Meta:About

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Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

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Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki (often shortened to Meta-Wiki or simply Meta), a wiki for coordination of Wikimedia projects.

Contents

Current purpose

Meta-Wiki currently serves several distinct roles, which are all closely related although often involve different subsets of users.

  1. Discussion and formulation of the Wikimedia projects, and in particular policy discussion relevant to all projects, such as open content licensing.
    • The central venue for discussion is the Wikimedia Forum.
    • Part of the high-level discussions happened mainly about 2009 were split to Strategy Wiki.
  2. A forum for personal essays about the Wikimedia projects (as these are usually not delivered from a neutral point of view, they should be summarized on neutral issues pages from multiple point of view using formats like TIPAESA or its subset IPA).
    • There's some degree of freedom in determining what is related to Wikimedia projects, which makes Meta also a meatball wiki of sorts, discussing wiki culture and patterns etc. Documentation of MediaWiki is mainly excluded now, see below.
    • More formal research and discussion of it is an expansion/subcase.
  3. A place for interlingual (cross-wiki) and international coordination concerning the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement in general, including discussion in languages other than English.

Categories should give a representation of Meta-Wiki's content.

Meta-Wiki currently serves as one of the major avenues of discussion for Wikimedians, the others being the mailing lists and the talk pages of individual articles.

Originally focused on the English-language version of Wikipedia, the then-named Meta-Wikipedia has, since its upgrade to Wikipedia's custom MediaWiki software, become a multilingual discussion forum used by all Wikimedia language communities. Currently, Meta comprises 25,372 articles.

What Meta-Wiki is not

Almost all Wikimedia wikis have a "What <this wiki> is not" page that describes inappropriate content for that site.

Meta is not

  1. A disposal site for uncorrectable articles from the different Wikipedias, and it is not a hosting service for personal essays of all types.
  2. A place to describe the MediaWiki software. The software has its own wiki at MediaWiki.org. Content and pages such as these should be transferred.

Origins

Meta-Wiki was first created as "Meta-Wikipedia" in November 2001 as a way to keep Wikipedia cleaner by moving all meta-content (content about the Wikipedia website and its users), as opposed to actual content (encyclopedia articles), to a new wiki.

As the number of Wikimedia projects and translations increased, so too did the scope of Meta. As a consequence of its history, many of the older pages here are still worded as being specific to Wikipedia, but arguably many now apply to all Wikimedia projects.

In the same way, the term "Wikipedian" should often be interpreted as "Wikimedian". "Metawikian" is a term also used sometimes, 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.

Meta policies

See also

Retrieved from "http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:About&oldid=3667487"
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