Meta:About

Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

• About Meta
• Discussion pages
• Request pages
• Policies and guidelines
• Information and statistics
• Categories
• Help pages

Participate:

• How to edit a page
• Meta-Wiki discussion page

Welcome to theWikimedia Meta-Wiki(often shortened toMeta-Wikior simplyMeta), awikifor coordinatingamongst the Wikimediaprojects.

Purpose

Meta serves three distinct roles, which are all closely related but often involve different subsets of users.

1. Discussion and formulation ofWikimedia projects,in particularpolicydiscussion relevant across projects, such asopen-content licensing.The central venue for discussion is theWikimedia Forum.Some high-level discussions, held mainly in 2009, were split off toStrategy Wiki.
2. A place for interlingual (cross-wiki) and international coordinationconcerning the Wikimedia projects and theWikimedia movementin general, including discussion in languages other than English. This includesrequests(for pan-Wikimedia or other wikis),translationsandnews,and the description, documentation, and discussion of real-life activities and facts related to theWikimedia Foundationandaffiliates.See alsoreports,events,outreach,andgrants.
3. A forum forpersonal essaysabout Wikimedia projects.Because these are usually not delivered from aneutral point of view,they should be summarized on neutralissuespages frommultiple points of viewusing formats such asTIPAESAor its subsetIPA.There is a degree of freedom in determining what is related to Wikimedia projects, which makes Meta also ameatballwiki of sorts, discussing such matters as wiki culture and patterns. Documentation of MediaWiki is mainly excluded now (see below). This role includes more formalresearchand related discussion.

Thecategoriesprovide a big-picture representation of Meta's content.

What Meta is not

1. A disposal site for uncorrectable articles from the different Wikipedias
   • If you want to build your own wiki, check out thelist of wiki softwareon Wikipedia.
   • If you're looking for a wiki-based community, check outother wiki communitieson Wikipedia, or MeatballWiki'scommunity list.
   • If you're looking for free webspace, you can find out more about that atweb hosting serviceon Wikipedia.
2. A place to describe theMediaWikisoftware. The software has its own wiki atMediaWiki.org.Content and pages such as these should betransferred.

Community

It has often been discussed whether Meta has a community. What's sure is that it doesn't have a community of its own, separate from the communities of theWikimedia projects:as someone said, «a meta-project—existingforandaboutthe other Wikimedia wikis, not as a content project to itself—a community of communities, rather than its own little island community».

This also means that many discussions, processes and other activities happen on Meta, with different participants and people in charge (if any)—for instance, among many, someWikimedia committees,thestewards,the WMF staff forgrants—: none of them, and all of them, is Meta. Meta is the space and the tool fortheir participantsto achieve their objectives, not an actor in them; and even less a power over them.

Strictly speaking, however, thereisa community specific to Meta: it's a loose group of people regularly active in some or many such activities (especially as "gardeners" ), who care about Meta serving the purpose above, and who are more likely to intervene to ensure it does.

"Metawikian" is a term also sometimes used, to indicate a member of the specific "Meta community", that is the community of Meta regulars who are more often active on Meta, for instance as contributors to its content pages or as facilitators of other discussions and processes.

Origins

Meta-Wiki was first created as "Meta-Wikipedia" in November 2001 to make the English Wikipedia less cluttered, by moving all meta-content (content about the Wikipedia website and its users), as opposed to actual content (encyclopedia articles), to a new wiki. Since its upgrade to Wikipedia's customMediaWikisoftware, Meta has become a multilingual discussion forum used by all Wikimedia language communities. As the number ofWikimedia projectsandtranslationsincreased, so too did Meta's scope. Meta comprises 144,621 articles. Many of the older pages here are still worded as being specific to Wikipedia, but arguably many now apply to all Wikimedia projects.

Meta policies

• Meta:Inclusion policy
• Meta:Deletion policy
• Policies and guidelines
• Privacy policy
• Steward policies
• New project policy(historical)

See also

• Goings-on
• Meta:Categories– introductory page for browsing
• Meta's Zeitgeistcan give a clue about the main activities of any month (only main namespace, although talk could be more indicative)
• Meta:Babel templates– language competence of Meta users
• Meta:Cleanup
• Meta:Requests for deletion
• Meta:Requests for undeletions
• Project portals– a list of Wikimedia project portals
• Wikimedia Foundationand the Wikimedia projects.