User:TVJunkie/Images to be copied

Figure 1-1. The top of the sandbox page, in normal mode. In normal mode, you can read what's on the screen, but not make any changes to it. To enter edit mode, just click the "edit this page" tab.

Figure 1-2. The sandbox, in edit mode. The text in the box (the edit box) is only an example—what you see will depend on what the other editors have just done to the page. The edit toolbar along the top of the edit box is standard; it provides one-click options for the most common kinds of formatting of content. Also standard is all the text between the sentences "It will be deleted" and "Your changes will be visible immediately."

Figure 1-3. The edit box after deleting all but the top three lines. Now the edit box is ready for you to add text. Of what remains, the first line is a template (see the section about templates, below), and the second and third lines are an invisible comment—visible, that is, only when you're in edit mode.

Figure 1-4. Typing this text into the edit box is a quick lesson in the three most common types of Wikipedia formatting. Putting equal signs on both sides of text turns it into a section heading (after you save your edit). Text surrounded by three apostrophes gets bolded; text surrounded by two apostrophes gets italicized.

Figure 1-5. When you add an edit summary, make it descriptive but concise. (The checkboxes for "This is a minor edit" and "Watch this page" are visible only if you're a registered user who is logged in.)

Figure 1-6. At the very top of the preview screen there's always a warning, in red, that you're looking at a preview, not something that has been saved.

Figure 1-7. The middle and part of the bottom half of the preview screen, showing how the edit from Figure 1-4 looks after saving the page. Wikipedia automatically adds a table of contents for articles that have four or more section headings. At bottom is the now-familiar edit box, so you can make corrections or improvements to your article.

Figure 1-8. The top of a page when there's an edit conflict. If you're logged in, you see only the top paragraph of information.

Figure 1-9. When there is an edit conflict, your screen will have an additional edit box, at the bottom of the screen, with the label "Your text." (Not all the text in Figure 1-4 is shown here, but all of it would be in the edit box.)

Figure 1-10. Compare what's been typed into the edit box (bottom) to what's in the preview portion of the page (top).

Figure 1-11. A common use for templates is infoboxes. Here's the infobox template for the article Winnowill, viewed in edit mode, on the top, and what it actually looks like in the article, on the bottom. The template has 15 parameters; the first two are for putting an image into the infobox, and are not being used here.

Figure 1-12. An article with three sections that can be separately edited. To edit a specific section, click an "edit" link on the right side of the page.

Figure 1-13. After you've selected the option to add an edit link for the lead section on the Gadgets tab of the "My preferences" page, you see a new edit link to the right of the title of every article. Clicking that link will open the top section of the article for editing. (If you don't see such a link, make sure you bypassed your browser's cache as described at the bottom of the Gadgets tab.)

Figure 1-14. The "Random article" link. Click this to go to one of the about three million articles in Wikipedia.

Figure 2-1. This example is a good lead section. It hits the highlights, so the reader can decide whether to continue reading the article. The citations for this information come in the body of the article.

Figure 2-2. Shown is the "Law" section of the Wikipedia article titled Canada. This section is a summary of a separate, more detailed article, Law of Canada. Citations of sources don't need to be in the "Law" section; they're in the article Law of Canada.

Figure 2-3. Here are the sources for the article George Washington in the American Revolution. These two sections appear at the bottom of that article. The "Bibliography" section lists six books. By contrast, there are only four footnotes—only four cases in this article where text is footnoted to show exactly where it came from.

Figure 2-4. The edit box shows the text for the external link example described on these pages. Notice the edit toolbar just above the edit box—that's a standard landmark when you're in editing mode. As discussed in the section about your first edit, the triple apostrophes around the word "wrong" are wiki markup; they make the word appear in boldface.

Figure 2-5. This preview shows how to create an external link in Wikipedia—by surrounding a URL with single square brackets. When you preview the page, you see the linked text but not the URL it takes you to. If you forget the brackets, then you see the whole URL when you do a preview. If you see a naked URL in preview mode, fix it.

Figure 2-6. You'll recognize some of the wiki markup that you used in the tutorial in Chapter 1, Editing for the First Time, like the headings for the two sections and the italicizing of the title of the publication (the magazine Slate). The footnote begins immediately after the sentence it documents—there's no space between the period and the <ref> tag. You must both create a heading for the "References" section and add the <references/> tag to tell Wikipedia where to put the footnotes.

Figure 2-7. At top, you can see how the page will look when you save it. The bottom shows the text entered into the edit box, with the two parts of the footnote system (the footnotes themselves, and where they're displayed).

") symbols, and the spaces before and after the equal signs aren't required. Of course, removing those 28 blank spaces would make the template even more difficult to read.

Figure 2-9. The same source is cited thrice. In the body of the text, ^[1] occurs thrice, as a link. Clicking any of the three takes you to the same place: the text of footnote 1, in the "Notes" section. With footnotes, linking works both ways. For example, for footnote 1, instead of clicking on the upward caret ("^") to go to the footnote, you click the "a", "b", and "c" to go to the three places in the body of the text where the footnote number ([1], in this case) is located.

Figure 2-10. When you edit just a section of an article, the footnote numbers are visible in preview mode, but not the text of the footnotes. Some experienced editors are comfortable saving their edits without previewing what their added footnotes look like, but if not being able to preview your footnotes makes you uneasy, see Figure 2-11 for the workaround.

Figure 2-11. With the <references/> tag added, the footnotes are visible in preview mode. Don't forget to delete the tag before you save your edit. If you forget, the software displays all the footnotes in the article, in two different parts of the article, not once at the bottom.

Figure 2-12. The Rp template lets you type page numbers when you insert multiple references to a source (bottom). They appear in superscript next to footnote numbers (top). So you can cite multiple pages from the same source without any of the problems mentioned in the section on adding page numbers to footnotes.

Figure 3-10. This edit box shows two different ways to create a link. In Preview mode, you can see that the links are red because the page doesn't yet exist. Also note that the page is spelled "My sandbox" in one link and "my sandbox" in the other. Those links are really to the same page because Wikipedia software always treats the first letter of the title of a page as a capital letter, even if it doesn't display it that way.

Figure 4-1. The Articles for Creation wizard asks a series of questions to determine if your idea for an article is a good one. Registered users normally don't use this wizard to create articles, but it's still a good learning tool. To get there, go to the Wikipedia:Articles for Creation page (shortcut: WP:AFC), scroll down until you see the large "Start Here," and then click that link. Then click "I would like to submit an article without registration".

