Guidelines, help & resources

Wikipedia has many help pages, policies, and departments. Here are some of the most general. For a comprehensive list of Wikipedia's departments, see the Wikipedia department directory.

Editing

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Policies and guidelines

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Wikipedia has many established policies, guidelines, conventions, and traditions. This is a very brief sampling of some of the most important; for more information, see the main policies and guidelines page. Policies and guidelines apply to both articles and how to work with fellow editors. For easy access, the shortcuts to the pages are also listed.

Article standards

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Be bold! WP:BOLD
Citing sources WP:CITE • WP:REF
Copyrights WP:C
Editing WP:EP
External links WP:EL
Image use WP:IUP
Include only verifiable information WP:V
Manual of Style WP:MOS • WP:STYLE
Neutral point of view WP:NPOV
What Wikipedia is not WP:NOT

Working with others

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Assume good faith WP:AGF
Avoid instruction creep WP:CREEP
Civility and etiquette WP:CIV • WP:EQ
Consensus WP:CON
IPs are human too WP:HUMAN
Do not bite the newcomers WP:BITE
Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point WP:POINT
No personal attacks WP:NPA • WP:ATTACK
Resolving disputes WP:DR
Vandalism WP:VAND

Resources

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New user information

Introduction · Tutorial · Sandbox · Help · Adoption · What Wikipedia is not · Glossary · Account benefits · Planning school assignments · New contributors' help page · FAQ

Ways to communicate

Contact (overview) · Discussion pages · Mailing lists · IRC chat · Meetups · User pages · Requests for comment · Public watchlists · Regional notice boards · Administrators' noticeboard · Requests for article feedback · Local Embassy

Community support groups and programs

Welcoming committee · Editor assistance · Wiki-adoption · Birthday Committee · Harmonious editing club · Wikipedia awards program · Dept. of Fun · Missing encyclopedic articles

Common procedures

Featured content · Good articles · Requests for feedback · Deleting a page (full policy) · Moving a page (naming policies) · Protecting a page (full policy) · Reverting a page · Administrator nominations (summaries) · Category-based access

How to resolve conflicts

Stay cool! · Be nice to newcomers · Alert others · Dispute resolution · Arbitration policy

Community information

About Wikipedia · Goings-on · About Wikimedia · Wikipedians · Wiki-adoption · Donations · Merchandise · Administrators · Babel · Culture · Games · Humor · Mottoes

Here is a list of the main community pages of Wikipedia's sister projects.
All of these projects are multilingual and open-content.
Meta-Wiki – Coordination of all Wikimedia projects.
Wiktionary – A collaborative multilingual dictionary.
Wikinews – News stories written by readers.
Wikibooks – A collection of collaborative non-fiction books.
Wikiquote – A compendium of referenced quotations.
Wikisource – A repository for free source texts.
Wikispecies – A directory of species.
Wikiversity – Where teachers learn, and learners teach.
Wikivoyage – A world-wide travel guide.
Wikidata – A free knowledge base that can be read and
edited by humans and machines alike.
Commons – Repository for free images and other media files.

Tip of the day

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Same titles, different meanings

To distinguish between pages that would otherwise have the exact same title, disambiguation is needed. Unless one meaning clearly dominates, the article should be replaced with a disambiguation page, e.g. Pan, which links to the different meanings with a qualifier in parentheses, e.g. Pan (mythology) vs. Pan (moon), or using a more specific natural name, e.g. cooking pan. If there is one dominant meaning, (cat), add a link to a disambiguation page‍—‌cat (disambiguation)‍—‌or to the secondary meaning if there is only one, on top of the article.

To add this auto-updating template to your user page, use {{tip of the day with h3 heading}}