Meta:FAQ

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Not to be confused with MediaWiki FAQ.

Welcome to Meta-Wiki! You might be confused about what Meta is, but this page hopes to explain the answer to some common questions.

What is Wikipedia and what is the Wikimedia Foundation?

See wmf:FAQ.

What is Meta-Wiki?

Meta-Wiki (or just "Meta") is a wiki used for coordinating the various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia and its sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikinews, and Wikibooks. Its uses vary quite a bit, but looking at the RecentChanges at any time will give you an idea of what happens on Meta. It is also used for coordinating events and meetups of Wikimedians (including Wikimania) and formerly outreach. Meta also hosts several grant proposals, research projects, and some of the fundraising for the Wikimedia Foundation. Meta also has pages about the local chapters and thematic organizations of the Wikimedia movement and various reports. Meta is multilingual, and many users help translate its content.

It is home to the requests for new languages, proposals for closing projects, as well as proposals for new projects.

Stewards perform global actions affecting all Wikimedia wikis here. It is here that the global Spam blacklist, Title blacklist, Interwiki map, and project portals (like www.wikipedia.org) are hosted. Only Meta admins, stewards, and staff can edit these pages, and they all have a special format (Regex, special table format, raw HTML code, respectively).

I mainly edit Wikipedia (or another Wikimedia sister project). How is Meta different? Does it have the same policies as my project?

What languages can be used on Meta-Wiki? How can I help by translating into my language?

Main articles: Translation requests and Multilingualism

Although English is the de facto lingua franca, Meta-Wiki is a multilingual project, and any language may be used. If you have an account, you can help by setting your language in Special:Preferences and signing up for translation notifications in your language, although this is not necessary. If you have an account, you can add a list of languages you speak to your userpage as described in User language.

Anyone can view the statistics for translations into a language by going to Special:LanguageStats and entering your language's code (usually w:ISO 639). Some other pages for which translations are always needed include Template:Main Page/WM News, which uses a special format, and ...