No book, not even the one you’re holding, can tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about Wikipedia, especially since Wikipedia is a work in progress, always changing and growing in the hands of a changing and growing community of editors. Being a Wikipedia editor is like being an eternal student, acquiring as well as transmitting new knowledge all the time.
Think of this appendix as a campus map. It shows you the myriad places you can go, both inside and outside Wikipedia, to learn what you need to know when you’re ready. It focuses on three main areas of learning:
Finding exactly the right information. Wikipedia has many hundreds of pages of detailed policies, guidelines, technical advice, and essays, not to mention specialized pages that simply list other pages. You’re more likely to find what you’re looking for, among all these instructional pages, if you choose one of several good starting points.
Getting personalized help. An unspoken assumption about editing in Wikipedia, as you may have noticed, is that you’re supposed to figure out things mostly by yourself. Still, you can get personal help, if you know where and how to ask.
Understanding Wikipedia as a community. You may be curious about what’s going on in the Wikipedia community. This appendix shows you how to get the news (and the gossip) about Wikipedia, and even how to meet other Wikipedians face-to-face if you so desire.
Wikipedia has help pages, FAQs, and other kinds pages offering information about editing and using Wikipedia. If you had to choose one place to go to first in your quest to find specifics about editing Wikipedia, a good candidate would be Help:Contents (shortcut: WP:HELP). It does a nice job of organizing information you might need into a dozen subtopics (most are shown in Figure C-1), plus links to a lot of other useful pages.
Figure C-1. 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:Tutorial and 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.
The Help:Contents page contains two separate links to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page. If you click either link, then you go to a page that lists available FAQs (Figure C-2).
