OrthodoxWiki:Glossary

Note: while the definitions below may be useful for understanding and writing text in the community pages (Talk, Wikipedia, User, Meta, etc.), please write actual encyclopedia articles in jargon-free language which is readily understandable without specific knowledge of the Wikipedia project.

This article or section needs a cleanup to bring it to a higher standard of quality. Recommendation: See talk page. More detailed comments may be noted on the talk page. You can help OrthodoxWiki by editing it, especially to conform to the Style Manual and the suggestions in How to write a great article.

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This is a glossary of terms commonly used on OrthodoxWiki and some other like sites. For more help, see OrthodoxWiki:Help, Help:Contents, and OrthodoxWiki:Trapeza.

Top - A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Admin

Short for Administrator. A user with extra technical privileges who does housework.

Also used: sysop.

Anchor

An HTML term for code that lets you link to a specific point in a page, using the "#" character. You can use them to link to a section of a page, e.g. Help:How_to_create_a_new_page#Second_method:_New_links. Note that anchors currently have no effect in redirects.

Archive

A subpage of a Talk page to which some parts of the discussion are transferred, to reduce the size of the Talk page.

See also: OrthodoxWiki:How to archive a talk page.

Article

An encyclopedia entry. All articles are pages, but not all pages are articles.

See also OrthodoxWiki:What is an article.

B

Ban

Banning is the extreme, last resort action by which someone is prevented from editing Wikipedia for a prolonged or indeterminate length of time. Reason for banning is usually a long history of biased edits, persistent adding of incorrect or doubtful material, refusal to cooperate with others, or extreme incivility and threats. If someone is banned, their username is blocked, and any username or IP identified as being the same person that is with great likelihood identified as being the same person can be blocked without any further reason. See also: block

BJAODN

Abbreviation for Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense.

Blanking

Removing all content from a page. Newcomers often do this accidentally. On the other hand, if blanking an article is done in bad faith, it is vandalism. If blanking is done to a vandalised brand-new page, it is maintenance, and the page will be deleted by an admin within a few hours if no dispute arises. {{delete}} should be added to the blanked page to draw attention to it, rather than just blanking it.

Block

Action by a sysop, removing from a certain IP-number or username the ability to edit Wikipedia. Usually done against addresses that have done vandalism or against users who have been banned. See also: ban

Boilerplate text

A standard message which can be added to an article using a Template. For example, {{stub}} is expanded to the following:

This article or section is a stub (i.e., in need of additional material). You can help OrthodoxWiki by expanding it.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Boilerplate text.

Bot

A program that automatically or semi-automatically adds or edits Wikipedia-pages.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Bots, Rambot.

Broken link

Also used: edit link, red link.

A link to a nonexistent page, usually colored red. [[Template:]] may display this way depending on your settings.

Broken redirect

Redirect to a non-existing page. Common opinion is that these should be removed.

Bureaucrat

A Wikipedia Admininistrator who has been entrusted with promoting users to sysops.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Bureaucrats.

C

Cabal

A secretive organization which some Wikipedians claim is ultimately responsible for the development of Wikipedia. Supposedly the Cabal acts to stifle dissent and impose their private points of view while hypocritically extolling NPOV. Admins who take action against users for seemingly illogical or immature reasons are often claimed to be acting on behalf of the Cabal.

Compare with Troll.

See also Meta:Cabal, w:There Is No Cabal.

Chatty

A term used for articles which seem to attempt a conversation with the reader. Chatty articles may need cleanup.

Cleanup

The process of repairing articles that are ungrammatical, are poorly formatted, etc. Cleanup generally requires only editing skills, as opposed to the specialized knowledge that is more often called for by pages needing attention.

See also: OrthodoxWiki:Cleanup process.

Copyvio

Also used: copyviol.

Copyright violation. Usually used in an edit summary when some copyrighted material has been added to OrthodoxWiki.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Copyrights.

Cut and paste move

Moving a page by taking the text of the page, and put it into the edit window for the second page. Generally considered worse than the 'move page' option, because it causes the page and its edit history to be in different places. Cut and paste moves can be fixed by administrators.

See also OrthodoxWiki:How to fix cut and paste moves.