Figure 4-2. When an article is a stub, it says so, as shown at the very bottom of this example. Stubs usually have just a sentence or two about their subject, and sometimes links to related, longer articles. Wikipedia's administrators are quick to delete stubs, so work on articles in your user space until they're long enough for prime time.

Figure 4-3. Five articles that mentioned Sam Wyly were found during the process of creating a new article about him. Information from those articles was copied (in this illustration, to the Windows Notepad) because it'll be used in the article. Part of building the web is creating outgoing links from a new article, pointing to existing Wikipedia articles.

Figure 4-4. Here are a number of reliable sources for the planned article. There isn't any standard way to put them on the subpage (the top of which is shown here), but it's a good idea to start building the format for full citations (see the section about citations). On the other hand, don't put the full text of long articles on the page—that's a copyright violation the moment you save the page with all the text on it, even though you're doing the work on a user subpage, rather than on an article page.

Figure 4-5. A section of the Sam Wyly article in rough draft form. Sections in the body of articles normally consist of prose paragraphs, not bullet points or lists as shown here, but that's because the article is still in very rough form. You should at least turn the bulleted sentences into bulleted paragraphs.

Figure 4-6. The standard page for moving (renaming) a page gives you information and warnings. Use the "Measure twice, cut once" rule: Check your spelling and capitalization carefully before you move your article to its new home. It's not the end of the world if you misspell or otherwise err with the title of your new article (you can always move the page again), but it's embarrassing.

Figure 4-7. There's one more step after you've moved a page—fixing any double redirects. A double redirect is where article A has a link to page B; page B is a redirect that immediately takes the reader to page C; and page C is also a redirect that points to page D.

Figure 4-8. There are nine direct links to the new Sam Wyly article. The last of the nine is a redirect (which is fine). If there were any double redirects; you'd see a double indentation underneath the redirect. (For more information on redirects, including fixing them, see the section about redirects.)

Figure 5-1. Here's a typical page history. Only six versions (edits) are shown, but a history page normally lists the first 50. Edits older than the most recent 50 are listed onto separate pages. You can specify the number of edits listed on the first page—and any subsequent pages you look at, with older edits, by clicking the 20,50, 100, 250, or 500 links near the top.

Figure 5-2. This page history excerpt shows only eight versions. Right away, you can see that one editor has been busily working away.

Figure 5-3. When the Wikipedia software compares two versions of a page (that is, the effects of one or more consecutive edits), you see a page like this one. Not all of this "diff" is shown—it actually includes the full version of the page after the edit listed in the right column at the top. You can turn that off— just see the top side-by-side comparison —if you want, by checking "Don't show page content below diffs" in the "Misc" tab of your My Preferences page, but most editors don't—it doesn't really save much time for the diff page to load, and sometimes having full context is helpful.

Figure 5-4. To see what editor John Broughton actually changed in his six edits, you can use the two rows of radio buttons to select a set of consecutive edits, as shown here. It's the slower way to view multiple edits, but you can use it anytime. If the edits you want to view happen to include the most recent version, a single click on the "cur" link next to the earliest edit you wanted to include would do the trick instead. Since you often focus on the most recent edits, that shortcut can be useful.

Figure 5-5. You see this standard wording of the warning when you first look at an older version of a page. Wikipedia stores only the text of old versions of pages, not images in that version. At the top of the infobox, on the right, you can see "Image:Gableautopic.JPG". If an image of that name existed in Wikipedia, you'd see it. But since the image is no longer on Wikipedia, all you see is a link to the location where the image used to be. In short, Wikipedia's copies of old versions of pages are not photographic copies, they're text stored in a database.

Figure 5-6. You see this warning when you're editing a version of a page other than the current one. Wikipedia wants to make sure you're fully aware that if you save this page after editing, you'll be wiping out all the edits that were made after this version was originally created, unless you manually make changes to this version that incorporate some of those edits. In this case, the last edit(s) were vandalism, not something to worry about losing.

Figure 6-1. On the User contributions page, if you've done the most recent edit of an article, you'll see "top", in bold, at the end of its row. Here you see five edits for five different pages. Only the last page has been edited subsequently by another editor, as indicated by the lack of the word "top" at the end of that row.

Figure 6-2. The standard watchlist report starts out in the "Display watched changes" view shown here. The number of edits listed is quite short, because this editor is watching only 21 pages, and because the watchlist report is set to show only the last 3 days of edits. (But you can change that setting; see the section about watchlist preferences.)

Figure 6-3. Wikipedia gives you three ways to add a page to your watchlist. You can turn on a checkbox when you edit or move a page (top and middle), or, at the top of the page you're viewing, you can click the "watch" tab (bottom).

Figure 6-4. The "View and edit watchlist" link, from the watchlist report screen, leads to this straightforward page for removing pages from your watchlist.

Figure 6-5. One of the easiest ways to do mass edits of your watchlist is via the "Edit raw watchlist" option. You can get to this screen by clicking "Edit raw watchlist" on your watchlist report, or "edit the raw list" on the "Edit watchlist" page (Figure 6-4).

Figure 6-6. For your watchlist, there are nine different things you can change via the Watchlist tab of the Preferences page. Whenever you open your watchlist report, Wikipedia uses these settings to decide what to show you (until you return to this tab and change them again). The "3" and the "250" are the initial settings with which every user account starts out.

Figure 6-7. The expanded watchlist report lists all edits, not just the last edit, during a given period. You can see that report instead of the standard watchlist report shown here by turning on "Expand watchlist to show all applicable changes" in the Watchlist tab of your Preferences page.

Figure 6-8. The enhanced watchlist report. This variant of the expanded watchlist report consolidates all edits into a single expandable row for each calendar day when changes to a page occurred.

Figure 6-9. When you click a summary line in an enhanced watchlist report, the right-pointing arrow changes to a down-pointing arrow, and details lines appear immediately below. Here, one of the summary lines in Figure 6-8 has been expanded.

Figure 6-10. Here's a subpage set up as a second watchlist. If you want paired talk pages, you need to be add them manually, because they're not included automatically on watchlist reports that use watchlists you create yourself. See the box about adding talk pages for a quick way to add the talk pages.

Figure 6-11. Top: To request an Atom feed for a specific article or other page, click the "history" tab for that page, and then look at the toolbox on the left side of the screen for the link to click: Bottom: Once you click "Atom", what you see depends entirely on your browser. Shown here is the top of the page of what Firefox 2.0 (on Windows XP) displays.

Figure 6-12. The User:Lupin/Monitor my watchlist page has a scrolling list of edits of pages on your watchlist. At the top are a number of options. For example, you might want to turn on "Ignore talk pages" and "Ignore pages outside the article namespace" because you're focusing solely on vandalism to articles themselves.

