Wikipedia:Guide for Everything2 noders

Welcome to Wikipedia, noder! Like much of Everything2, Wikipedia is a collaborative online encyclopedia project. However, there are some major differences between the two, so this guide has been put together to help you. Our general Help and FAQ pages are also at your disposal.

First, you may want to look at an E2 writeup about Wikipedia (http://everything2.com/?node_id=1244296) and a Wikipedia article about E2.

Table of contents 1 Cultural differences 2 Moving content from E2 to Wikipedia 2.1 Legal issues 2.2 Changes to make 3 Moving content from Wikipedia to E2 4 Final words

Cultural differences

Wikipedia is entirely focused on making an encyclopedia. Unlike E2, there's not a lot of unrelated socializing; almost all of Wikipedia's chat is about improving specific articles or the project as a whole. Wikipedia doesn't have song lyrics, poetry, or fiction either; it's not a primary-source repository.

Anyone can edit any article here. Everybody's a Content Editor. Your contributions will be edited, rearranged, re-worded and expanded, and you shouldn't be shy about doing the same to other people's work. Be bold in updating pages!

Wikipedia is self-moderated and relatively anarchic, rather than having moderation imposed upon it. See Wikipedia:Power structure for details. Most Wikipedians try to avoid personal attacks and to spread WikiLove wherever they go :-). If you say something you regret, just apologize and delete it. If someone offends you, we have some advice on staying cool when the editing gets hot.

We don't have a voting system or experience measure -- be assured that Wikipedia is more than addictive enough without it. However, some users came up with the idea of WikiMoney to create an "economy of incentives" without adding any bloat[?] to the software -- if you like motivation systems, you may want to try this out.

Moving content from E2 to Wikipedia

Please copy your good encyclopedic content from E2 to wikipedia! Don't forget to search for related Wikipedia content first -- unlike E2, Wikipedia has full-text search, and if Wikipedia already has an article on the subject, just merge your own content into it: be bold!

Legal issues

You can move any of your own E2 writeups to Wikipedia. Mention on the Wikipedia article's talk page (click "Discuss this page") that you originally wrote the material for E2 and link to your E2 homenode (like this: [http://everything2.com/?node=yerricde yerricde]), so that nobody thinks you're plagiarising material. You can even do this if your node has been improved by an E2 content editor. For other noders' writeups, you will need the permission of all major contributors (see Wikipedia:Copyright).

Any contributions you make to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free Documentation License. However, you retain the copyright to your own work and are free to re-use and re-license it in any way you wish.

Changes to make

Content needs to be converted from E2 markup to wiki markup. For the most part, wiki markup resembles that of E2's auto-formatting tool (http://everything2.com/?node=Text%20Formatter), but there are a few differences. Generally it's easiest to copy and paste the text and add markup rather than copying the E2 markup. Wikipedia titles are generally shorter, so phrases like "how to" should be removed, and most titles should be uncapitalised. See the naming conventions for all the details.

Wikipedia also has some technical features that E2 lacks. For instance, Wikipedia allows links to external web pages, but we use them mostly in the bibliographies at the ends of articles. Because you can upload image files, you do not need to convert images to ASCII art. You don't need to use <pre> markup to generate tables; you can use standard HTML <table> markup instead. Though you can use HTML entity escapes for '[', ']', '<', and '>', you don't need to; Wikipedia has the <nowiki> tag to suppress interpretation of control characters as markup. In fact, Wikipedia has <code> tags that can be used to enclose a fragment of a computer program.

Wikipedia has a different manual of style from E2. However, if your article doesn't match that style, someone will change it so it does, so don't panic. It's easy to link something by putting it in [[square brackets]], and [[target|pipe links]] work here too, but remember that two pairs of brackets surround a link in Wikipedia. Don't forget to add links from other articles to yours, where it's appropriate; Wikipedia has no "soft link" functionality. On the other hand, E2 articles tend to be somewhat heavier linked, and E2 noders often put links around phrases to emphasize them. This is uncommon here: links should be only created around words and phrases where encyclopedic articles exist or can realistically be written. Wikipedia articles usually try to cover a subject in depth instead of concentrating on a single aspect thereof. What may be a perfectly acceptable write-up on E2 may well be a stub on Wikipedia that can only be fixed by merging it into a larger article.

On E2, noders will often quote from private messages sent by other noders in response to a writeup. On Wikipedia we try to quote opinions from people who are influential, or have some special expertise, and the best people for that generally won't be Wikipedians. We have a policy called the neutral point of view (NPOV). It is similiar to E2's deprecation of "getting to know you" nodes, subjective list nodes, and bullshit (called patent nonsense here), but there are subtle differences in the two policies. Wikipedia's policy is stronger; when expressing opinions (such as in Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act), we turn them into facts by stating that a group holds such opinions. Similarly, an article should at any time look like an encyclopedia text, even if it is only a very short one. Comments should be put on discussion pages, or if absolutely necessary within the text, enclosed as HTML comments. It may take you a little time to get used to the Wikipedia approach, but don't worry too much about it.

Anyone can fix your mistakes while you're getting the hang of things. But always keep in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia -- if you want to keep an online diary or write down your personal opinions, E2 and other wikis are probably a better place. Of course, we would like to encourage you to post encyclopedic material here, and non-encyclopedic material elsewhere :-)

Although the color scheme on Wikipedia pages other than articles matches E2's popular "jukka dim" theme to an extent, don't let this confuse you. Unlike E2, Wikipedia does allow use of external links.

Moving content from Wikipedia to E2

Moving articles from Wikipedia to E2 is very easy. All you have to do is reformat the content appropriately (E2's text formatter makes it easy) and follow the GNU Free Documentation License. Damian Yerrick (yerricde on E2 (http://everything2.com/?node=yerricde)) has provided an example of how to do this in his writeup in bullshit (http://everything2.com/?node=bullshit), which was derived from Wikipedia's article on bullshit. Some recommend using the everyone E2 logon to add wikipedia content.

Final words

We hope you find working on Wikipedia to be fun and rewarding. If you have questions that you can't find the answers to, drop by the Wikipedia:Village pump and ask away. Chances are a friendly Wikipedian or three will have some answers for you.

This article was originally based on an analogous guide for h2g2 researchers.