Meta:For Wikipedians

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
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This page explains how Meta-Wiki differs from Wikipedia. It is intended for Wikipedians, especially those new to Meta and Wikipedia's sister projects. A quick guide to Meta-Wiki for users more familiar with our big sister project Wikipedia.

Welcome to Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia project coordination wiki.

Meta-Wiki: it's not Wikipedia's Project namespace on steroids.

As a Wikipedian, you understand what a wiki is, how it works and how to edit; this page focuses on the important differences between Wikipedia and Meta-Wiki, to help you get acquainted with how things work here. Meta is not a place to write articles; this project involves coordinating projects, events, and other collaboration.

Key differences between Wikipedia and Meta[edit]

Summary
Project Wikipedia Meta-Wiki
Language One language per subdomain (en.wikipedia.org in English) Multilingual, but with English as the lingua franca, used in most discussions and policies
Criteria for inclusion Verifiability, Reliable sources, Notability, etc. Relevance to the Wikimedia movement (cf. Meta:Inclusion policy)
Neutrality and essays NPOV in mainspace, essays in Project and User namespaces Essays and opinions about Wikimedia allowed in mainspace, userspace; Meta namespace for matters related directly to Meta-Wiki itself (or "meta-Meta")
Deletion discussion process Articles for Deletion
(Also: CfD, TfD, etc.)
Meta:Requests for deletion
Namespaces Article, Project (WP), Help, Category, etc. Extra: Grants, Schema (JSON), Research, Zero (JSON), Participation, Iberocoop, CNBanner, Translations
See #Namespaces for info on mainspace/Meta namespaces.
Demonym Wikipedians Wikimedians, "Metawikians"

Policies[edit]

Some policies are different here. For example, we don't have SNOW closures of discussions, since most users only visit occasionally.

Multilingual[edit]

On Wikipedia, everyone uses the language of that project. So on the English Wikipedia, all communication happens in English If someone doesn't speak English, they are kindly advised to move to a different project. However, Meta-Wiki is for all languages. So discussions may happen in any language, and so proposals may be discussed, voted on, and decided entirely in a different language.

Namespaces[edit]

On Wikipedia, all content goes in the main namespace, and all discussions about content goes in the talk and project namespaces. Here, the mainspace is for anything about other Wikimedia projects or Wikimedia in general, and the project namespace (beginning with Meta: or WM:) is for anything specifically about Meta-Wiki (like this page).