D

dab

See Disambiguation.

Data dump

To import material from outside sources into OrthodoxWiki without editing, formatting and linking. This is frowned upon by most Wikipedians.

See also Wikify.

Dead-end page

Page that has no links to existing other pages, except perhaps interlanguage links. Special:Deadendpages lists them, but this function is disabled in some Wikimedia projects.

De-admin

See De-sysop.

De-bold

Also used: un-bold.

To remove a phrase's bold typeface, because it is not the first reference to the title or a synonym of the topic (which should be bold), or that it is not the topic of the article at all. Common situations when one would de-bold include: bold foreign words (should instead be italicized) and bold Wikilinks (which, according to current Manual of Style, should be plain).

Deletionist

Someone who is in favor of deleting some pages that others prefer to keep. Often used as a derogatory term. The term 'inclusionist' for the opposite party is less used.

See also Meta:deletionism and Meta:inclusionism.

De-sysop

Also used: De-admin.

Take away someone's sysop status. Used very rarely, in cases where someone has misused their sysop powers.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Possible misuses of admin privileges.

Developer

A user who can make direct changes to the Wikipedia software and database.

See also Meta:Developer for a list of developers and further information.

De-Wikify

Also used: Un-Wikify.

To remove (de-link) a wikification of an article. This can be done to remove selflinks or excessive common-noun Wikification.

Dicdef

Also used: Dictdef.

Short for a dictionary definition. This term is commonly used when referring to an article that is more similar to a dictionary article than an encyclopedia one.

Diff

The difference between two versions of page, as displayed using the Page history feature, or from Recent Changes. The versions to compare are encoded in the URL, so you can make a link by copying and pasting it - for instance when discussing a change on an article's talk page.

See also Meta:Help:Diff.

Disambiguation

Also used: dab, disambig.

The process of resolving the conflict that occurs when articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Disambiguation.

Disambiguation page

A page that contains various meanings of a word, and refers to the pages where the various meanings are defined.

Double redirect

A redirect which leads to another redirect. Counterintuitively, this will not bring one to the final destination, so it needs to be eliminated by linking directly to the target redirect.

Dupe

Short for a duplicate article. Often used when identifying a duplicate page that needs to be merged with another.

E

Edit conflict

Two or more parties both attempt to save different edits to the same page at the same time, causing one to get canceled out.

Edit link

See Broken link.

Edit summary

The contents of the "Summary:" field below the edit box on the "Edit this page" page.

Edit war

Also used: revert war.

Two or more parties continually making their preferred changes to a page, and undoing the changes they don't agree with. Generally, an edit war is the result of an argument on a talk page that could not be resolved.

External link

Also used: ext. ln, ext lk, or extlink.

A link to a website not owned by OrthodoxWiki. The alternatives are an internal link, wikilink or free link within OrthodoxWiki, and an interwiki link to a sister project.

See also OrthodoxWiki:External links.

F

FAC

Featured article candidate, an article that has been proposed for consideration to be featured as one of the best in Wikipedia.

Fancruft

A neologism most often seen on WP:VFD, meaning a trivia article of interest only to hardcore fans of a specific film, television series, book, game, etc. Where the line is drawn is highly subjective and can be controversial. Often seen as an insult to those who've contributed that information, and to others interested in the subject.

Forest fire

A flame war which spreads, seemingly uncontrollably, beyond the pages where it began into unrelated articles' talk pages. A forest fire becomes progressively more difficult for any user to keep track of. On Wikipedia, this is less of a problem than on other wikis, due to well-established boundaries for user conduct, clear guidelines for article content, and a formal dispute resolution process.

See also w:wildfire and MeatBall:ForestFire.

Free link

A link pointing to another page within OrthodoxWiki or its sister projects by using the wiki markup double square-brackets "[[" and "]]". Sometimes they are referred to as wikilinks or internal links. These links usually show up as blue if they are working and you haven't visited them before, red if they are broken, and purple if they are working and you have visited them before; note that they do not have the arrow symbol characteristic of an external link.

G

GFDL

GNU Free Documentation License. OrthodoxWiki articles are released under this license.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Copyrights.

