Glossary
Note: while the definitions below may be useful for understanding and communicating on project and discussion pages, and with edit summaries, remember to explain jargon in encyclopedic articles, and write them in language which is readily understandable without specific knowledge of the Bahaikipedia project.
This is a glossary of terms commonly used on Bahaikipedia. For more help, see Bahaikipedia:Help.
- 3RR
- See three-revert rule
- Ad
- Advertisement.
- Admin
- Short for Administrator. A user with extra technical privileges for "custodial" work on Bahaikipedia - specifically, deleting and protecting pages, and blocking users. Also used: Sysop.
- Anon
- Abbreviation for "anonymous user". This is what you are if you have not logged in.
- Also used: IP user.
- 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. Bahaikipedia:How to edit a page#Links,_URLs,_images.
- Arbitration
- The final step in the dispute resolution process.
- Article
- An encyclopedia entry. All articles are pages, but there are also pages that are not articles, such as this one.
- Autoconfirm
- A newly registered user is still subject to some of the same restrictions as anonymous users - for example, inability to move articles or edit semiprotected pages, although some restrictions, such as the restriction on anonymous users creating pages, are lifted. When a user is autoconfirmed, these restrictions end. Currently a new user must wait four days to be autoconfirmed, and there is no minimum number of edits required.
- Ban
- Banning is the extreme, last resort action by which someone is prevented from editing Bahaikipedia for a certain length of time, limited or unlimited. Typical reasons for banning include a long history of biased edits (violation of NPOV), 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 judged to be the same person can be blocked without any further reason. See also: Block.
- Banner
- A banner is a template that is placed across the top of an article's talk page or at the top of a category to indicate specific details relating to the article or category's maintenance. They are often specifically linked to a WikiProject to indicate that the article or category falls within the jurisdiction of that project, but may also be related to article maintenance or protection. "Banner" may also simply mean the administrator who bans a troublesome editor.
- Be Bold
- The exhortation that users should try to improve articles and fix mistakes themselves by editing, rather than complain about them. See Bahaikipedia:Be bold in updating pages.
- 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 vandalized 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. Newcomers often mistake blanking for deletion.
- Block
- Action by a sysop, removing from a certain IP-number or username the ability to edit Bahaikipedia. Usually done against addresses that have engaged in vandalism or against users who have been banned. See also: Ban.
- BLP
- Abbreviation for Bahaikipedia:Biographies of living persons, the official policy on articles on living people.
- Bot
- A program that automatically or semi-automatically adds or edits Bahaikipedia-pages.
- See also Bahaikipedia:Bots, Vandalbot.
- BPOV
- Bahá'í point of view, or the agreement to present possibly subjective content in an objective, neutral, and substantiated manner; while being complaiant with the Bahá'í view, 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 Bahaikipedia's BPOV policy.
- 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 Bahaikipedia Administrator who has been entrusted with promoting users to sysops.
- Cat
- "Category" or "Categorize".
- Category
- Also used: cat
- A category is a collection of pages automatically formed by the Bahaikipedia servers by analyzing category tags in articles. Category tags are in the form [[Category:Countries]]. The part after the ":" is the name of the Category. Adding a category tag causes a link to the category and any super-categories to go to the bottom of the page. As stated, it also results in the page being added to the category listing. A list of basic categories to browse through can be found at Category:Categories.
- Checkuser
- An access level that lets users with it see the IP addresses of logged-in users, usually to determine if someone is using sockpuppets to violate policy. Currently only granted to Administrators.
- Cleanup
- The process of repairing articles that contain errors of grammar, are poorly formatted, or contain irrelevant material. Cleanup generally requires only editing skills, as opposed to the specialized knowledge that is more often called for by pages needing attention.
- To hide from normal display whilst retaining the material for editors to see. This is done by inserting the characters <!-- at the start of the comment text and --> at the end. These character strings are used to delimit comments in HTML code.
- One of Bahaikipedia's main pages. It can often be found on the sidebar (on the left side in most skins), and is a page that lists the collaboration of the week, outstanding tasks that need to be addressed, and several other useful bits of information and resources. The Community Portal is useful for picking an article or topic to work on or read.
- Contribs
- Short for contributions. These are the edits that a user has made.
