The main page is packed so densely with content that it can be overwhelming (Figure 3.2, “The main page of Wikipedia, from September 12, 2007”). At the top, a header welcomes you to Wikipedia and offers an automated count of articles—2,428,969 at the time of writing. Clicking this number reveals more statistics about Wikipedia. To the right of the header, you'll find links to broad scholastic topics such as History and Mathematics. (See "Portals into the Encyclopedia," next.)

Below the header, you'll find links to introductory information. Overview and Questions will give you basic information about the site; Editing takes you to the Wikipedia Tutorial, a good walk-through of basic editing techniques. Help links to the extensive help pages (this link is the same as the Help link on the left-hand sidebar).

If you have a broad subject area in mind, notice the group of links on the upper right:

Figure 3.2. The main page of Wikipedia, from September 12, 2007

Follow any of these links and you will come to a portal. Just as Wikipedia's front page is a gateway to the encyclopedia as a whole, a portal is a gateway to a particular topic, offering selected articles, relevant links, and ways of finding editors with an interest in that particular subject.

Portals are accessible and user-friendly ways to explore Wikipedia's coverage of a topic. A portal is also a project, attracting swarms of wiki editors who help beautify and maintain the articles in that subject area, not to mention the portal page itself. (The articles in the portal are hand-selected and are usually accurate and interesting.) Most portals feature an introduction to the topic; selected articles, biographies, and pictures; and links to any relevant WikiProjects and editor collaborations.

Some portal topics are broad, others quite specific. For instance, there is a portal for science, [[Portal:Science]], and one for the sport of cricket, [[Portal:Cricket]] (Figure 3.3, “Example of a featured portal: The Cricket Portal”).

Figure 3.3. Example of a featured portal: The Cricket Portal

Below the main page's header, you'll find five sections that are updated every day: Today's featured article, In the news, Did you know … , On this day … , and Today's featured picture. Each provides a taste of the wide variety of content available on Wikipedia.

The three remaining items of daily content are less reverent.

In some ways, the main page is like any other page on Wikipedia: Delve in and you will find people at work. Like the rest of the site, the main page is maintained by a dedicated group of volunteer editors, who update each section on a regular schedule.

But even when viewed in comparison to other Wikipedia pages, the main page is very unusual:

If you want to make suggestions about the main page and to learn more about how it is edited and maintained, see the corresponding discussion page [[Talk:Main Page]]. Each section of the main page is linked from the discussion page, and it is here that you can suggest new daily content.

Scrolling down the main page, you'll find links to other helpful sections, including links to help and community areas of Wikipedia and to the sister projects. After those, you'll find links to Wikipedias in other languages; these links are only a selection from the total (now over 200) languages available.

At the very bottom of the page, the page footer, which is reproduced on every page, has a collection of disclaimers and links to copyright information. The general disclaimer in particular is worth reading. It states that Wikipedia makes no guarantee of validity—that is, the site doesn't promise to be correct, factual, or truthful in any way. Use Wikipedia for quick reference only. Double-check any important information—especially legal or medical advice, but information just for homework too. By accepting the disclaimer, you accept responsibility for any possible use you might make of information derived from Wikipedia.

Although this disclaimer sounds dire, it is in fact not so unusual. Many general encyclopedias disclaim all responsibility; Wikipedia simply makes a stronger point of it than most. Using common sense is key, and Wikipedia is great if you can accept its limitations: that the site is a work in progress and individual article quality may vary (more on evaluating individual articles in the next chapter).

In the footer, you'll also find a link to the GNU Free Documentation License, or GFDL, which was described in Chapter 2, The World Gets a Free Encyclopedia; this license is the one under which all Wikipedia content is released. Understanding the GFDL, or at least its most basic implications, matters for a contributor because anything you contribute (from copyedits to whole articles) will be placed under this license. As a reader, you only need to know that you can reuse content if you credit the source in a particular way. [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]], also linked to in the footer, will tell you more about the rights you retain under the GFDL and the copyright status of Wikipedia.

The privacy policy explains your privacy on Wikipedia and what information is collected about you (generally, a session cookie). Personal information about contributors is not collected or sold. However, newcomers to the site frequently misunderstand two key points. First, Wikipedia keeps a permanent record of everything transacted on the site: Every comment and edit is kept forever. Second, if you edit without being logged in, you are disclosing your IP address publicly and others may be able to trace it. Editing without being logged in is "anonymous" editing only in the sense that your name is not attached. To be more private, you should register an account. Because of Wikipedia's great prominence, you should be in no hurry to disclose any personal details on the site. Using your real name on Wikipedia is fine (the authors of this book do), but you should know the implications; the pros and cons are discussed in Chapter 11, Becoming a Wikipedian.

Finally, the footer contains a link to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia. The footer also typically shows a date and timestamp telling when the page you are viewing was last edited.

Navigation offers four links to major directory pages and one to a randomly chosen article:

The links in this section help you find out more about Wikipedia or interact with the site as an editor:

Sandwiched in the middle of the sidebar's Interaction section is a link to one of the most important pages on Wikipedia. Recent Changes is a continuously updated list of every single edit made to Wikipedia, beginning with the most recent (see Figure 3.5, “The Recent Changes display”).

This list of edits uses the same format as the editing histories of individual articles (see Chapter 4, Understanding and Evaluating an Article): Each new edit occupies a single line.

