Pending order strategy

While the overall trend is toward improvement, it is important to use Wikipedia carefully if it is intended to be used as a research source, since individual articles will, by their nature, vary in quality and maturity. Guidelines and information pages are available

In May 2001, a large number of non-English Wikipedias were launched — in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian.[2] In September,[3] Polish was added, and further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the year, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian versions were announced.

mplete and may be continually edited and improved. Over time, this generally results in an upward trend of quality and a growing consensus over a neutral representation of information.

Strengths, weaknesses, and article quality in Wikipedia
Main pages: Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is so great and Wikipedia:Why Wi

See also: Reliability of Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia
Wikipedia's greatest strengths, weaknesses, and differen

Several mechanisms are in place to help Wikipedia members carry out the important work of crafting a high-quality resource while ma

Wikipedia contributors encourages inclusion of a tremendous amount of content. About 77,000 editors—from expert scholars to casual readers—regularly edit Wikipedia, and these experienced editors often help to create a consistent style throughout the ency

dia to significantly reduce regional and cultural bias found in many other publications, and makes it very difficult for any group to censor and impose bias. A large, diverse editor base also provides access and breadth on subject matter that is otherwise inaccessible or little documented. A large number of editors contributing at any moment also means that Wikipedia can produce encyclopedic articles and resources covering newsworthy events within hours or days of their occurrence. It also means that like any publication, Wikipedia may reflect the cultural, age, socio-economic, and other biases of its contributors. There is no systematic process to make sure that "obviously important" topics are written about, so Wikipedia may contain unexpected oversights and omissions. While most articles may be altered by anyone, in practice editing will be performed by a certain demographic (younger rather than older, male rather than female, rich enough to afford a computer rather than poor, et cetera) and may, therefore, show s

Wikipedia is open to a large contributor base, drawing a large number of editors from diverse backgrounds. This allows Wikipeome bia

Disclaimers
Core
General
Content
Legal
Medical
Risk
Other
Academic use
Non-Wikipedia
v t e
Main page: Wikipedia:Disclaimers
Wikipedia dis

Disclaimersclaimers apply to all pages on Wikipedia. However, the consensus in Wikipedia is to put all disclaimers only as links and at the end of each article. Proposals to have a warning box at the beginning have been rejected. Some do not like the way it looks or that it calls attention to possible errors in Wikipedia.

Main pages: Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Starting an article, Wikipedia:New contributors' help page.
Guide to fixing vandalism: Help:Reverting.

Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia by clicking on the Edit tab in an article. Before beginning to contribute, however, read some handy helping tools such as the tutorial and the policies and guidelines, as well as our welcome page. Creating an account offers many benefits. It is important to realize that in contributing to Wikipedia, users are expected to be civil and neutral, respecting all points of view, and only add verifiable and factual information rather than personal views and opinions. "The five pillars of Wikipedia" cover this approach and are recommended reading before editing. (Vandals are reported via the Administrator Notice Board and may be temporarily blocked from editing Wikipedia.)

Most articles start as stubs, but after many contributions, they can become featured articles. Once the contributor has decided a topic of interest, they may want to request that the article be written (or they could research the issue and write it themselves). Wikipedia has on-going projects, focused on specific topic areas or tasks, which help coordinate editing.