Figure 6-13. After you install Lupin's Anti-vandal tool and purge your cache, your "toolbox" (on the left side of the screen) has five new links. You use the "Monitor my watchlist" link to get a real-time display of changes to pages in your watchlist.

Figure 7-2. You can get to a listing of blocks made against a user account via a link at the top of the User contributions page. The block log shows any action taken by administrators to block the user account from editing for an hour, day, a week, or some other period, including indefinitely.

Figure 7-3. A portion of a User contributions page, showing two edits with "top" at the end of the row of edit information. The "top" means this editor was the last person to edit that page – his edit is at the top of the revision history of that page.

Figure 7-4. You can use the Special:LinkSearch page to find all Wikipedia pages with an external link to any specific URL. It even finds all Wikipedia pages with external links to a particular Web site if you use the "*" wildcard character. In this figure, a specific URL has been entered, rather than searching for links to a portion of or all of a Web site.

Figure 7-5. A preview of the level 3 user warning for vandalism (the uw-vandalism3 template, using substitution). It's critical to preview user warnings, because mistyping even a single character will probably cause the template to malfunction.

Figure 7-6. The page Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism contains instructions about reporting vandalism, including other pages where you should go if you're not reporting simple vandalism.

Figure 7-7. You see this initial screen when you go into edit mode to enter information about the vandalizing account. Typically, you see a few accounts that were just reported by other editors and haven't been fully processed yet. As you see here, you use different templates for reporting IP editors and for reporting registered users.

Figure 7-8. Your screen looks like this after you've started your vandal report. Note that you're using the IP vandal template, not the template for registered users. The text you've copied and pasted has been highlighted.

Figure 7-9. The vandalism report is complete. Here's what it looks like in preview mode.

Figure 8-1. An example of indentation, done in the sandbox.

Figure 8-2. The "new section" tab on article talk pages lets you start a new section. Click it rather than the "edit this page" link.

Figure 8-3. You see this "You have new messages (last change)" alert after someone edits your user talk page. If you're a registered editor, you need to be logged in to see this alert. You see it only when you open a new page or refresh a page you're viewing.

Figure 8-4. The archive box template creates a neat list of archive pages. You can create archive links without using the archive box template, but the box is a handy way—particularly on article talk pages—to show other editors that older postings have been archived.

Figure 8-5. The toolbox set of links is on the left of the Wikipedia screen. You don't see "E-mail this user" unless you have a confirmed email address in your profile, and, in your preferences, you've turned on "Enable e-mail from other users" (see the section about email preferences).

Figure 8-6. Clicking "E-mail this user" on someone's user page or user talk page opens this "E-mail user" form. When you send email to another editor, it originates from a Wikipedia server, though the email will show your email address as the "from" address when the recipient gets it.

Figure 9-1. Some WikiProjects, such as the one on beer, may seem worth joining just to have the excuse to pop over to the WikiProject main page to check things out. But WikiProjects aren't chat rooms—they involve serious work on improving articles in a particular area of Wikipedia.

Figure 9-2. WikiProject Space exploration is one of three WikiProjects concerned with the larger topic of Space. To coordinate efforts with two other related WikiProjects, the three have created a common template that summarizes the scope of each.

Figure 9-3. WikiProject Military history is among the largest WikiProjects at Wikipedia. Its review department gives a good indication that it has a large number of active participants.

Figure 9-4. This template for WikiProject Iran includes parameters (which would be visible in edit mode) for quality and importance. Because neither has yet been assessed, they show as "???" in the message box the template creates. Article assessments are important for a number of reasons, including identifying articles that might be included in published DVDs, and measuring Wikipedia's progress.

Figure 9-5. WikiProject Cycling has created two userboxes that participants can pick from, for posting on the user page. But they've also created or collected four userboxes for cycling enthusiasts who aren't participants, perhaps a subtle way of encouraging editors to work on cycling articles, even if they're not formal WikiProject members.

Figure 9-6. The September 2007 newsletter for WikiProject Puerto Rico prominently mentions some editors who have contributed significantly to the WikiProject.

Figure 9-7. Here's the top of the list of collaborations as of mid-October 2007. At the time, about 40 collaborations were considered active.

Figure 11-1. On December 10, 2007, Wikipedia:Requests for adminship (shortcut: WP:RFA) listed 19 open candidacies for adminship. Editors are expected to read the answers given by candidates to questions posed to them, and the opinions of others editors about the candidates, and research the information provided to ascertain whether the candidate seems trustworthy and capable of handling administrator responsibilities.

Figure 11-2. As of late 2007, there was no formal warning template for incivility. Warnings regarding failure to assume good faith only went to level 3, meaning that it's inappropriate to request that an editor be blocked for this problem (blocks require ignoring a level 4 warning). Wikipedia uses a catch-all "personal attacks" label for improper behavior toward other editors, and that can be the basis for blocking editors, whether or not they get level 4 warnings.

Figure 11-3. The greatest number of editors became administrators per week around late 2005, when Wikipedia was much smaller than it is today. The number of active Wikipedia administrators has grown more slowly than Wikipedia as a whole. The graph shows "User Rights" granted, not "Admin Rights" granted, but almost all rights granted are for new admins. [This graph is courtesy of editor Dragons Flight (Robert A. Rohde), based on a log analysis.]

Figure 11-4. At the Editor assistance page, you can post an open request for any editor who wants to assist you, or you can pick an editor from a list (lower down on the page than shown here). In either case, you can get a personal consultation about any editing situation.

Figure 11-5. The Mediation Cabal is an unofficial group of editors who offer informal mediation. The "cabal" aims to help with disputes in a way that minimizes administrative procedures. If you ask for help, you get help, though for best results it helps if all editors involved in a dispute agree to participate.

Figure 11-6. The page Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents is for reporting and discussing incidents on the English Wikipedia that require administrators' intervention. But if you can use a more specialized noticeboard (listed at top, in small print), you should post there, not here. Similarly, if a specialized page exists to report editing abuse, then you should post there, not here.

Figure 11-7. A Request for Comment on user conduct is a cross between a legal case and a public hearing, with evidence, responses, and statements of view from uninvolved editors. Here's the table of contents of an RfC that's been open for about 6 weeks.

Figure 11-8. The Arbitration Committee consists of volunteer editors; the English Wikipedia is essentially a self-governing community. Committee members are appointed by Jimmy Wales, based on the results of annual elections. The fifth annual elections were held in December 2007; roughly a third of the Committee is elected each year, for 3-year terms.

Figure 12-1. The phrase "For factual and other kinds of questions" means that the Help desk is not the place to look for information contained in encyclopedia articles. For a question like, "How long do butterflies live?" use the search box to find the article Butterfly, which probably contains the answer.

