User:Astronautics~enwiki/Introduction to Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia site that allows anybody to edit almost any page. If you think this causes a lot of confusion at times, you're right. However, its users have gradually built up a large and complicated system that allows things to run well.

If you ignore the Wikipedia system completely and just go about your business editing articles, you probably won't notice it much, and that's completely OK. This guide is here to help you when you need to find your way around.

If you want to use the full power of the behind-the-scenes system that makes Wikipedia work, click on the link in this table of contents that you want to read about.

Seeing what's going on

The page that shows what people are editing, as it happens, is Special:Recentchanges.

Getting rid of junk

People come to the pages on this site all the time and scribble junk on them. We call this "vandalism", just like it would be called in the real world. If you see some of this