Google test

Running sections or titles of articles through the Google search engine for various purposes. The four most common are to check for copyright violations, to determine which term among several is the most widely used, to decide whether a person is sufficiently famous to warrant an article or is simply engaging in vanity and to check whether a questionable and obscure topic is real (as opposed to the idiosyncratic invention of a particular individual).

GPL

General Public License. OrthodoxWiki's software is released under this license.

H

History

All previous versions of an article, from its creation to its current state. Also called page history.

See also: OrthodoxWiki:Page history

I

IANAL

An abbreviation for I Am Not A Lawyer, indicating that an editor is about to give their opinion on a legal matter as they understand it, although they are not qualified and probably don't fully understand the law in question.

Infobox

A consistently-formatted table which is present in articles with a common subject.

See also: taxobox.

Internal link

See free link.

Interwiki

A link to a sister project; this can be an interlanguage link to a corresponding article in a different language in Wikipedia, or a link to a project such as Wikibooks, Meta, etc.

ITN

An abbreviation for In the news.

L

Language link

See Interwiki.

M

MediaWiki

The software behind OrthodoxWiki and its sister projects, as well as several projects not related to Wikimedia, and a namespace.

Compare with Wikimedia.

See also OrthodoxWiki:MediaWiki, OrthodoxWiki:MediaWiki namespace.

Merge

Taking the text of two pages, and turning it into a single page.

Meta

A separate Wiki (http://meta.wikipedia.org) used to discuss general Wikipedia matters. In the past, this has been called Metapedia, Meta Wikipedia, Meta Wikimedia, and many other combinations.

Meta page

Page that provides information about Wikipedia. Meta pages are more correctly referred to as project namespace pages. Meta pages should not be confused with a page on Meta-Wikimedia.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Meta page.

Mirror

A website other than OrthodoxWiki that uses content original to OrthodoxWiki as a source for at least some of its content.

N

n/a

An abbreviation for new article, often used in edit summaries.

Namespace

A way to classify pages. OrthodoxWiki has namespaces for encyclopedia articles, pages about OrthodoxWiki(meta pages), user pages (User:), special pages (Special:), mediawiki pages (MediaWiki:) and talk pages (Talk:, OrthodoxWiki talk:, and User talk:).

See also OrthodoxWiki:Namespace.

Newbie test

Also used: newb test, noob test.

An edit made by a newcomer to Wikipedia, just to see if "Edit this page" really does what it sounds like. Newcomers should use OrthodoxWiki:Sandbox for this purpose.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Clueless newbies.

NPOV

Neutral point of view, or the agreement to report subjective opinions objectively, so as not to cause edit wars between opposing sides. As a verb, to remove biased statements or slanted phrasing. As an adjective, it indicates that an article is in compliance with OrthodoxWiki's NPOV policy.

O

Orphan

A page with no links from other pages. You can view lists of orphaned articles and images.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Orphan.

P

Page

Any individual topic within OrthodoxWiki; the web page without the top, bottom and side bars. Pages include articles, stubs, redirects, disambiguation pages, user pages, talk pages, documentation and special pages.

Patent nonsense

A humorous pejorative applied to articles that are either completely unintelligible or totally irrelevant.

Piped link

A link where the displayed text is not the name of the target article. Such links are created using the pipe character "|" e.g. [[Target article|Displayed text]]. The pipe trick is a software feature that generates the displayed text for you in certain circumstances.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Piped link.

POV

Point of view. Often used negatively as an adjective to indicate bias, as in "That reply was POV, not neutral.".

Project namespace

The project namespace is a namespace dedicated to providing information about wikipedia.

Protected page

A page that cannot be edited except by sysops. Usually this is done to cool down an edit war.

R

RC

An abbreviation for Special:Recentchanges

Redirect

Also used: redir.

A page title which, when requested, merely sends the reader to another page. This is used for synonyms and ease of linking. For example, impressionist might redirect to impressionism.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Redirect.

Red link

See Broken link.

Revert

An edit made with the intent of reversing changes made by someone else.

Revert war

See Edit war.

rm

Remove. Used in edit summaries to indicate that a particular piece of text or formatting has been deleted.