Figure 12-2. The top of the Help desk's talk page has instructions to help you get started using the page. The links at right ("Be polite", "Assume good faith", and so on) link to guideline pages. These norms of conduct (see the section about norms of conduct) apply throughout Wikipedia, as well as to editors working the Help desk and posting on the talk page.

Figure 12-3. This "how-to" guide helps you become a better question-answerer. For example, it has templates that you can paste in for common questions: how to create a new article, how to link from an article to another Wikipedia article, how to report vandalism, how to upload an image, and so on.

Figure 12-4. When you click a Reference desk category, you go to a page of instructions for asking questions, plus a list of previous asked (and answered) questions archived by date. Click the question to see volunteers' answers on a discussion page.

Figure 12-5. If you'd like to give accolades to an editor who made tremendous improvements to a number of articles or a huge contribution to a project, check out one of these pages with information on awards.

Figure 12-6. Many WikiProjects set up pages where editors can nominate a project article for review by other editors. All these reviews are open to any editor who wants to help.

Figure 12-7. Requests for Comment regarding articles are divided into major topical areas. However, disputes may be more about applying a particular policy or guideline than a particular subject matter.

Figure 12-8. Requests for Comments for policy and conventions are also split out, but into fewer groups than for articles, probably because Wikipedia has considerably fewer RFCs of this type.

Figure 13-1. When you click "edit this page", Wikipedia tells you if the page exceeds 32 kilobytes (a kilobyte is roughly 1,000 characters). If the size exceeds 64K, you see a link to the guideline on article size. Consider that a strong suggestion to look closely at whether one or more sections can be spun off as separate articles.

Figure 13-2. When you're creating a new page for a daughter article, you first search for the name of new article you intend to create. The search fails, leaving you with a link on the search page that you want to click: "create this page".

Figure 13-3. The critical thing when spinning off a daughter article is to put the {{Main}} template into the section from which the daughter article's content was taken. If you do that, and prepare at least a brief summary, then other editors can easily improve that summary.

Figure 13-4. The "See Also" section from the article Plug-in hybrid. One of the links has a few words of explanation ("a derivative of the Kangoo"), which is optional, and somewhat unusual.

Figure 13-5. The "Further reading" section of the article Ireland. None of the links are to an online source; those go in the "External links" section instead.

Figure 13-6. The external links section of the article History of the Grand Canyon area.

Figure 13-7. The table of contents for the article Battleship: on the left side are the first 15 lines of the TOC before the template {{TOClimit}} was added to the article; on the right is the TOC after the template was added. A 38-line TOC is now 14 lines.

Figure 13-8. Shown here is the entire page for the template {{TOCUSStates}}. This compact TOC, for U.S. states, can be tailored by adding links (which point to sections of the page) both above and below the standard list (links). In this documentation, the words "before" and "after" are inserted as (non-link) placeholders.

Figure 13-9. At the top of this figure is the standard version of the A-to-Z TOC ({{AlphanumericTOC}}). You can tailor most compact tables of contents, including this one, to add or subtract sections. In the middle is a variant with only the 26 letters displayed; and at the bottom is another variant, with editor-specified additional sections.

Figure 13-10. When a line starts with a semicolon (left), the line is bolded and looks like a subsection heading, but it doesn't show up in the table of contents. This technique should be avoided in favor of the template {{TOClimit}}.

Figure 13-11. The standard table of contents for the article Stock car racing appears on the left side of the page, immediately below the lead section. With all the white space on the right, the layout isn't particularly attractive, and the main article text can't begin until after the TOC.

Figure 13-12. Here's how the table of contents for the article Stock car racing looks with a {{TOCleft}} template inserted. Note how the text wraps neatly around the TOC, unlike the previous figure.

Figure 13-13. Inserting {{TOCleft}} in the wikitext of the Stock car racing article wraps text around the right of the TOC as shown in Figure 14-12.

Figure 13-14. This article has the table of contents on the right. The image at the top is on the left instead of the right, since the TOC is on the right. The layout makes efficient use of space—the entire TOC is visible on one screen, yet the reader has the option of simply reading the article and ignoring the TOC.

Figure 14-1. Shown are two ways of including the same information in an article: in list format (top) and narrative format (bottom). In this case, narrative is better. It maintains the article's flow and takes up less space.

Figure 14-2. The wikitext for the bulleted list in Figure 14-1 is very simple—an asterisk at the beginning of each item in the list.

Figure 14-3. Putting pound (#) signs at the beginning of a line of text will number that line. Numbering is rare in articles, but it's handy (and common) on discussion pages. Typos can wreak havoc in wikitext numbered lists. For example, if you put a blank line between items, the numbering starts over.

Figure 14-4. The criteria for evaluating whether an article gets to be a Featured list is at Wikipedia:Featured list criteria (shortcut: WP:WIAFL). You can use the criteria as a checklist to improve a list that interests you. When you think your list is good enough, you can submit it to a review to see if it earns the Featured list designation.

Figure 14-5. The article List of wild mammal species in Florida has been designated as a Featured list. It's an amazing collection of sortable lists, with pictures and well over a hundred footnotes for those interested in more information. The star in the upper-right corner indicates that it's a Wikipedia featured page. The same star appears on Featured Articles and Featured Portals.

Figure 14-6. The article List of economists is a simple bulleted list of wikilinks. It resembles a category page (see Chapter 17, Categorizing Articles) so much that pages like this one have been the subject of fights between proponents of categories (who want to delete lists like this) and those arguing that lists are just as good, if not superior. For more information, see the section about categories versus lists.

Figure 14-7. Here's the beginning of the article List of winners and shortlisted authors of the Booker Prize for Fiction. It's an example of indented bulleted paragraphs within articles.

Figure 14-8. You indent bulleted paragraphs simply by putting two asterisks at the beginning of a line, rather than one. This arrangement looks nicer than colon indenting, but it's more fragile. If you make a mistake and have a blank line just above the double asterisks, then the viewable version of the page shows two bullets at the beginning of the line, not one indented bullet.

Figure 14-9. The article List of finance topics is arranged hierarchically. This scheme is a bit more challenging for editors, but it helps readers comprehend what otherwise might be a long alphabetized list. It also helps readers find related articles that wouldn't be obvious in an alphabetical list.

Figure 14-10. The article List of social networking websites consists primarily of a sortable table, which lets readers reorganize the table to better find what they want. (For more on sorting tables, see the section about sortable tables.)

