User:Niteowlneils/mergesisters

Related sites

Wikipedia is for prose articles about subjects considered encyclopedic (along with some topics that would typically be found in an almanac).

Any article that simply defines a word, or short phrase, as you would find in a typical dictionary, and that can't be expanded into an encyclopedic entry, should be contributed to Wikipedia's sister project Wiktionary.

Original source text, such as from a public domain book that you want to post to make it more accessible, should be contributed to Wikipedia's other sister project Wikisource.

For a list of all related projects, see the complete list of wikimedia projects.

Linking to the related sites

Say you have an uncommon word in an article that you write, that you think people might not understand. So you're tempted to try and link to it on Wikipedia, but there isn't enough to say about that word to make a real encyclopedia entry.

Link to it's Wiktionary entry (and if Wiktionary doesn't have it yet, do everyone a favor and add it--even if it's just a brief definition--other Wiktionarians will help flesh it out).

Instead of the whole URL, it's just like a Wikipedia link, but with a prefix. For example, [[wiktionary:house]]. In your article it will appear like "wiktionary:house"--you can hide wiktionary using the "pipe trick" from the previous page.

The other projects have similar shortcuts.

Cross-server links

You are viewing this article on the English version of Wikipedia, but there are Wikipedia editions with articles written in many languages. One cannot have both an article on Michael Jackson in English and an article on Michael Jackson in German; how will links work? What will the extra load on the server be with 6,812,988 articles and then the translation of those articles into 20 different languages?

For this reason, separate languages are hosted on separate servers. To link from the English Wikipedia to the German article on Michael Jackson, one must type [[:de:Michael Jackson]] (with a colon in front of it; otherwise it just creates a link in spaces at the top and bottom of the page). It will appear as de:Michael Jackson.

Similarly, to link from the German Wikipedia back to the article on Michael Jackson in English, one must type [[:en:Michael Jackson]] (en:Michael Jackson).

The Meta site

There is one main site that serves as a common area to coordinate development of all these sites, Meta-Wikimedia. The Meta and Wikipedia sites can be linked to in a similar manner:

• One may link to the Meta by typing something such as [[m:Wikipedia Anti-rules]] (m:Wikipedia Anti-rules).
• One may link back to the English 'pedia from Meta by typing something such as [[w:Michael Jackson]]. To link to a separate project in a different language, one would type something like [[w:de:Michael Jackson]].