Introducing Wikipedia
The free encyclopedia
Wikipedia is a project to produce a novel kind of encyclopedia that is comprehensive and free.
Wikipedia's goal is to create a free, reliable encyclopedia-indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, in terms of both breadth and depth. This is an ambitious goal, and will probably take many years to achieve! As anyone can edit any article, it is of course possible for biased, out of date or incorrect information to be posted.
Thousands of people have contributed to different parts of this project, and anyone can do so, including you. All you need is to know how to edit a page, and have some encyclopedic knowledge you want to share. The encyclopedia provides users with a certain amount of freedom. You can learn who is responsible for the most recent versions of any given page by clicking on the "Page history" link. But if you spot an error in the latest revision of an article, you are highly encouraged to be bold and correct it. This practice is one of the basic review mechanisms that maintains the reliability of the encyclopedia.
If you are uncertain or find the wording confusing, quote the material on the associated talk page and leave a question for the next person. This helps eliminate errors, inaccuracies or misleading wording more quickly and is highly appreciated by the community.
However, because there are so many other people reading the articles and monitoring contributions using the Recent Changes page, incorrect information is usually corrected quickly. Thus, the overall accuracy of the encyclopedia is improving all the time.