Figure 14-11. Here's one of three timelines that make up the article Timeline of architectural styles. It uses the <timeline> tag syntax, sometimes called EasyTimeline syntax. Graphical timelines are relatively rare, but you can read about them at Wikipedia:Timeline (shortcut: WP:TIMEL) and Help:EasyTimeline syntax.

Figure 14-12. The article List of places in Alabama: D-H. The box near the top of the article, with text that begins "Places in Alabama", is there because the underlying wikitext includes the template {{List of places in Alabama}}. That template also appears at the top of the other five lists (A-C, I-K, L-N, O-R, and S-Z) that comprise a single list. This navigational template makes it easy for the reader to get to any of these six parts, although they're separate articles.

Figure 14-13. Here's a table (top) and its underlying wikicode (bottom). The wikicode is split into seven chunks by six blank lines, for ease of understanding. You don't usually find blank lines in the wikicode between rows of a table, as is the case here. (These blank lines make no difference in what the reader sees.)

Figure 14-14. On the edit toolbar, if you click the "table" icon, in editing mode, the software generates a basic table for you. It may not be much, but it's a start if you're creating a table from scratch.

Figure 14-15. This table arranges a list of information into three columns. In some sense, this isn't a true table because it doesn't have rows (or, to be exact, it's formatted as if it had only one row), and the information in one column doesn't necessarily line up with information in the other columns. (Notice that the center column has four entries, versus three entries for the left and right columns.) Still, it can be useful for getting a long list to fit into much less space.

Figure 15-1. The standard email settings in the "User profile" tab of your user account's preferences let the Commons contact you when something changes.

Figure 15-2. The two critical components, for copyright purposes, are the source of an image, and the license for that image. When you start the upload process to the Commons, the first page is concerned with the source. Which link you click determines which page you'll see next, a page that either helps you figure out the source or moves you to the question of the license.

Figure 15-3. Here's what you need to fill out in order to upload an image to the Commons. The text in the Summary section is preloaded for you, including your user name.

Figure 15-4. Once you've specified that what you're uploading is your own work, you have a choice of six different licenses. The top three are categorized as "Best practices," the next two as "Better practices (multi-licensing)," and the last one is in the category "Good practices (single license)." When you select one, you'll see more information about it.

Figure 15-5. When you select the public domain license, the page changes to show what the license actually is. If you decide you don't like what you see, you can choose another license. To get further information about the license you've tentatively selected, you can follow the links in the box that states what the license is.

Figure 15-6. When you've selected a file, the "Source filename" field has the full path for that file. The destination filename is automatically given the same name as the source filename, but you can change that.

Figure 15-7. Upload information is complete, with a descriptive filename, and the Summary field filled out. Leave the Permission parameter blank, since you specified a license using the pull-down menu in the Licensing box.

Figure 15-8. After you click "Upload file," you'll go to the image page for the image you've just uploaded. This figure shows the top and bottom of the page; the image is in the middle. The information you entered in step 6 appears on this page.

Figure 15-9. The CommonSense tool searches for possible categories. If the initial search fails to find any (as is the case here), try adding keywords and searching again. The results appear at the bottom of the page.

Figure 15-10. The search results, at the bottom of the CommonSense page, consist of two parts. On the left are categories that can be expanded (for looking at subcategories) by clicking the "[+]" symbol. On the right is some text that's ready to be copied and pasted to the image page.

Figure 15-11. Two categories are being added to the wikitext for the image page: Entrance to the Noilly Pratt cellars and tasting room in Marseillan.jpg. The edit toolbar—the row of icons you can click to add text—is different in the Commons. That's because the toolbar is customizable on a project-by-project basis. So, for example, the toolbar for the Spanish Wikipedia is different too.

Figure 15-12. Wikipedia doesn't like non-free content. It can be used only if it meets every one of the ten criteria in the policy Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria (shortcut: WP:NFCC). Most of all, note number 8, which specifies that the non-free material must contribute significantly to understanding the article.

File:Wikipedia Uploads.png

Figure 15-13. While image uploads have been relatively steady at around 2,500 per day throughout the last half of 2006 and well into 2007, deletions have been all over the place, ranging from 1,000 to 4,000 per day. The wide swings are probably due to occasional concentrated efforts to work off backlogs. [This graph is courtesy of editor Dragons Flight (Robert A. Rohde). It's based on a log analysis he did. Points on the graph are plotted weekly, not daily.]

Figure 16-1. The table of contents of the policy Wikipedia:Naming conventions (shortcut WP:NAME), only partly shown here, gives you a sense of how detailed the policy is, including the related pages such as Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people) (shortcut: WP:NCP). Fortunately, while new articles often get renamed, name changes thereafter are rarely needed.

Figure 16-2. The move log includes moves by administrators (in this case, GTBacchus and Moonriddengirl) and moves by regular editors (Pixelflash). The move shown at the very top is a revert of vandalism.

Figure 16-3. To move a page, begin by clicking on the "move" tab at the top of that page. If you don't see the tab, you're not logged in, or you haven't been a registered user for four days. Or, the page may be protected against being moved (typically because of prior vandalism or because of an edit war concerning the name of the page).

Figure 16-4. Changing the name of an article isn't a trivial matter. If it's your first time, read all the text. You'll find it reinforces what you've learned in this chapter.

Figure 16-5. Before you click "Move page," double-check the name—is it absolutely correct? Also remember that the text in the Reason box is essentially the edit summary, and will show up in logs, the page history, and other places, so a good explanation is important.

Figure 16-6. You've successfully moved the page. But there's still one more step—to check for double redirects. Double redirects often occur when a page has been moved (renamed) several times. If there are double redirects, you must fix them.

Figure 16-7. On this page listing all the links to the article Sam Wyly, there are no double redirects. There's one redirect page listed—that's a single redirect, which is absolutely okay. (Single redirects are indented once; double redirects are indented twice, as discussed in the section about double redirects. If you're not familiar at all with redirects, see the section about redirects.)

Figure 16-8. Top: When an article is renamed, as was Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, links to that article (like the link in the article Sand Hill Road) do not change. They continue to point to the old name. Middle: When you click the old link in the Sand Hill Road article, the software goes to the article's old name, where it finds a redirect. Instead of displaying this redirect page, the software follows the redirect. Bottom: The redirect points to the new name of the article, so that's what you'll see. Renaming the article didn't break links to it. Instead, the rename just added one brief, intermediate stop at the redirect page. (The "Redirected from" in small print tells you that the original link is incorrect, though it's good enough to get you to where you wanted to go.)

Figure 16-9. Microsoft Word can be a good source if you're looking for a commonly misspelled word for which to create a redirect. You'll find a list of word pairs in the AutoCorrect dialog box. In Word 2007 for Windows, choose Office button→Word options→Proofing. In earlier versions of Word, choose Tools→AutoCorrect.

