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Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to Wiktionary. Thank you for your contributions. If you have edited Wikipedia, you probably already know some basics, but Wiktionary does have a few conventions of its own.

This is not Wikipedia; it is run in a very different manner, and assuming similarity may 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 can get more of a glimpse of the Wiktionary mindset at Help:Interacting with humans.)

Our two main policy documents are Wiktionary:Entry layout explained ("ELE") and Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion ("CFI"). ELE describes our standard layout; unlike on Wikipedia, 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 or places. We generally follow ELE and CFI closely.

An easy way to create a properly formatted entry is to use one of our article templates: type the name of a non-existent article into the search box and hit 'Go', and you'll see links to the templates. If you do create a couple of entries 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.

Some other differences between us and English Wikipedia:

• 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, not long-winded explanations worthy of Wikipedia.
• 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, and redirects, are very different from English Wikipedia's. And we have no counterpart to Wikipedia's three-revert rule.
• Various templates and shortcuts that you're used to using do not 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.)

Also, a "citation" on Wiktionary is the same as a "quotation" and 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. (This 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.)

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℠ 00:24, 30 April 2009 (UTC)