Meta:For Wikipedians

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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.

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

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

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

Multilingual

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

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 about 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).