To understand what Wikipedia is, you may find it very helpful to understand what Wikipedia is not. Wikipedia’s goal is not, as some people think, to become the repository of all knowledge. It has always defined itself as an encyclopedia—a reference work with articles on all types of subjects, but not as a final destination, and not as something that encompasses every detail in the world. (The U.S. Library of Congress has roughly 30 million books in its collection, not to mention tens of millions of other items, by comparison to about two million articles in Wikipedia). Still, there’s much confusion about Wikipedia’s scope.
Wikipedia has a well-known policy (to experienced editors, at least) stating what kinds of information belong in the encyclopedia. The sister projects that the Wikimedia Foundation supports, such as Wiktionary, fulfill some of the roles that Wikipedia does not.
The Wikimedia Foundation has seven projects that are parallel to Wikipedia, plus a project called the Commons, where pictures and other freely-usable media are stored for use by all projects in all languages (Figure B-1).
Figure B-1. The Wikimedia Foundation has eight parallel projects, the oldest of which is Wikipedia, plus the Commons, a central repository of pictures and other media.
Several of the projects listed in Figure B-1 overlap (or potentially overlap) with Wikipedia:
Wiktionary is a free, multilingual dictionary with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations. It’s the “lexical companion” to Wikipedia. It’s common at Wikipedia to move (transwiki) articles to Wiktionary because they’re essentially definitions.
Wikinews and Wikipedia clearly overlap. A story in the national news (Hurricane Katrina, for example) is likely to show up on both. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikinews includes articles that are original writing, but the vast majority are sourced. Because of the overlap between the two, Wikinews has struggled to attract editors. Given a choice, most editors have chosen to work with Wikipedia articles, which are more widely viewed.
Wikisource is an archive of “free artistic and intellectual works created throughout history.” Except for annotation and translation, these are essentially historical documents (fiction as well as nonfiction) that are in the public domain or whose copyright has expired.
Wikipedia’s policy, What Wikipedia is Not, is lengthy, so this section just hits the highlights. Aside from the what seem obvious to more experienced editors at Wikipedia (“Wikipedia is not a blog, Web space provider, social networking, or memorial site”, “Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files”) and ones that follow from sister projects (“Wikipedia is not a dictionary”, “Wikipedia is not a textbook”), here are several that readers and contributors frequently misunderstand:
Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought. You won’t find ground-breaking analysis, original reporting, or anything else in Wikipedia that hasn’t been published elsewhere first. (If you do find any of these, it’s a violation of the rules and likely to be removed when other editors discover it.) Thousands of wikis do welcome original research and original writing, but Wikipedia isn’t one of them. (You’ll find hundreds listed at WikiIndex.org, a site not associated with Wikipedia.)
Wikipedia is not a directory. Articles aren’t intended to help you navigate a local bureaucracy, find the nearest Italian restaurant, or otherwise include information that other Web pages do a perfectly fine job of maintaining.
Wikipedia is not a manual or guidebook. Wikipedia articles aren’t intended to offer advice, or to include, tutorials, walk-throughs, instruction manuals, game guides, recipes, or travel or other guides.
There actually are wikis for how-to stuff (wikiHow.com) and for travel (Wikitravel.org), but neither is affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects.
Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. It’s not the place for frequently asked question (FAQ) lists, collections of lyrics, long lists of statistics, routine news coverage, and “matters lacking encyclopedic substance, such as announcements, sports, gossip, and tabloid journalism.”