................................................................xxiii Part I: Content Chapter 1: What’s in Wikipedia?.....................................................................................3 Types of Articles..................................................................................................................................7 Article and Content Inclusion Policies............................................................................................ 11 Core Policies: V, NOR, and NPOV ............................................................................................. 12 Understanding the Policies........................................................................................................ 13 Other Guidelines.........................................................................................................................18 What Wikipedia Is Not................................................................................................................22 Non-article Content..........................................................................................................................25 Types of Non-article Pages ........................................................................................................25 Namespaces.................................................................................................................................26 Summary and What to Read Next...................................................................................................30 Chapter 2: The World Gets a Free Encyclopedia ...............................................31 Wikipedia’s Mission ..........................................................................................................................32 Wikipedia’s Roots..............................................................................................................................33 Ancient Greece to Today: Encyclopedias ................................................................................33 Late 17th Century: The Modern Encyclopedia........................................................................35 Wikipedia as an Encyclopedia...................................................................................................36 The 1960s and 1970s: Unix, Networks, and Personal Computers .........................................37 The 1980s: The Free Software Movement................................................................................38 1995: Ward’s Wiki......................................................................................................................... 41 1997: Open Source Communities..............................................................................................42 2000: Online Community Dynamics .........................................................................................44 2001: Wikipedia Goes Live .........................................................................................................46 Wikipedia Today..........................................................................................................................47 Unfinished Business ....................................................................................................................49 The Wikipedia Model Debated....................................................................................................... 51 Misinformation: The Seigenthaler Scandal.............................................................................. 51 Amateur Contributors, Authority, and Academia...................................................................53 Summary.............................................................................................................................................58 Chapter 3: Finding Wikipedia’s Content..................................................................59 Searching Wikipedia.........................................................................................................................60 Basic Searching............................................................................................................................60 External Search Engines.............................................................................................................65 How Wikipedia Works (C) 2008 by Phoebe Ayers, Ben Yates, and Charles Matthews Ways into Wikipedia .........................................................................................................................68 Welcome to the Main Page........................................................................................................68 The Omnipresent Sidebar..........................................................................................................73 Joys of Hypertext ..............................................................................................................................80 A Hypertext Primer......................................................................................................................81 Three Types of Links....................................................................................................................82 Browsing by Topic .......................................................................................................................83 Browsing by Categories..............................................................................................................88 Browsing by Page Type ..............................................................................................................93 Summary.............................................................................................................................................97 Chapter 4: Understanding and Evaluating an Article.....................................99 Anatomy of an Article.....................................................................................................................100 The Article Text..........................................................................................................................101 Backlinks ....................................................................................................................................104 Article History ............................................................................................................................105 Talk Pages................................................................................................................................... 113 Evaluating Articles .......................................................................................................................... 117 Misinformation, Missing Information, and Mistakes............................................................. 117 D-R-E-W-S ..................................................................................................................................120 Summary...........................................................................................................................................126 Final Thoughts for Part I.................................................................................................................127 Part II: Editing Chapter 5: Basic Editing ................................................................................................... 131 Editing a Page..................................................................................................................................132 Understanding the Edit Window.............................................................................................133 Major vs. Minor Edits ................................................................................................................138 Handling Major Editing Tasks ..................................................................................................138 Fixing Mistakes and Other Reasons to Revert.......................................................................140 Who Can Edit What?.................................................................................................................143 Syntax ...............................................................................................................................................144 Fundamentals of Text Markup ................................................................................................145 Internal and External Links......................................................................................................