Figure 16-10. When you're doing a search for a word or a phrase and misspell it, consider that an opportunity to create a redirect for others who might do the same in the future. When you type the misspelling "lisence" instead of "license," you get a search page rather than the article you're looking for.

Figure 16-11. 1. In the edit box, copy and paste the correct name of the article you want to redirect to. Pasting the title, rather than typing it yourself, helps prevent typos. 2: Select the text you just pasted so you can apply the Redirect format to it. 3: Clicking the "#R" icon on the edit bar adds the redirect formatting. 4: Voila—the text for the redirect is done. All you have to do is save your work.

Figure 16-12. The preview screen for a new redirect, before you save it, shows what the redirect link will look like. Make sure the link is blue; if it's red, your redirect is to a non-existent page, which is what you don't want. Oddly enough, a preview of a redirect doesn't look the same as a saved redirect. Compare this figure to Figure 17-13.

Figure 16-13. When you've saved your new redirect, you'll see a page with the misspelled title and a link to the correct page.

Figure 16-14. The page Pages that link to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers includes, because of a recent renaming, a number of double redirects. These are the double-indented links, like Brook Byers and List of Stanford University people. Clicking a link in one of those two pages takes you to the redirect page Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers instead of the correct article. (Note the commas in the title; this redirect page has the old title from before the rename.)

Figure 16-15. Top: If you type Jerry Lewis in the search box and click Go, you arrive at this article. If you had another Jerry Lewis in mind, simply click the Jerry Lewis (disambiguation) link near the top of the page. Bottom: The Jerry Lewis (disambiguation) page lists four articles that editors think readers might want when they search for the name Jerry Lewis.

Figure 16-16. This disambiguation page doesn't have the parenthetical (disambiguation) in the title. None of the three Donald Davidsons are famous enough to be the overwhelming choice of someone searching for that name, so readers are sent to the disambiguation page to sort out the matter. Since the disambiguation page now owns the name, the three articles on individuals need to be named something else, such as Donald Davidson (poet).

Figure 16-17. Top: Here are the sample opening sentences you might find in different disambiguation pages, using the three standard phrases prescribed at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages) (shortcut: MOS:DAB). Bottom: If the disambiguation page has (disambiguation) in the title, it starts by defining the primary term first. The link school goes to the most popular article for that term.

Figure 16-18. The guideline MOS:DAB includes three examples of acceptable piped links that aren't the first words in an entry.

Figure 16-19. Every disambiguation page needs one—and only one—of these templates at the bottom (that is, at the very end of the page's wikitext). You'll find the full list at the page Category:Disambiguation and redirection templates (shortcut: CAT:DRT).

Figure 16-20. Links to disambiguation pages come in two flavors—links at the top of pages (as discussed in the next section), which are okay, and links in the body of articles, which are not okay. The pages listed in this figure are all of the second type: The wikilinks of the word "lift" in articles like Jet airliner and Kevin Haskins shouldn't link to a disambiguation page, they should link to a page like "Elevator" or "Lift (force)." These wikilinks need to be changed.

Figure 16-21. Wikipedia has two articles about Ally McBeal, and it's easy to see that a reader might want one rather than the other (or even both). When there are exactly two articles that can be confused with each other, no disambiguation page is needed—just a link at the top of each page to the other page. These two pages use the {{For}} template for disambiguation. To be specific, in the second article, the wikitext looks like this: {{For|the television show|Ally McBeal}}.

Figure 16-22. At one point, if a reader searched for dioxin, they arrived at this article. The too-long hatnote on this page probably befuddled many readers looking for the Wikipedia article Polychlorinated dibenzodioxins, which is about the environmental pollutants known as dioxins. The reader had to get past 37 words, including one wikilink, before finding the desired link.

Figure 16-23. The {{Distinguish}} template creates text that begins "Not to be confused with." Here, the template has two parameters, "Guyana" and "French Guinea," which become links within the note at the top of the article (top). Also shown here (bottom) is the template {{Redirect}}, which explains to a reader who typed "GUF" into the search box why they are looking at this particular article, and not another article, and the page to go to if not where desired.

Figure 17-1. When you go to the page Category:American economists, you see links to −1 articles categorized as being about American economists, plus three subcategories. Every category page looks like this one, with four parts: some introductory text, possibly with a link or two; a list of subcategories; a list of any pages that belong directly to the category rather than one of its subcategories; and finally the categories to which the category page belongs.

Figure 17-2. These templates are in the article Hulihee Palace. They're visible only when you click "edit this page," and then scroll to the bottom of the page.

Figure 17-3. The category People includes a number of subcategories (not shown) plus six individual articles. Two of these are not like the other four—Altun Bishik and Kailash Singh Parihar. Both should be in a subcategory.

Figure 17-4. The great thing about the CategoryTree Special page is that you don't have to open a bunch of category pages to find good subcategories. You can simply click one here, find (or not find) something you want to add to an article, and then try another category, drilling down as needed—all in one place.

Figure 17-5. The highest category in Wikipedia—the only category that doesn't belong to a higher category—is Category:Contents. It has thirteen subcategories.

Figure 17-6. The category page Algerian media has five parent categories—one is a cleanup category; the other four are higher level topical categories. Put differently, Algerian media is a subcategory of five categories, four of them topical and one a cleanup category.

Figure 17-7. On the category page Algerian media, the line with [[Category:Algeria|Media]] needs to be deleted, since [[Category:Algerian culture]] already leads to that. While you're looking at the wikitext, note that three of the four categories listed have a sort order, which affects where this category page is displayed on the higher level category page (under "A" or "M"). Finally, notice the two interlanguage links—German and French—which create links in the left margin to similar category pages at the German and French versions of Wikipedia.

Figure 17-8. The page Wikipedia:Categories for discussion is for discussion of renaming, merging, or deleting of all types of categories except for two, discussed elsewhere: user categories (as in Category:Wikipedians who dislike excessive categorization) and stubs (categories for very short articles). There's a separate page for discussion of user categories probably because they can be particularly controversial, or trivial. The separate page for discussion of stub categories is because this is a very specialized area.

Figure 17-9. Want to mention a category within a comment you're making on a discussion page? If so, either add a colon just before the word Category, or use the {{Cl}} template. Both choices display the category name where you typed it, within your comment, and neither will put the discussion page they're on into a category.

Figure 17-10. If this list of economists looks familiar, it's because it's also Figure 14-6 (see the section about formatting list articles), and because Figure 17-1 earlier in this chapter, showing the category page Economists, has almost the same set of links in it. Lists and categories can overlap considerably, but each has strengths and weaknesses.

