Wikipedia:Glossary

This is a glossary of commonly used Wikipedia terms. For more help, see Wikipedia:Help

This page explains words that are used on Wikipedia. These words are used on talk pages, and in the Wikipedia namespace. Most of these words should not be used in articles. Many of these words are jargon.

!vote

A entry on a RfD discussion that is not a vote.

Article

An encyclopedia entry. All articles are pages, but not all pages are articles. Talk pages are not articles and pages that only redirect to other pages are not articles.

Cabal

A secretive community of wikipedians acused of controlling wikipedia

Copyvio

Copyright violation. Usually used in an edit summary when some copyrighted material has been added to Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Copyrights.

Data dump

To import material from outside sources into Wikipedia without editing, formatting and linking. This is frowned upon by most Wikipedians. See Wikify.

Disambiguation

The process of resolving the conflict that occurs when articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title. See Wikipedia:Disambiguation

Edit conflict

When two or more people both attempt to save different edits to the same page. See Wikipedia:edit conflicts.

Editcountitis

Only caring about edit count and not edit quality

Edit war

Two or more parties continually making their preferred changes to a page, and undoing the changes they don't agree with. Generally, an edit war is the result of an argument on a talk page that could not be resolved. See Wikipedia:Edit war.

Edit summary

The contents of the "Summary:" field below the edit box on the "Edit this page" page. See Wikipedia:Edit summary.

En

This abbreviation is used to mean the English Wikipedia. Other languages use their own codes.

GFDL

GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia articles used to be released under this license.

Google test

Running sections or titles of articles through the Google search engine for various purposes. The four most common are to check for copyright violations, to determine which term among several is the most widely used, to decide whether a person is famous enough to have an article or is just making the page because of vanity, and to check whether a questionable and uncommon topic is real (instead of a fake invention written about by a person). See en:Wikipedia:Search engine test.

GPL

GNU General Public License. Wikipedia's software is released under this license.

InterWiki

This is the means of creating links between articles in the different languages in Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Interlanguage links.

Meta-Wikimedia, Meta-Wiki, or simply Meta

A separate wiki (https://meta.wikimedia.org) used to discuss general Wikipedia matters. In the past, this was sometimes incorrectly called "Metapedia". See Meta-Wikimedia.

Namespace

A way to classify pages. Wikipedia has namespaces for encyclopedia articles, pages about Wikipedia (Wikipedia:), user pages (User:), special pages (Special:) and talk pages (Talk:, Wikipedia talk:, and User talk:). See Wikipedia:Namespace.

Newbie test (also "newb test" or "noob test")

An edit made by a newcomer to Wikipedia, just to see if "change this page" really does what it sounds like. Newcomers should use Wikipedia:sandbox for this purpose.

NPOV

Neutral point of view, or the agreement to report opinions that favor or represent only one point of view. This is done so edit wars between people of opposite views do not happen. When used as a verb, it means to remove biased statements or slanted phrasing.

Orphan

A page with no links from other pages. You can view lists of orphaned articles and images. See Wikipedia:Orphan

Page

Any individual topic within Wikipedia; the web page without the top, bottom and side bars. Pages include articles, stubs, redirects, disambiguation pages, talk pages, documentation and special pages.

POV

Literally, a point of view, but often used negatively as an adjective to indicate bias.

Project namespace

A name for the Wikipedia: namespace

Rambot

A script written by User:Ram-Man to enter United States geographical data. See the rambot FAQ.

Redirect

A page title which, when requested, sends the reader to another page. This is used for words that have similar meanings and for ease of linking. For example, "impressionist" might redirect to "impressionism". See Wikipedia:Redirect.

RfD

The Wikipedia:Requests for deletion page.

rv

Revert. An edit summary that implies that the page has been reverted to a previous version, often because of vandalism. Usually people use the term rvv when they revert multiple vandal actions at once. See Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version.

Salt

Block creation of article. Usually used when a user keeps making a bad page with a particular title. An Administrator will "salt" the page to prevent it from being created again.

Sockmaster

The creator of the sockpuppet

Sockpuppet

Another user account created secretly by an existing wikipedian, generally to create a false sense of support in a vote or argument, but sometimes just for humour.

Stub

An article that usually has one short paragraph or less. Many of Wikipedia's most informative articles started out as stubs. See Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub

Sub stub

A very short stub. For example, an article that is no more than a simple definition ("An airplane is a type of winged flying vehicle"). See Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub

Subpage

A page connected to a parent page. Pages in the Talk: and User: namespaces can have subpages: see Wikipedia:Subpages in the user and talk namespaces. However, do not use subpages in the main article space.

Talk page

A page used only for discussion. All pages within Wikipedia (except talk pages themselves!) have talk pages attached to them. See Wikipedia:Talk page

Taxobox

A table positioned at the right side of an entry for a species of organism (or for a genus or family), giving a chart of the kingdom, phylum, etc. of the creature. See the article on owl for an example.

Tyop

A cute misspelling of typo. Used as an edit summary when correcting typos.

User page

A personal page for Wikipedians. Most people use their pages to introduce themselves and to keep many personal notes and lists. They are also used by Wikipedians to communicate with each other via the user talk pages. A user page has a name of the form [[User:Hephaestos]]

Userfy

Wikipedia:Userfication means moving a new Wikipedia page to a user page or user subpage. A common reason for doing this is for a user to improve it. The page would be deleted after being moved to a user page.

Whitespace

Is blank space that appears on the published version of a Wikipedia page. It is not occupied by any characters, templates, multimedia, or anything else. In other words, it appears white.

Wikify

To format using Wiki markup (as opposed to plain text or HTML) and add internal links to material, incorporating it into the whole of Wikipedia. Noun: Wikification. See Category:Articles that need to be wikified

Wiki markup, also called wiki text or wikitext

Code like HTML, but simplified and more convenient, for example not <b> and </b>, but in both cases ''', see Wikipedia:How to edit a page. It is the source code stored in the database and shown in the edit box. Searching by the Wikipedia software is done in the wikitext, as opposed to searching by Google, which is done in the resulting text. The size of a page is the size of the wikitext.

Wikipedian

A contributor to Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Wikipedians.

Wikipediholic

Someone addicted to Wikipedia

RFCU

Typically said in conversations relating to sockpuppets. The full meaning is request for checkuser. Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser