Why YSK: The English Wikipedia’s front page (the “main page”) offers a surprisingly diverse, compact, and accessible way to find an interesting topic you might not have heard of before. This assumes you’re a reader only and don’t care about editing.

A lot of this is surface-level, but I’m trying not to assume anything – while hopefully giving a bit of “here’s what you’ll find if you click two links deeper” and professional bias opinion. Feel free to skip around to the sections that you find more immediately interesting, since they’re largely independent.

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(For accessibility, I’ll be doing this with the Vector (2022) skin, the default. It’s similar if you use Vector (2010) like I do, but there’s a good chance this introduction isn’t very useful if you do, you fucking nerd.)

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I’m going to break the front page into six regions:

• Toolbar (ignoring since it’s general-purpose and present on every page)
• Header
• Left/right sidebar (ignoring for the same reason as the toolbar)
• Content
• Directory

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Header

The header (starting past the toolbar at the top, which appears on every page) is a little “Welcome to Wikipedia” message. Besides linking to articles like “Wikipedia” and “English language”, it has the job of linking to the official introduction to Wikipedia under the text “anyone can edit” and linking to the page “Special:Statistics” when it links the numbers of editors and articles.

• The introduction to Wikipedia is designed to be helpful for editors and non-editors. The “policies and guidelines” and “navigating Wikipedia” introductions can help readers learn to identify why material is written the way it is, discern bad articles from good ones, and easily find what they’re looking for. These are very short introductions but can be used as pseudo-directories to more in-depth information.
• “Special:Statistics” gives general statistics about Wikipedia (many of which, like the number of “oversighters” or “stewards” or “bureaucrats” will be gibberish to anyone who’s never worked on the project) and also links to external statistics which are much more detailed.

Like every article, you can find a “Talk” page on the upper left, where people discuss the page itself. You’ll also find options for:

• “Read” – Duh.
• “View Source” – Normally reserved for “Edit”, but only administrators can edit the front page. (Source is normally much more readable than this; see next point.)
• “View History” – You won’t find much of interest here, even if you care about the main page’s history. Nearly all of the main page is transcluded from templates which are edited elsewhere. Looking back at even the past 100 edits brings us to October 2018 (average about one edit per month).

Note: Ignore the statistics like “revisions since [page creation date]”, etc. That’s just an extension that makes editing a bit easier.

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Contents

The contents of the front page are these six boxes (from left to right):

• “Today’s featured article”
• “In the news”
• “Did you know …”
• “On this day”
• “From today’s featured list”
• “Today’s featured picture”

I used to ignore all of these, and I didn’t appreciate them until I decided one-by-one over years to give each a fair shake by just trying them for a couple days (and not approaching them from my usual completionist mindset).

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Today’s featured article

“Featured article” is the highest status an article can attain, and it means it meets strict, heavily scrutinized criteria. A featured article has undergone an open peer-review process where, at minimum, several very experienced editors attempt over a lengthy discussion to find any possible flaws. In total, these represent about 0.09% of all articles, and there’s an ongoing drive to reexamine old ones to make sure they still hold up.

“Today’s featured article” (TFA) is a daily slot chosen via editors nominating articles already with featured status and other editors discussing, so it’s selection after an already-selective process. They are well worth your time if you have any interest in the subject, and they’re simply better than what you’ll find in a professional publication like Britannica.

The content itself consists of a link to the article (in bold) a short introduction (usually a trimmed version of the article’s lead section), an image of or representing the subject, “recently featured” articles (in descending chronological order), an “Archive” of all the TFAs, “By email” for a subscription, “More featured articles” to see all the featured articles grouped by subject matter, and “About” for basically what I just said in fewer words.

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In the news

Wikipedia is not the news, but Wikipedia often documents breaking news when its subject obviously has more than passing notability. Typically, “in the news” (ITN) consists of four to five bullet points of news stories in descending chronological order. Each story gets a single-sentence description (a “blurb”) along with a link to the event itself (in bold) and links to subjects involved. One story gets its own picture, although this isn’t always the top one.

There are criteria for these, but as these are current events, the standards only enforce a baseline level of quality. The section is surprisingly globally representative. It will also usually safely cover blatantly major news stories, like: “Mojtaba Khamenei is elected Supreme Leader of Iran following the assassination of his father, Ali Khamenei.” However, it isn’t a replacement for news publications because 1) it will miss most of your local and regional stories, 2) it only covers five-ish events at a time, and 3) there is latency.