Figure 17-11. Shown is the navigation template titled Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics: List of Laureates. This navigation template appears in an article when the template {{Nobel Prize in Economics}} is added to the article's wikitext. Navigation templates are appropriate for relatively short lists (the one shown has about sixty links). Navigation templates are also appropriate only when membership in a list is very clear. Prominent British politicians, for example, would not be good for a navigation template, since "prominence" is on a continuum. Even if everyone agreed on relative prominence, the cut-off point for being in or not in the navigation template is still arbitrary.

Figure 18-1. Here's the top of the infobox for the Andrew Browne Cunningham article, which was the Featured Article on the Main Page on November 28, 2007. The Infobox Military Person template created this infobox and others like it. Infoboxes normally appear in the upper-right corner of an article. The right-alignment is built into the template, so you don't need to specify it.

Figure 19-2. You can nominate an article for speedy deletion using criteria from either the general ("G") list or the article ("A") list. There are also separate lists, not shown, for redirects, images, media, categories, user pages, templates, and portals.

Figure 19-4. The CSD template goes at the top of the article, above everything else. In this case, because the template allows for a reason, it's okay to type a lengthy one.

Figure 19-5. The message box that appears at the top of an article after you place a CSD template includes the reason for the proposed speedy deletion; information for other editors who might disagree with the nomination, including the editor who created the page; information for the administrator; and a suggestion to place a notice on the user talk page of the editor who created the article.

Figure 19-6. Place the {{Prod}} template at the top of the article, above everything else. It's important to explain what you did to come to the conclusion that an article isn't salvageable, for both the reviewing administrator (in 7 days) and other editors.

Figure 19-7. The article message box that appears at the top of an article after you place a prod template includes the reason for the proposed deletion; information for other editors who might disagree with the nomination, including the editor who created the page; the date and time the message was posted, and when the 7 days will be up; a comment for the editor who created the article; and a suggestion to place a notice on the user talk page of the article's creator and major contributors.

Figure 19-8. Don't bring articles to AfD if you can handle them another way. That's the clear message at the top of the page Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. For example, first make sure you can't use the speedy deletion or proposed deletion processes, which make less work for administrators.

Figure 19-9. After you've put the {{subst:afd1}} template at the top of the article, you see a large message box. The link to the discussion page is red, because you have yet to create it. The notice contains a link for the next step, in small print: "Preloaded debate".

Figure 19-10. The instructions on this page, five steps in all (only part of the first step is shown) get you through the rest of the AfD nomination process.

Figure 19-11. The text you add as a reason, in the {{subst:afd1}} template, shows up as a sort of "opening statement for the prosecution" on the AfD discussion page. So things like logic and spelling do count.

Figure 19-12. In the edit box of the deletion log page, scroll down to where you want to add an entry for your deletion, and then paste it. Your entry in the edit box looks different from the others, but it won't after you save the edit.

Figure 19-13. Other editors will comment on this discussion page as to whether they agree or disagree with deleting the nominated article. It includes your reason, your signature, and the category you chose for the article.

Figure 20-1. The preferences page has 11 tabs. When you click the My Preferences page at the upper right of any Wikipedia page, it opens to the first tab, "User profile".

Figure 20-2. This page is the same as in Figure 21-1, but with the French language chosen. You're still at the English Wikipedia, so the titles and content of regular pages are still in English, as are URLs. But all the top and side links are in your chosen language, as are all special pages, and the standard text at the bottom of all pages.

Figure 20-3. To set up or change your email address at Wikipedia, enter the email address (new or changed) at the top of this tab. Unless you want email only in case you forget your password, turn on the "Enable e-mail from other users" box, and then click Save.

Figure 20-4. The "Log in" screen has an "E-mail new password" button. When you click this button, Wikipedia sends you an email with a new, temporary password. You can then change the temporary password to something more memorable.

Figure 20-5. Here's the top of the Main Page in the Nostalgia skin rather than Monobook. The Wikipedia logo appears on the right side of the page rather than the left, and the six standard links (username, "my talk", My Preferences, and so on), normally in the upper-right corner, aren't visible at all. You find them, along with a multitude of other links, in a drop-down menu.

Figure 20-6. In the Skin tab of your My Preferences page, you'll see Vector plus your seven other choices: Chick, Classic, Cologne Blue, Monobook, MySkin, Nostalgia, and Simple. You can click on a link to see a preview.

Figure 20-7. In the Classic and Cologne Blue skins, you can use the Quickbar tab to customize the links that usually appear on the left—you can put them on the right, have them always visible when you scroll down a long page, or hide them altogether. (The screenshot here is with the Classic skin; the Cologne Blue skin offers the same five options.)

Figure 20-8. On the "Date and time" tab, you can change the time zone that Wikipedia uses when displaying the date and time of a particular edit to your local time, rather than Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Figure 20-9. These three editing options start out turned on, and most editors leave them that way. For example, it's very handy to be able to click a link to edit an individual article section (the section about xx). So are the editing toolbar, and the preview feature.

Figure 20-10. If you set up your preferences to use an external editor instead of Wikipedia's edit box, then the first time you start to edit a file, Wikipedia sends the file to your browser. The browser opens a dialog box for you to specify actual editing program. The dialog box varies by browser—this picture shows Internet Explorer 7.

Figure 20-11. The Search tab lets you tailor the results from Wikipedia's internal search engine. The fourth of these settings, not completely shown, is a listing of all namespaces that you want to include in all your searches.

Figure 20-12. On the top is a search on the word "Crosspool," with the "Context per line" set to 50 (which means 50 characters). (Only the first three results are shown). On the bottom is the same search, with this option set to 200. (Again, only the top three results are shown.)

Figure 20-13. The Miscellaneous tab has a varied assortment of nine options, three of which are turned on initially.

Figure 20-14. At this writing, the Gadgets tab only includes four JavaScript user scripts. But its potential is limited only by editors' time and imagination.

Figure 21-1. All common.js pages have the same warning at the top – don't copy a script just because someone else leaves a note on your user talk page about what a neato-cool tool they've created. (Leaving uninvited, non-personal postings on user talk pages is considered spam, and fortunately it doesn't happen very often.) If you use JavaScript code someone else wrote, make sure it's someone you trust.

Figure 21-2. The script at the page Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/User tabs has three full lines of comment (two at the top, one at the bottom); these have two slashes at the beginning. The actual code that will be executed is the middle fifteen lines. The blanks spaces at the beginning of any line are optional—they're there to make the script easier for humans to read. Computers don't care one way or another. (The blank spaces at the beginnings of lines are why the text goes off-screen on the right; that's normal for Wikipedia wikitext.)

