Hello, and welcome to Wiktionary!

If you have edited Wikipedia, you probably already know some basics, but Wiktionary does have a few conventions of its own. Please take a moment to learn our basics before jumping in.

First, all articles should be in our standard format, even if they are not yet complete. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with it. You can use one of our pre-defined article templates by typing the name of a non-existent article into the search box and hitting 'Go'. You can link Wikipedia pages, including your user page, using [[w:pagename]], {{pedia}}, or {{wikipedia}}.

Notice that article titles are case-sensitive and are not capitalized unless, like proper nouns, they are ordinarily capitalized (Poland or January). Also, take a moment to familiarize yourself with our criteria for inclusion, since Wiktionary is not an encyclopedia. Don't go looking for a Village pump – we have a Beer parlour. Note that while Wikipedia likes redirects, Wiktionary deletes most redirects, (especially spelling variations) in favor of short entries. Please do not copy entries here from Wikipedia if they are in w:CAT:MtW, they are moved by bot, and will appear presently in the Transwiki: namespace.

A further major caveat is that a "Citation" on Wiktionary is synonymous with a "Quotation", we use these primary sources to construct dictionary definitions from evidence of the word being used. "References" (aka "Citations" on Wikipedia) are used predominantly for verifying Etymologies and usage notes, not the definitions themselves. This is partly to avoid copyright violation, and partly to ensure that we don't fall into the trap of adding "list words", or words that while often defined are never used in practice.

Warning to experienced Wikipedians:
This is not Wikipedia; it is run in a very different manner, and assuming similarity will likely get you blocked for causing disruption. This has happened too frequently in the past, which leads to a (possibly unfair) prejudice about your motives and actions here. You should note particularly that being bold is not encouraged where it goes against any of our policies or against the community consensus, which is generally strong.

Changing policy pages on Wiktionary is very strongly discouraged. If you think something needs changing discuss it at WT:BP, following which we may formally VOTE on the issue.

You should also note that Wiktionary has very different user-space policies, we are here to build a dictionary and your user-page exists only to facilitate that. In particular we have voted to explicitly ban all userboxes with the exception of {{Babel}}; please do not create or use them.

We hope you enjoy editing Wiktionary and being a Wiktionarian. — Carolina wren discussió 04:48, 1 October 2009 (UTC)Reply