Rollback

To change a page back to the version before the last edit. Sysops have special possibilities to do this more easily.

rv

Revert. An edit summary indicating that the page has been reverted to a previous version, often because of vandalism.

See also OrthodoxWiki:How to revert a page to an earlier version.

S

s/word1/word2/

Replace word1 with word2. Used in edit summaries. It is a reference to the command for "find and replace" in languages such as sed and Perl. s/word1/word2/g means "replace all occurrences of word1 with word2" (g stands for "global").

Sandbox

A sandbox is a page that users may edit however they want. Though it is meant to help users experiment and gain familiarity with Wiki markup, the public sandbox at OrthodoxWiki:Sandbox is often filled with strange things and patent nonsense. In addition to the public sandbox, users may create private sandboxes on subpages of their user page, e.g. User:Hephaestos/Sandbox.

Section editing

Using the 'edit' links to the right of the page, one can get an edit window containing only part of the page, making it (hopefully) easier to find the exact spot where one wants to edit. Javascript is needed for section editing. You can turn section editing off in your preferences under the "Enable section editing via [edit] links" option.

Self-link

A Wikilink contained in an article that points the reader to that same article, e.g. linking Vice President in the article "Vice President". Such links are automatically displayed as strongly emphasised text rather than links, but the more complex case of a link which redirects to the same article is not, and should be de-wikified.

Skin

The appearance theme in Special:Preferences. Currently, five are available: Standard, Nostalgia, Cologne Blue, Monobook, and MySkin.

Sock puppet

Another user account created secretly by an existing wikipedian, generally to manufacture the illusion of support in a vote or argument.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Sock puppet.

Soft redirect

A very short article or page that essentially points the reader in the direction of another page. Used in cases where a normal redirect is inappropriate for various reasons (e.g. it is a cross-wiki redirect)

See also OrthodoxWiki:Soft redirect.

sp

Short for spelling correction. Used in edit summaries.

Split

Separating a single page into two or more pages.

Steward

An Administrator who has been empowered to change any user's status, including granting and revoking Administrator status and granting bureaucrat status.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Administrators#Stewards.

Stub

An article usually consisting of one short paragraph or less.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Find or fix a stub.

Sub-stub

A very short stub. For example, an article that is no more than a simple definition ("An airplane is a type of winged flying vehicle").

See also OrthodoxWiki:Substub.

Subpage

A page connected to a parent page. You can only create subpages in certain namespaces. Do not use subpages in the main article space.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Subpages.

Sysop

See Admin.

T

Talk page

A page reserved for discussion. All pages within Wikipedia (except talk pages themselves!) have talk pages attached to them.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Talk page.

Taxobox

A type of infobox, a taxobox is a taxonomy table positioned at the right side of an entry for a species of organism (or for a genus or family), giving a chart of the kingdom, phylum, etc. of the creature. Taxoboxes are also used for similar standardised tables.

Template

A way of automatically including the contents of one page within another page, used for boilerplate text, navigational aids, etc.

TfD

The OrthodoxWiki:Templates for deletion page.

Transclusion

There are two main ways of using templates on articles: inclusion (accomplished by using {{Template Name}}), and transclusion ({{subst:Template Name}}). The former will include the content of Template Name on the fly whenever the article is loaded, while the latter will permanently insert the content of the template onto the article. Thus, using transclusion, if the template content is modified at a later date, the article's content will not change.

Transclusion is the preferred method for short-term, non-permanent notices, as it is less confusing, and even helps to lighten the load on the database.

Translation

The English-language OrthodoxWiki should have only pages in English. Non-English pages are subject to deletion unless translated.

See also: OrthodoxWiki:Pages needing translation into English for pages on the English Wikipedia that are written in a foreign language; OrthodoxWiki:Translation into English for requests for translations into English of pages from foreign-language Wikipedias.

Transwiki

Move a page to another wiki, in particular Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource or sep11.

See also m:Transwiki.