Figure 21-3. In editing mode, common.js pages look different from regular pages. There's no edit toolbar, because there's no need for buttons for inserting a signature, or a table, or other text. There's also a message about using the "Show preview" button to test the added JavaScript before saving the page.

Figure 21-4. The nice thing about previewing a change to your personal JavaScript page is that the JavaScript is implemented immediately. If it should change the common.js page, you see that. In this case, the new tabs will only show on a user page, so the preview doesn't tell you how you're doing.

Figure 21-5. Now a number of additional tabs appear whenever you go to a user or user talk page. If you decide you don't want one or more of these, all you need to do is comment out the corresponding line on your common.js page (put two slashes at the very beginning), and that tab won't appear any more.

Figure 21-6. When you create a page whose name ends with .js or .css, Wikipedia checks to see if that's the name of a skin (see the section about xx). If not, it gives you this warning. In this case, you can ignore the warning. But if you typed (for example) COMMON.js rather than common.js, earlier in the chapter, the misspelling would be critical and the warning would be relevant.

Figure 21-7. The page User:Ais523/monobook.js has a number of JavaScript functions (user scripts) added via the importScript command, rather than pasting all the JavaScript into the page. One advantage of importScript is that you get a neat list of all your user scripts, rather than a mass of code. Separating functions by putting them on separate pages also makes it easier to share scripts with other editors.

The standard links at the bottom of each Wikipedia page include ones to the license (GNDL) under which content can be legally copied, to the home page of the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, and to Wikipedia's privacy policy and disclaimers.

The edit toolbar is always just above the edit box, near the top of the page. If you're not sure what an icon does, just move your mouse pointer to one of the icons and see what the tooltip says.

Below the edit box is a box to enter the edit summary for the change you're making to the page you're editing, plus two checkboxes, three buttons, and three links.

There are hundreds of symbols and other text below the edit summary box, which appear in the edit box when you click them. These include wiki markup, symbols, special characters, the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols, and so on.

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

Featured articles (articles with the highest assessed quality in Wikipedia) have a star in the upper right corner. You can click the star to learn how articles get their featured status (the section about xx).

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

Wikipedia makes it easy to pick another search engine. Here Google's being selected, but other search engines are available. Take advantage of this option if your initial Go attempt doesn't succeed.

The same search for "Institute for Institutional Research" as in Figure C-1, but this time searching with Google. The search results are completely different.

Wikipedia's Main Page is accessible via a single click from any other page in Wikipedia. At the top are three links to starting points within Wikipedia that provide different top-down views.

Here's the top-level list of categories. It's the starting point for drilling down to find all articles in any particular subcategory.

The category Geography had 28 subcategories when this screenshot was taken. In the "B" section, you see an expansion of one of those subcategories, Branches of Geography, displaying all the sub-subcategories until there are no further ones, along one line of that subcategory.

Portals are probably one of the least known ways to find articles on Wikipedia. If you're particularly interested in a topic, one of the 500 or so existing portals can be a great page to bookmark.

The A-Z index (also called the Quick Index) lets you go directly to a list of articles beginning with any two characters: El or Na or Tr or whatever.

If you pick a two-letter starting pair, in Figure 22-1, and click that link, here's what you see. The links in regular text are articles; the links in italics (the majority) are redirects, which take you to an article with a different name. Redirects are used for misspellings, for less common variants of a particular name, and for subjects that don't (yet) have their own articles, and are related to an existing article to which the reader will be directed.

The article on major league baseball player Lee Smith has, at the bottom, a larger than usual number of categories. In this case, it's mostly because Smith was a member of eight different teams.

When you search for articles by category using CatScan, you can choose how many levels of sub- and sub-sub-categories you want to search. This search shows a depth of 3, but since there were no subcategories, the results are only for a depth of 1. But if you were using the category Architects, you'd see results in subcategories such as American Architects (level 2) and Architects from Cincinnati(level 3).

This Google search restricts results to category pages, since "site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category" was typed into the search box. It furthermore requires that the title of the category page contain the word "spy"; note "intitle:spy" at the beginning of the search term. There are 16 categories with "spy" in the title. Searching for "spy" instead of "intitle:spy" would turn up category pages with "spy" anywhere on the page (of which there are about 500).

On the left side of any Wikipedia page, the navigation box has a "Random article" link. Click again to go elsewhere. Click it 20 or 30 times, and you have a pretty good idea of Wikipedia's wide range of articles.

The toolbox on the left of the screen includes a "What links here" link. Click it to see all the Wikipedia pages that link into the page you're on.

The file Image:Fujisan from Motohakone.jpg is used in the article Tokyo. Clicking the thumbnail image in the article shows you this larger image, though not necessarily a full-sized image. Click "full resolution" to see the full-sized version. Right-click the full-sized image to save it to your computer. You can also save the image as your new desktop background image.

The Commons' Main Page offers a number of ways to view its content—by starting with featured pictures, by drilling down through categories, or by choosing a topic area. If you choose a topic, you'll arrive at a category page similar to Figure B-5 with one interesting difference—the page has a tab labeled CatScan. Yep—that's the category intersection tool mentioned on the section about xx, and it works for the Commons as well as Wikipedia.

Here's what the page should look like after step 3: It's ready for you to enter a brief summary ("Possible vandalism" or "Birthplace seems wrong" or whatever) and then, below the summary line, to type in your full comment or question.

Here's what the input screen shown in Figure C-14 looks like after someone has entered a section heading (summary) and a comment. It's now ready to be saved.

From the Help:Contents page, you can go in one of four directions if you're looking for useful information about editing. From the top bar, you can go to two somewhat similar pages: Wikipedia:Tutorialand Wikipedia:FAQ. Secondly, you can use the search box. A third option is to select one of the subpages, each of which contain a list of specific pages for a particular area. The fourth option is to go directly to an individual page; the top bar includes two particularly detailed individual pages, Wikipedia:Cheatsheet (editing markup) and Wikipedia:Glossary.

Wikipedia has a number of compilations of frequently asked questions. If you're looking for information in one of these areas, you can probably get it, and also learn other useful things.

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

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

The beginning of section "A" of the Editor's Index to Wikipedia. In addition to the links to specific pages, the index also has links from one major topic (like Administration) to others (in this case, Enforcement). All major topics also have shortcuts (not shown here) for easy linking from other pages.

The archived messages of the WikiEN-l newsletter offer a good preview, before subscribing, as well as a way to look back through old messages to see what topics were hotly discussed.