Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia/Finding your way around

To understand Wikipedia, it is easiest to think of this website as having two types of pages: pages that are part of the encyclopedia itself, and pages of the community (used by contributors to help build and operate the encyclopedia).

To find your way around the encyclopedia, either enter a term into the search box at the top-right side of the screen, or go to Wikipedia's table of contents. Clicking on links like this one will take you to relevant or related pages. If you know the name of the topic you are looking for, simply type it into Wikipedia's search box and press Go.

If you would like to look around Wikipedia to see what's on it, keep in mind that many major subjects have a root article on the Contents/Overviews page and an outline on the Contents/Outlines page.

There are some other "Tables of Contents" type pages on Wikipedia. They are:
 * Contents/Portals – portals are digests of excerpts and things to do
 * Contents/Lists – this is a list of item lists (like List of dog breeds)
 * Contents/Glossaries – alphabetical lists of definitions

Wikipedia also has an alphabetical index of all of its articles, and a categorical index of most of them.

Wikipedia's community pages include instructions, help contents, policies and guidelines, processes, discussion forums, places to make requests, pages to report problems, and user pages. These are all pages which we use to develop the encyclopedia and to communicate with each other in that mission. We even have an online newspaper, The Signpost, that reports on developments that affect the encyclopedia and its community, from within and abroad.

Some directories to help you find your way around the community are:
 * Directories


 * Department directory - what gets done where
 * Questions - where to go to ask questions
 * Community portal - Wikipedia's hub of activity. It includes announcements, news, ongoing projects, and task lists.  This is where to find out where your help is needed most.
 * The Signpost - discover what's going on in the Wikimedia community.


 * See also
 * Tips

WikiProjects are social groups of contributors (anyone may join them), who work together as a team to improve Wikipedia. These groups often focus on a specific topic area (for example, women's history) or a specific kind of task (for example, copyediting). WikiProject are one of the central places for editor collaboration and the organization of specific topics. The English Wikipedia currently has over 2,000 WikiProjects and they all have a variety of tasks to get done (for example, Canadian articles to improve).
 * Collaboration groups