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Welcome!
editHello, and welcome to Wiktionary. I hope you enjoy contributing there.
As you have edited Wikipedia, you probably already know some basics, but Wiktionary operates in a very different manner from Wikipedia and you will have a better experience if you do not assume the two are similar in culture. Please remember that despite your experience on Wikipedia, you are inexperienced here. While you do not need to be an expert, or anything close to one, to contribute, please be as respectful of local policies and community practices as you can: being bold is not encouraged where it goes against any of those practices.
Our two main policy documents are Wiktionary:Entry layout explained ("ELE") and Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion ("CFI"). ELE describes our standard layout; all entries must follow this layout, even if they are not yet complete. (You can get a feel for our standard layout by looking at existing entries.) CFI describes what is allowed in the dictionary, and disallows (for example) most names of specific persons. We generally follow ELE and CFI closely.
If you create a few entries — or make additions — that are not properly formatted, someone will be glad to clean up after you. But if you do it repeatedly, you might get blocked as a temporary measure to give you a chance to read ELE. (Please add pages you edit to your watchlist and examine subsequent edits for corrections to your work. Feel free to ask those editors, or me, for clarification.)
Some other differences between us and English Wikipedia:
- Not everything that merits an article in Wikipedia merits an entry in Wiktionary. A Wikipedia article exists on exploding whales, but there's nothing dictionary-worthy in that phrase. (See CFI.)
- Entry titles are case-sensitive and do not have their first letters capitalized (unless, like proper nouns, they are ordinarily capitalized). So we have mercury for the substance and Mercury for the planet and the god. (We do not use parentheses in titles: there's no Mercury (planet).)
- We just want definitions of words. Facts about the referent of the term being defined generally belong at Wikipedia. Thus, the definition for (deprecated template usage) keyboard is "A set of keys used to operate a typewriter, computer etc.", and makes no mention of how many keys are on a keyboard, what order they are in, or how data is sent from the keyboard to the CPU (computer).
- Wiktionary has very different user-space policies from Wikipedia's. We are here to build a dictionary, and userpages exist 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. - Other policies, including on bots, blocks, redirects, interwiki links, and original research, are very different from English Wikipedia's. And we have no three-revert rule like Wikipedia's.
- Various templates and shortcuts that you're accustomed to don't exist here, or have different names. For example, don't try to use
{{tl|template name}}to refer to a template! ({{temp|template name}}will do the trick.) - Don't add an edit summary when creating a new entry here: the software will fill a useful one in automatically. (Edit summaries are good for other edits, though.)
Also, what we call a "citation" (sometimes "quotation") is evidence of a word being used; we use these to construct dictionary definitions. See WT:QUOTE. A "reference", on the other hand, which is called a "citation" on Wikipedia, references another secondary source, such as a dictionary, and is used predominantly for verifying etymologies and usage notes, not the definitions themselves. (That we don't use another dictionary as our source for the existence of a word is largely so that we don't fall into the trap of adding "list words", words that, while often defined, are never used in practice.)
A fuller introduction to Wiktionary for Wikipedias is Wiktionary:Wiktionary for Wikipedians. I recommend it.
I hope you enjoy editing Wiktionary! If you have any questions, then see the help pages, add a question to one of the discussion rooms or ask me on my talk page.—msh210℠ (talk) 07:16, 20 January 2013 (UTC)