The “Ongoing” list covers current events which have either been ongoing for a long time or which will foreseeably continue for a long time. Especially for protracted events, there’ll be a separate “timeline” article so readers can catch up.

“Recent deaths” does what it says on the tin: it lists people (with Wikipedia articles of some baseline quality) who usually died within the last couple weeks-ish. The quality ranges anywhere from “fine” to “excellent”, typically more toward the former.

“More current events” takes you to the current events portal (see ‘content portals’ later under ‘Other areas of Wikipedia’) which has muuuuuuuch more coverage of current events. “Nominate an article” is kind of inviting you to do so, but it’s also inviting you to watch the shitshow that goes on behind the scenes.

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Did you know …

“Did you know …” (DYK) is a trivia section that’s mainly designed as a hook to several articles (one of which gets an image). Like the previous two, it’s done via a nomination process; an article can only be nominated seven days after it’s created, expanded by 5x, or promoted to Good Article status* (these are the formal rules). Often, you’ll find a niche subject that someone very recently put a ton of passion into researching and writing about.

The hook is supposed to be “likely to be perceived as unusual or intriguing by readers with no special knowledge or interest” (if it’s about a creative work, it must be about a real-world fact). The subjects for DYK are usually extremely random, and the order doesn’t represent quality. I think reading one per day is a lot of fun.

The “Archive” section lists every DYK, “Start a new article” takes you to a page which introduces writing an article from scratch,** and “Nominate an article” shows you all the behind-the-scenes goodness that goes into getting these selected.

* “Good article” status is a rung down from “featured article” status (discussed above). It’s peer-reviewed by exactly one editor against less stringent criteria. Still considered quite good.

** If you’re considering creating an article, please don’t unless you’ve done some editing, and please read this page in its entirety first; it’s extremely concise relative to how much you should know by the time you create an article.

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On this day

“On this day” is one for the history buffs. Underappreciated, I think, is that it links to the day itself – Wikipedia maintains an article for all 366 calendar days, each of which documents events, births, deaths, and holidays. If there’s a holiday of any reasonable import, it’ll be shown alongside the date in “On this day”.

There’ll normally be 4 or 5 historical events on a bulleted list in ascending chronological order. Because a specific date needs to be known, these are typically distributed from about 1500 onward, but there are plenty much older than that. Each event will have the year linked, which Wikipedia also keeps articles on. Because there’s such a deep pool to choose from, these articles are normally quite high-quality. Although an article can be about an event from any year, even in the 21st century, diversity is prioritized.

Below the events is a list of births and deaths, mixed together and in ascending chronological order. These have the same quality standards as the events list. If you’re looking for biographies, these are more likely to be high-quality than the “Recent deaths” under “In the news”.

“More anniversaries” just gives you the Wikipedia articles for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. “Archive” gives you the “On this day” for all 366 calendar days. This section doesn’t technically rotate every year. Rather, these are pages that can be changed at any time. So the “March 13” page in 2027 could theoretically be the same as today. By convention, though, they’re changed to avoid repetition.

* Pope Francis got mentioned today in both DYK and OTD. I promise Wikipedia isn’t obsessed with Pope Francis.

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Today’s featured list

Much of the information on featured articles (above) applies here. Wikipedia categorizes lists separately from articles due to their major difference in format and function. Featured lists (of which there are about 4750) aren’t just bulleted lists of the material or summaries of each item. Instead, they start with prose which introduces the subject and information you may need to understand the list.

The list is normally presented as a table with an image of and relevant information about each item. For lists with especially many items (e.g. list of California tornadoes), the table is usually dropped in favor of a bulleted list with summaries, but even in that example, you get statistics and graphics to summarize the items. All of the information is as well-cited as it would be in a featured article.

Featured lists are great unto themselves, and, in most cases, they also act as a great directory by linking to the article for each item, so you can use it as a way to find one that interests you and read specifically about it.

Today’s featured list is chosen similar to today’s featured article. The section has a summary of the overall subject being listed, an image of a representative of the list (including a link to that item’s article), and recently featured lists (in descending chronological order).

The “Archive” is a list of all TFLs, and “More featured lists” has all the featured lists grouped by subject matter.