- Copyedit
- A change to an article that only affects formatting, grammar, and other presentational aspects.
- Copyvio
- Also used: copyviol, and occasionally CV.
- Copyright violation. Usually used in an edit summary when deleting copyrighted material added without complying with Bahaikipedia copyright verification procedures.
- See also Bahaikipedia:Copyrights.
- 'Crat
- Short for Bureaucrat, used only occasionally.
- CV
- See Copyvio.
- dab
- See Disambiguation.
- Data dump
- To import material from outside sources into Bahaikipedia without editing, formatting and linking (wikifying). This is frowned upon.
- See also Wikify.
- Dead-end page
- Page that has no links to existing other pages, except interlanguage links. Special:Deadendpages lists them, but this function is disabled in some Wikimedia projects.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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 Bahaikipedia:Disambiguation.
- Disambiguation page
- A page that contains various meanings of a word, and refers to the pages where the various meanings are defined. In cases when there is a prevailing meaning of the term, disambiguation pages are named "subject (disambiguation)".
- 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. Double redirects are generated when moving a page which has redirects leading to it.
- DYK
- An abbreviation for Template:Did you know.
- Edit conflict
- Also, "edconf". Appears if an edit is made to the page between when one opens it for editing and completes the edit. The later edit doesn't take effect, but the editor is prompted to merge their edit with the earlier one. Edit conflicts shouldn't be confused with edit wars.
- Edit summary
- The contents of the "Summary:" field below the edit box on the "Edit this page" page.
- See also Help:Edit summary.
- Editor
- Anyone who writes or modifies articles in a Bahaikipedia. That includes you.
- Edit war
- Also used: revert war.
- Two or more parties continually making their preferred changes to a page, each persistently undoing the changes made by the opposite party. Generally, an edit war is the result of an argument on a talk page that could not be resolved. Edit wars are forbidden and lead to blocks.
- See also Bahaikipedia:Three-revert rule.
- External link
- Also used: ext. ln, ext lk, or extlink.
- A link to a website not owned by Bahaikipedia. The alternatives are an internal link, wikilink or free link within Bahaikipedia.
- See also Bahaikipedia:External links.
- FA
- Featured article, an article that has been selected as representing "the best of Bahaikipedia".
- FP
- Featured pictures, a picture that has been selected as representing "the best of Bahaikipedia".
- Free link
- A link pointing to another page within Bahaikipedia or its sister projects by using the wiki markup double square-brackets "[[" and "]]". Sometimes they are referred to as wikilinks or internal links. Unless otherwise specified in a user's monobook.css, 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.
- GFDL
- GNU Free Documentation License. Bahaikipedia articles are released under this license.
- See also Bahaikipedia: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
- GNU General Public License. Bahaikipedia's software (Mediawiki) is released under this license.
- History
- All previous versions of an article, from its creation to its current state. Also called page history.
- See also: Help:Page history
- Inclusionist
- A user who is of the opinion that Bahaikipedia should contain as much information as possible, often regardless of presentation or notability.
- Infobox
- A consistently formatted table which is present in articles with a common subject.
- Internal link
- See free link.
- Janitor
- See Admin.
- Kill / Kill with fire / Kill with a stick
- Dysphemisms for "deleting" a page, expressing some disgust for the existence of the page.
- Link rot
- Because websites change over time, many external links from Bahaikipedia to other sites cannot be guaranteed to remain active. When an article's links becomes outdated and no longer work, the article is said to have undergone link rot.
- Link
- See Help:Contents/Links.
- m
- On the Recent changes page, m (lower case, bold) indicates a minor edit.
- Main Page
- The page to which every user not specifying an article is redirected.
- Mediation
- An attempt by a third party to resolve an edit war or other conflict between users.
- MediaWiki
- The software behind Bahaikipedia, as well as several projects not related to Wikimedia, and a namespace.
- Merge
- Taking the text of two pages, and turning it into a single page. See Help:Merging and moving pages
- Mirror
- A website other than Bahaikipedia that uses content original to Bahaikipedia as a source for at least some of its content.
- Move
- Changing the name and location of an article because of a misspelling, violation of naming convention, misnomer, or inaccuracy. Involves either renaming the page or moving it and constructing a redirect to keep the original link intact.
