Wikipedia:Basic navigation

Basic navigation in Wikipedia

How to navigate Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles are all linked, or cross-referenced.

Where you see text like this, it means there is a link to some relevant article or Wikipedia page with further information elsewhere if you need it. Holding your mouse over the link will often show you where a link will take you. These links mean that articles do not need to cover common ground in depth; instead, you are always one click away from more information on any point that has a link attached.

There are other links towards the ends of most articles, for other articles of interest, relevant external web sites and pages, and reference material. At the end of the article are relevant categories of knowledge which you can search and traverse in an interconnected hierarchy for further related information in a field.

Some articles may also have links to dictionary definitions, audiobook readings, quotations, or the same article in other languages.

You can add further links if a relevant link is missing; this is one way to contribute.

Main Page

There's a browsing bar at the top of the Main Page with links to Categories, Portals, Featured content and the A-Z index. Each category is a list of sub-categories or articles. Portals bring you to sub-portals and portals, which are illustrated article summaries like on the Main Page. Featured content is the way to the best articles, pictures, lists and portals in the encyclopedia. A-Z index finds a page from the first two or three letters of its title.

Contents and index browsing

Wikipedia contains a huge amount of information on all sorts of subjects ranging from politics, science, history, music, religion, pop culture, and sports to everything and anything in between.

To help you find your way around this world of knowledge, Wikipedia has many pages that organize its contents. These lists and indices use links to the articles that are organized by subject or alphabetically. Our best content also finds its way to one of the featured content lists. Links to all of Wikipedia's main contents pages are presented below, and they in turn link to all the rest.

Category browsing

Every article has a list at the bottom of all the major categories it belongs to. For example Albert Einstein is listed under:

1879 births, 1955 deaths, Cosmologists, German physicists, German-Americans, Naturalized citizens of the United States, Nobel laureates in Physics, Refugees, Vegetarians, World federalists.

Each of these categories can be browsed and is linked to related categories in an interconnected hierarchy or web.

Try browsing the various categories below right now:

Arts | Culture | Geography | History | Mathematics | People | Philosophy | Science | Society | Technology

Other useful buttons and panels

Sidebar (left)

To the left side of each article are some standard options for navigation and interaction, for tools, and, on some articles, for languages:

Navigation options:

• Main page - the English Wikipedia home page
• Contents - an index of the various ways to find content within Wikipedia
• Featured content - a selection of the best of what Wikipedia has to offer
• Current events - latest world news reported within the Wikipedia community
• Random article - lucky dip, if you're ever bored or want to learn something new!

Interaction options:

• About Wikipedia - an introduction to the Wikipedia project for visitors
• Community portal - as a community building an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has a portal for users, giving easy access to many of the useful pages within Wikipedia
• Recent changes - articles that are being edited at this moment
• Contact Wikipedia
• Donate to Wikipedia
• Help - the main menu for all the help pages

Search box - allows you to search other articles across the whole of Wikipedia.

Toolbox options:

• What links here - useful for tracing where this article is referenced from
• Related changes - list of changes made recently to pages linked from the specified page
• Upload file - help with properly uploading images and other files to Wikipedia
• Special pages - all the special functions and administration options can be found here
• Printable version - displays the article by itself, without all the site navigation. See Help:Printable for details.
• Permanent link - used to link to a specific version of a page. See Permalink for an encyclopedic explanation of permanent links.
• Cite this page - generates a set of copyable sample citations for the article, in different styles

Other languages - if an article exists on the same subject in any of the other hundred languages in Wikipedia, it should usually appear on a list of other language links in the sidebar too.

Top tabs (above the article)

Each page in Wikipedia contains an article, and a discussion page (usually called "Talk...")

You can see these above: the article is labelled "project page", the discussion page is the tab to the right of it. These are treated as two separate pages in Wikipedia, but are shown side by side on the tab bar, for ease of use.

Whether you are looking at the article or project page, or the discussion page, you will see there is a button marked "edit this page", possibly a "new section" button, and a button labelled "watch" or "unwatch".

• edit this page - this is the key to contributing to Wikipedia. When you click this button, you change from viewing an article or discussion about an article, to being able to edit the article, or add comments to the discussion that is going on.

  Occasionally, pages that are important or may be vandalized are locked, in which case the "edit" will show "view source", and you will not be able to edit the article at that time.

  Page editing is simple with Wikipedia, and you cannot harm a page if you make a mistake, since all changes can be undone. This is part of Wikipedia's vandal protection.

• "new section" - adds a new section to a discussion page, without changing what is already there.
• history - All editable pages on Wikipedia have an associated page history, which consists of the old versions of the wikitext, as well as a record of the date and time (in UTC) of every edit, the username or IP address of the user who wrote it, and their edit summary. See Help:Page history for details.
• watch/unwatch - adds or removes a page from your watchlist, the list of pages you are tracking. You can view your watchlist with the user option button "my watchlist" at the top right of the screen. See Help:Watching pages for details.

User options (top right)

These control your user account. To create a user account you only need to choose a name and a password. An email address is optional and only used for password reminders.

Unless you create an account you will not be able to customize Wikipedia preferences for yourself. Almost all experienced editors use an account in order to ensure accountability.

The user options also include links to view your watchlist (articles you are tracking), and contributions you have made.

Navigate using WikiBrowser

WikiBrowse is a set of open source tools for Windows that are designed for navigating Wikipedia and other MediaWiki sites. WikiBrowse includes tools and multimedia players.