A place for interlingual (cross-wiki) and international coordination concerning the Wikimedia projects and theWikimedia movement in general, including discussion in languages other than English. This includesrequests (for pan-Wikimedia or other wikis),translations andnews, and the description, documentation, and discussion of real-life activities and facts related to theWikimedia Foundation andaffiliates. See alsoreports,events,outreach, andgrants.
A forum forpersonal essays about Wikimedia projects. Because these are usually not delivered from aneutral point of view, they should be summarized on neutralissues pages frommultiple points of view using formats such asTIPAESA or its subsetIPA. There is a degree of freedom in determining what is related to Wikimedia projects, which makes Meta also ameatball wiki of sorts, discussing such matters as wiki culture and patterns. Documentation of MediaWiki is mainly excluded now (see below). This role includes more formalresearch and related discussion.
Thecategories provide a big-picture representation of Meta's content.
What Meta is not
A disposal site for uncorrectable articles from the different Wikipedias
If you want to build your own wiki, check out thelist of wiki software on Wikipedia.
If you're looking for free webspace, you can find out more about that atweb hosting service on Wikipedia.
A place to describe theMediaWiki software. The software has its own wiki atMediaWiki.org. Content and pages such as these should betransferred.
Community
It has often been discussed whether Meta has a community.What's sure is that it doesn't have a community of its own, separate from the communities of theWikimedia projects: as someone said, «a meta-project—existingfor andabout the other Wikimedia wikis, not as a content project to itself—a community of communities, rather than its own little island community».[1]
This also means that many discussions, processes and other activities happen on Meta, with different participants and people in charge (if any)—for instance, among many, someWikimedia committees, thestewards, the WMF staff forgrants—: none of them, and all of them, is Meta. Meta is the space and the tool fortheir participants to achieve their objectives, not an actor in them; and even less a power over them.
Strictly speaking, however, thereis a community specific to Meta: it's a loose group of people regularly active in some or many such activities (especially as "gardeners"), who care about Meta serving the purpose above, and who are more likely to intervene to ensure it does.[2]
"Metawikian" is a term also sometimes used, to indicate a member of the specific "Meta community", that is the community of Meta regulars who are more often active on Meta, for instance as contributors to its content pages or as facilitators of other discussions and processes.
Origins
Meta-Wiki was first created as "Meta-Wikipedia" in November 2001 to make the English Wikipedia less cluttered, by moving all meta-content (content about the Wikipedia website and its users), as opposed to actual content (encyclopedia articles), to a new wiki. Since its upgrade to Wikipedia's customMediaWiki software, Meta has become a multilingual discussion forum used by all Wikimedia language communities. As the number ofWikimedia projects andtranslations increased, so too did Meta's scope. Meta comprises 154,333 articles. Many of the older pages here are still worded as being specific to Wikipedia, but arguably many now apply to all Wikimedia projects.