Exploring the Recent Changes page can give you a feel for what is happening on Wikipedia at any particular moment. Experienced editors might even get a sense of the site's general mood. But using the Recent Changes page this way is a little like trying to predict a presidential election by looking at a satellite photo of the United States. Hundreds of edits happen each minute, so any given glance at this page offers only the tiniest window into Wikipedia's broader workings.

The idea of Recent Changes, however, is a key part of Wikipedia's philosophy of transparent collaboration: Anyone can see any change that has been made to the site. All work in Wikipedia is open; there are no "hidden parts." Every edit made will show up on the Recent Changes page, even if it flashes by in a second.

In practice, the Recent Changes page is primarily used for detecting damaging edits (such as deliberate inaccuracies, wholesale text deletion, and other vandalism) as soon as they occur. Some editors, acting as volunteer security guards, use automated tools that help them sift through recent changes more efficiently in order to find and fix these edits (see Chapter 7, Cleanup, Projects, and Processes). At the top of the page, above the main listing of changes, you'll find two sets of links. The first set (Projects, Utilities, About Us, Requests, and Challenges) are community utilities and help pages that are discussed separately throughout this book.

Figure 3.5. The Recent Changes display

The second set—beginning with Below are the last 50 changes—control how recent changes are displayed. You can change the number of edits listed, hide edits made by anonymous contributors, and so on. By default, minor edits are displayed, though automated edits by bots are not.

You can also watch for entirely new pages as they are created; see [[Special:Newpages]].

Returning to the sidebar, right in the middle you'll find the search box. This is where you enter terms for searching the English-language Wikipedia. Click the Go button to find an article with the exact title you entered; click the Search button to search for any occurrences of the words within the full text of all articles. See "Searching Wikipedia" on Section 1, “Searching Wikipedia”.

The Toolbox section of the sidebar (see Figure 3.6, “Close-up of the Toolbox section from the sidebar”) contains several utilities that give you more information about the page you're viewing, allowing you to fit the page into a broader context or letting you see the page in other formats.

Figure 3.6. Close-up of the Toolbox section from the sidebar

What Links Here lists all the Wikipedia pages that link to the page you're viewing. (For example, [[Central Intelligence Agency]] and [[Acoustic Kitty (album)]] both link to [[Acoustic Kitty]].) You'll come to value this tool if you research less mainstream areas (see Chapter 4, Understanding and Evaluating an Article).

Related Changes lists every recent edit to any page that links to the page you're viewing. Use this link to track activity in a particular topic area or to check for vandalism occurring across related articles.

Printable Version is a version of the page you are viewing formatted for printing; for example, some wiki formatting is removed, external URLs are spelled out, the sidebar is removed, and the font is different. If your web browser was made within the last couple of years, you'll never need to use this link: Your browser will send this printable version to your printer even if you click Print while viewing the standard page.

Because Wikipedia articles change unpredictably, linking to them can be problematic; someone might follow your link, only to discover a version of the article different from the one you saw. (The problem is especially acute on high-traffic pages that might be edited every few minutes.) When you click Permanent Link, you are taken to a time-stamped snapshot of the article as it currently appears. The text at this URL will never change, so you can link to it or cite it with confidence. (You can also link to any previous version of the article from the page history; every version of every page has a unique ID number.)

Cite This Page provides a handy, appropriate bibliographic citation (with a permanent link) for the article you're viewing, which can then be easily cut and pasted into a list of citations. You can generate citations in various bibliographic styles, including MLA style, APA style, BibTex, and so on.

If you're viewing a user page rather than an article or project page, you'll see two additional links: User Contributions, and, if the editor has enabled email contact, Email This User. User Contributions takes you to a list of all the edits made by that user (or that IP address). Email This User leads to a form where you can send an email to the editor without his or her email address being revealed.

Two last links are for more advanced use. Before images can be displayed on Wikipedia, they must be uploaded to the site. Upload File takes you to a form for adding images and other files to Wikipedia. (See Chapter 9, Images, Templates, and Special Characters for a full description.)

Finally, the Special Pages link accesses a list of pages in the Special namespace. Unlike most pages on Wikipedia, these pages are not editable; instead, they are generated automatically each time you visit them. Some, such as My Preferences and My Watchlist, are customized for you and are only valid if you're logged in. (You can locate these two pages more easily, however; they are also available in the top right-hand corner of the page if you're logged in.) Most special pages contain utilities for advanced users and will be discussed throughout this book by topic.

The last section of the sidebar, if it exists, contains links to versions of the article you're currently viewing in other language Wikipedias. For instance, while viewing the English article [[Astronaut]], if you click the Español link in the Languages section, you'll go to the Spanish-language Wikipedia article [[Astronauta]]. Language links should be alphabetized by the name of the language (Figure 3.7, “The Languages section for the main page: Each of these links takes you to the main page of another language's Wikipedia.”).

Figure 3.7. The Languages section for the main page: Each of these links takes you to the main page of another language's Wikipedia.

An article written by speakers of another language often differs in focus and perspective. But even if you're a monoglot, browsing articles in other languages can be a good way to find images.

These links are sometimes called interwiki links (see Chapter 15, 200 Languages and Counting for a more thorough discussion). The language links that appear depend on which Wikipedias contain an article about the topic in question. Even if a matching article exists in another language, an editor must first add an interwiki link to it before it will appear in the languages list.