- N
- On the Recent changes page, N (upper case, bold) indicates a new page or article.
- Namespace
- A way to classify pages. Bahaikipedia has namespaces for encyclopedia articles, pages about Bahaikipedia (project namespace), user pages (User:), special pages (Special:), template pages (Template:), and talk pages (Talk:, Bahaikipedia talk:, and User talk:), among others.
- See also Bahaikipedia:Namespace.
- Newbie test
- An edit made by a newcomer to Bahaikipedia, just to see if "Edit this page" really does what it sounds like. Newcomers should use Bahaikipedia:Sandbox for this purpose.
- See also Bahaikipedia:Introduction.
- NOR
- The Bahaikipedia policy that No Original Research is allowed in citing sources in articles.
- Null edit
- a null edit is made when an editor opens the edit window of a document then re-saves the file without having made any text changes. This is sometimes done to change the functioning of templates (which require articles containing them to be edited in order for any changes to take effect).
- Original research
- In Bahaikipedia, original research (sometimes abbreviated OR) is material added to articles that has not been published already by a reputable source. As an encyclopedia, Bahaikipedia is not the appropriate place to publish original research, nor can it be used for substantiation of article content.
- Orphan
- A page with no links from other pages. You can view lists of orphaned articles and images.
- Page
- Any individual topic within Bahaikipedia; 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.
- PD
- Material not presently under copyright and thus available for use without permission.
- Personal attack
- A comment that is not directed at content, but rather insults, demeans or threatens another editor (or a group of editors) personally, with obvious malice. To maintain a friendly and productive atmosphere, personal attacks are forbidden per Bahaikipedia policy and may be grounds for blocking in serious and/or repeated cases.
- See also: Bahaikipedia:No personal attacks
- Piped link
- A link where the text displayed in the article is not the name of the link target. 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 the editor in certain circumstances.
- POTD
- Picture of the day
- POV warrior
- An editor who aggressively distorts coverage of certain topics to suit his/her biases despite community norms of neutrality and the Bahaikipedia policy of NPOV.
- Project namespace
- The project namespace is a namespace dedicated to providing information about Bahaikipedia. Pages in the project namespace always start with "Bahaikipedia:".
- Protected page
- This term indicates a page that cannot be edited except by administrators, or in some cases, established users. Usually this is done to cool down an edit war.
- Random page
- The Random page link is on the left of each page for most skins. It will take you to a Bahaikipedia article that is chosen by a computer algorithm without any deliberate pattern or meaning to the choice.
- RC
- An abbreviation for Recent changes
- Reader-facing template
- See: Bahaikipedia:Bahá'í point of view
- Recent changes
- A dynamically generated page (found at Special:Recentchanges) that lists all edits in descending chronological order.
- Redirect
- Also used: redir.
- A page title which, when requested, merely sends the reader to another page.
- See also Bahaikipedia:Redirect.
- Render
- In the context of the World Wide Web, rendering is the operation performed by the user's browser of converting the web document (in HTML, XML, etc. plus image and other included files) into the visible page on the user's screen.
- Repoint, also "retarget"
- To change the destination article of a redirect, either to avoid a double redirect or to change the redirect so that it leads to a more appropriate article.
- Revert
- An edit that reverses edits made by someone else, thus restoring the prior version.
- Revert war
- See Edit war.
- Rollback
- To change a page back to the version before the last edit. Sysops have special tools to do this more easily.
- 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 Bahaikipedia:Sandbox. In addition to the public sandbox, users may create private sandboxes on subpages of their user page, e.g. User:Username/Sandbox.
- Section editing
- Using one of the '[edit]' links to the right of each section's title, one can get an edit window containing only the section of the page that's below the [edit] link. This makes it (hopefully) easier to find the exact spot where one wants to edit, and helps you avoiding an edit conflict. You can turn section editing off in your preferences under the "Enable section editing via [edit] links" option.
- Self-revert
- An editor self-reverts when he or she reverts or undoes an edit that he or she had previously made. This may be because the editor was merely making a test, or because the editor later realised his or her edit was faulty, or because he or she wishes to show good faith after a three-revert rule violation.
- Shortcut
- A redirect used within Wikispace to enable editors to get to a project page more quickly.
