Help:Introduction to navigating Wikipedia/3

Introduction Navigating Wikipedia Namespaces The different types of pages Searching and redirects Tricks to find what you want Useful pages Handy pages for editors Summary Review of what you've learned

The search box is one of the most useful features of Wikipedia. It can be found in the top right of the screen. Start typing in it and it will begin to suggest pages you might be looking for — you can click on one to go directly to that page. Alternatively, if you type in an page title and hit Enter, you will also be taken straight to that page. If you type a word or phrase which isn't an article title and hit Enter, then it will take you to the full search page, which lists articles where your search term occurs. You can also reach this page by typing something into the search box, then clicking the "containing..." link at the bottom of the list of suggestions. For example you might do this if you wanted to search for occurrences of the word "Fish" across Wikipedia, rather than be taken straight to the article Fish. The search page also allows you to search the different namespaces which we learnt about earlier. You can choose one of the preset options (Content pages, Multimedia, Help and Project pages, Everything) or you can choose Advanced which allows you to check the individual namespaces you wish to search in. File:Go-jump.svg Some pages on Wikipedia are redirects, they don't have any content of their own but just send you on to another page. For example UK is a redirect to United Kingdom. So if you type UK in the search box and press Enter, it will take you directly to the article on the United Kingdom. (There will also be a small note below the article title saying "Redirected from UK", just so you know what happened.) You can create a redirect yourself by making a page with the code: #REDIRECT [[Destination]] (Note that it's usually a bad idea to create redirects from one namespace into another.) Redirects are particularly useful as shortcuts to internal Wikipedia pages, which could otherwise require quite a lot of typing. For example, Wikipedia:NPOV is a redirect to Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. Even better, the Wikipedia namespace has an alias: WP. So you can get there simply by typing WP:NPOV. This also works for links: WP:NPOV will take you to the same place. Shortcuts to a page are usually listed in a box at the top right of the page. Next >>