About page

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An about page on a wiki site is a meta page that describes the actual wiki; its purpose, its culture (values and norms), and usually its ownership, and a little about its history (founding date and founder, etc). As part of describing the wiki's purpose, the about page may also summarise the wiki's inclusion policy, and what the wiki is and what it is not. It may also contain a WikiNode. From one wiki site to another, some about pages may just be a brief one or two line summary, whilst on other wiki sites, it could be a long, detailed, and extensive page, and may also include encyclopaedic citations and a bibliography.

Wiki sites may encourage new people to read the about page before contributing, so that they do not inadvertently violate expectations (e.g. by posting content that is outside the scope of the wiki, or breaching local etiquette when interacting with other contributors).

By default, MediaWiki-powered wiki sites link to the wiki's about page from every page on the entire wiki site; in the footer of the page on most skins, usually second link from the left after the Privacy policy link (on wikis using a left-to-right interface language, whereas it is found second from right on right-to-left interface language sites). Some wiki sites also link to the about page from their main page; other wiki sites may create the actual about page to redirect to the wiki main page.

On WikiIndex

Here on this WikiIndex wiki site, our main article infobox template for wiki sites allows the inclusion for the URL of a wiki's about page as a standard parameter.

See also