Most of the technical information we give is also available on Wikipedia's help and project pages, though these pages are not always neatly organized. In writing this book, we have tried to use our own experience to explain (and condense) a selection of the thousands and thousands of available pages of documentation. We spend time on spelling out unwritten customs and pointing out the implications of the most basic policies for a new editor to give a view of Wikipedia and how it actually works.

Although we attempt to express consensus views about how Wikipedia operates, the views represented in this book are solely those of the authors. They are not necessarily shared by other editors (including those quoted) or the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is now enormous, and every editor's experience on the site will be different. What you encounter as you work on Wikipedia may well vary from what we describe. The authors of this book have a combined 11 years' experience working on Wikipedia and over 150,000 edits, but we have still only directly experienced a portion of the site. In this book, we mostly talk about the common ground: general principles that should apply across the project.

Making absolute, definitive statements about Wikipedia is tricky. Even basic policies may be changed—tomorrow's Wikipedia may be different. Adaptability and change are, in fact, hallmarks of the project. All the same, much of the project setup, on its constitutional and policy side, seems to be relatively settled and understood across the editing community; and after seven years of existence, Wikipedia has a certain maturity. We have tried to be as accurate as possible at the moment of publication, but if you want more definite information, always refer to the live pages on the site itself.