- Skin
- The appearance theme in Special:Preferences. Currently, seven are available: Chick, Classic, Cologne Blue, Monobook, MySkin, Nostalgia, and Simple.
- sp
- Short for spelling correction. Used in edit summaries.
- Split
- Separating a single page into two or more pages.'
- Strike out
- Placement of text in strikethrough (HTML <s></s>) tags. This is very rarely used in articles, but is relatively common in votes and discussions when a contributor changes his opinion. As not to cause confusion, the outdated comments are struck out (
like this). Generally, one should strike out only one's own comments.
- Stub
- An article usually consisting of one short paragraph or less.
- Subpage
- A page connected to a parent page, such as [[Somepage/Arguments]]. You can only create subpages in certain namespaces. Do not use subpages in the main article space.
- See also Bahaikipedia:Subpages.
- Sysop
- See Admin.
- Tag
- In addition to its usual HTML meanings, a tag can simply mean a category or a template that will assign an article to a category (most often a stub template). "To tag an article" means to either add a category or a stub template.
- Talk page
- A page reserved for discussion of the page with which it is associated, such as the article page. Very confusingly, the link to a talk page is labelled "discussion". All pages within Bahaikipedia (except pages in the Special namespace, and talk pages themselves!) have talk pages attached to them.
- See also Bahaikipedia:Talk page.
- Task force
- A smaller group of editors in a WikiProkect dedicated to a more specific field within the scope of the parent project. Task forces are located on WikiProject subpages. They generally have a less formal bureaucratic structure than full-fledged WikiProjects.
- Template
- A way of automatically including the contents of one page within another page, used for boilerplate text, navigational aids, etc.
- See also: Bahaikipedia:Template namespace.
- Three-revert rule
- A rule whereby no one is allowed to revert a single article more than three times in one day (with a few exceptions). See Bahaikipedia:Three-revert rule.
- top
- On a user's list of contributions, (top) indicates that the article has not been edited by anyone else since the user last edited it.
- Troll
- A user who incites or engages in disruptive behavior (trolling). There are some people who enjoy causing conflict, and there are those who make a hobby of it. However, these are few in number and one should always assume good faith in other editors. Calling someone a troll in a dispute is a bad idea; it has an effect similar to calling someone a Nazi – no further meaningful debate is likely to occur.
- Tyop
- A cute misspelling of typo. Used as an edit summary when correcting typos.
- 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.
- Userbox
- A small box which is stored in the template space, and which includes a small piece of information about a user (such as "This user likes cheese"). Many users use userboxes on their user page, although some look down upon it.
- See also Userboxes on wikipedia.
- User page
- A personal page for Bahaikipedians. Most people use their pages to introduce themselves and to keep various personal notes and lists. They are also used by Bahaikipedians to communicate with each other via the user talk pages. User pages are not generated automatically by the process of Registration. A user page is linked to as [[User:David|David]] and appears as David.
- See also Bahaikipedia:User page.
- 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 Bahaikipedias in a timespan of only minutes.
- Vandalism
- Deliberate defacement of Bahaikipedia pages. This can be by deleting text or writing nonsense, bad language, et cetera.
- Watchlist
- A set of pages selected by the user, who can then click on My watchlist to see recent changes to those pages.
- 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 Bahaikipedia. Noun: Wikification. Sometimes shortened to wfy.
- See also Bahaikipedia:How to edit a page
- Wikilink
- A link to another Bahaikipedia page, as opposed to an external link.
- 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 Bahaikipedia software is done in the wikitext, as opposed to searching by external major search engines, which is done in the resulting text. The size of a page is the size of the wikitext.
- See also Bahaikipedia:How to edit a page
- WikiProject
- An active group of Bahaikipedia editors working together to improve a specific group of articles, usually those on one or more related topics. This often involves an attempt to standardize the content and Style of the articles using an agreed standard format.
- Wikispam
- Articles or sections created to promote a product or other meme. Spamming can also include adding extraneous or irrelevant links to promote an outside site, particularly for commercial purposes.
- ø
- The term ø is sometimes used in edit summaries to indicate a null edit.
- !=
- "Is not equal to". This usage comes from the relational operator in such languages as C.
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