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Today’s featured picture

(Also called “photo of the day”)

Most of Wikipedia’s media is pulled from Wikimedia Commons, and a featured picture is normally a picture that’s been uploaded to Commons and then uploaded separately to Wikipedia to receive featured image status there. Don’t ask me; I don’t know. Contrary to their name, they’re sometimes videos rather than still images.

Bottom line is that these are really good free media which capture a specific subject very well. If you’re solely interested in the eye candy, I recommend featured pictures on Commons, but these are nicer to me overall because they have an accompanying article. The article quality itself will range from “fine” to “excellent”, because the image is the focus, but an image, to me, is still more enriching with context.

Unlike TFA and TFL, although images need featured status, there isn’t a second nomination process; instead, they get a spot on the main page in roughly the order they were first considered featured (looks like about 2 years’ delay right now).

The section on the main page will have the image, a short summary of the subject’s article (like TFA and TFL), a link to said article (in bold), image credit, “Recently featured” pictures (in descending chronological order), an “Archive” of all the past today’s featured pictures, and “More featured pictures” with every featured picture grouped by subject matter.

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Directory

The directory after “Today’s featured picture” is pretty much static.

Other areas of Wikipedia

“Other areas of Wikipedia” gives you reasonable descriptions of the items it lists, but I’ll try to add something.

• Community portal – Just a big fuck-off list of things that editors might find useful or interesting, but some of it can be useful to the curious non-editor, which I guess I can describe (I’ll skip the ones I think are pretty much only of use to editors).
  • The Teahouse (listed separately in “Other areas of Wikipedia”) is a friendly place where newcomers can get help; usually this help concerns non-technical editing, but anything you’d want to do as a reader is covered there too.
  • The Reference Desk isn’t just for editors. Obviously we massively appreciate if you contribute what you learn in your research to the encyclopedia (if it’s applicable), but if you’re really struggling to find a source for something, the reference desk is theoretically open to anybody.
  • WikiProjects. It’s kind of wild to claim non-editors might be interested in this, but seeing the inner workings of some fields can, in my insanely biased seasoned opinion, be interesting. “Women in Red” is one that comes to mind.
  • The Signpost is Wikipedia’s newspaper about itself. It’s well-written and often surprisingly critical, and like usual, anyone can contribute.
  • “Newest featured content” shows the newest of the best of the best Wikipedia has to offer, namely featured articles, lists, topics (a collection of articles/lists around one subject), and pictures.
• Village pump – For technical stuff; no non-editor will ever need to be here.
• Site news – Nothing of importance to non-editors that The Signpost doesn’t cover.
• Teahouse – See point in ‘Community portal’.
• Help desk – Nominally different from the Teahouse (the latter is “for beginners”), but I don’t think so in practice. Either way, non-editing questions are probably basic enough for the Teahouse.
• Reference desk – See point in ‘Community portal’.
• Content portals – These are actually really cool and don’t get nearly enough love. Portals are functionally topic-specific front pages to Wikipedia. So for example, the volcanoes portal is the front page of Wikipedia if you want to use it as an encyclopedia of volcanology.

Wikipedia’s sister projects

The “Wikipedia’s sister projects” section lists all of the sister projects under the Wikimedia Foundation. Yes, these exist; yes, they have a ton of work put into them. They have varying levels of “usefulness”, ranging from what I would consider “just hanging on” for Wikinews to “fun curiosity” like Wikivoyage to “occassionally practical” like Wikiquote to “a serious public good” like Wikimedia Commons to “I use this at least once a day” like Wiktionary to “probably as used societally as Wikipedia” like Wikidata. I highly recommend looking at at least one of them; their contributors work just as hard as Wikipedia’s, if not moreso.

Other Wikipedias

Lastly, you’ll see non-English Wikipedias. A lot of these are very robust, and if you’re curious about a more niche language, there’s a dropdown on the bottom-right that lets you select from 346 languages. If you’re trying to learn about something fairly regional and can translate, the corresponding Wikipedia’s article is often better than the English Wikipedia’s (or even exists, for that matter). If you’re reading an article about a subject from a non-English region, you can always check the sidebar and see what it looks like in that language too. Keep in mind different languages have different editorial standards.

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Follow-up questions welcome; I tried and probably failed to overcome nose blindness when considering relevant information.