Troll

A user who incites or engages in disruptive behavior (trolling). This term is applied fairly arbitrarily; generally, it can be assumed that someone who calls another user a troll simply does not like that user. Admins sometimes consider trolling to be justification for banning indefinitely. The validity of this is somewhat questionable, partly because the definition of troll is not agreed upon, and because calling someone a troll has an effect similar to calling them a Nazi: no further meaningful debate can be held.

Compare with Cabal.

See also polarization.

Tyop

A cute misspelling of typo. Used as an edit summary when correcting typos.

See also OrthodoxWiki:typo.

U

Unencyclopedic

What should not be in Wikipedia; the term is highly debated and sometimes considered useless or tautological.

Un-wiki

Going against the character of a Wiki. Usually saying that something is un-wiki means that it makes editing more difficult or impossible.

User page

A personal page for Wikipedians. Most people use their pages to introduce themselves and to keep various personal notes and lists. They are also used by Wikipedians to communicate with each other via the user talk pages. A user page is linked to as [[User:Hephaestos|Hephaestos]] and appears as Hephaestos.

See also OrthodoxWiki:User page.

V

Vandalbot

Some kind of bot being used for vandalism or spamming. Recognizable by the fact that one or a few IP-addresses make many similar clearly vandalist edits in a short time. In the worst cases these have created or vandalized hundreds of pages in several Wikipedias in a timespan of only minutes.

See also m:Vandalbot.

Vandalism

Deliberate defacement of Wikipedia pages. This can be by deleting text or writing nonsense, bad language etcetera. The term is often incorrectly used to discredit the views of an opponent in edit wars. Vandalism can be reported at OrthodoxWiki:Vandalism in progress.

See also m:Wikipedia vandalism.

Vanity page

A page in the article namespace that presents biographical details of a non-famous person favorably and is considered inappropriate and/or unencyclopedic by most Wikipedians. Such articles are often suspected to be written by their subjects.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Wikipedia is not a vanity press.

W

Watchlist

A set of pages selected by the user, who can then click on ?My watchlist? to see recent changes to those pages.

See also: Help:Watching pages.

Wikibooks

A Wikipedia sister project that works to develop free textbooks, manuals, and other texts online.

See also Wikibooks.

Wikibreak

Also used: Wikivacation.

When a Wikipedian takes a break from Wikipedia.

See also m:Wikibreak.

Wikify

To format using wiki markup (as opposed to plain text or HTML) and add internal links to material, incorporating it into the whole of Wikipedia. Noun: Wikification. Sometimes abbreviated wfy.

Wikilink

A link to another OrthodoxWiki page, as opposed to an external link. See OrthodoxWiki:Canonicalization.

Wiki markup

Also used: wiki text, wikitext.

Code like HTML, but simplified and more convenient, for example '''bold''' instead of <b>bold</b>. It is the source code stored in the database and shown in the edit box. Searching by the Wikipedia software is done in the wikitext, as opposed to searching by Google, which is done in the resulting text. The size of a page is the size of the wikitext.

See also OrthodoxWiki:How to edit a page.

Wikimedia

Properly Wikimedia Foundation Inc., a non-profit organisation that provides a legal, financial and organisational framework for Wikipedia and its sister projects and provides the necessary hardware.

Compare with MediaWiki.

See also Wikimedia.

Wikipedian

Also used: Wikipedist, Wikipede.

A contributor to Wikipedia.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Wikipedians.

WikiProject

An attempt to standardise the content and formatting of a particular category of articles using an agreed template.

See also OrthodoxWiki:WikiProject.

Wikiquette

The Wikipedia etiquette of working with others on Wikipedia.

See also OrthodoxWiki:Wikiquette.

Wikiquote

A Wikipedia sister project to create a free online collection of quotations.

See also Wikiquote.

Wikisource

A Wikipedia sister project to create a free online compendium of primary source texts.

See also Wikisource.

Wikistress

Personal stress or tension induced by editing Wikipedia, or more often by being involved in minor conflict with another editor. Some users maintain a Wikistress meter on their user page. See Wikistress template.

Wiktionary

A Wikipedia sister project to create a free online dictionary of every language.

See also Wiktionary.

?

en: / de: / ja: / etc.

The English / German / Japanese / etc.-language Wikipedia. Often used in edit summaries to indicate changes to interwiki links.