Wikipedia:Contact us/other:
Contact us
You are a student and you wish to use some of our text or images in a school project
Apparently, British school students have been told to request explicit permission from Web site operators before copying content into school projects and reports.
The things is, while such use is likely to be legal, we as an organization cannot grant such explicit permission, even if you email us. Please read Wikipedia:Copyrights for more information.
You wish to protest the content of an article, especially as part of an organized petition drive
The Wikimedia Foundation does not interfere with article content, outside of blatant abuse of the site (posting swearwords or nonsense), and legal issues (we remind you that the Wikimedia Foundation, being located in the US, applies US law).
As a consequence, it is useless to email the Wikipedia help desk in order to tell us that you disagree with the content of such or such article, about alleged political biases, or in order to demand that we remove such or such image.
Petitions demanding such actions will also be disregarded.
If you wish some content should be altered, or removed, you are invited to gain consensus on that issue on the discussion page associated with the article.
You would like Wikipedia articles to include pronunciation keys, or other indications
Please look up whether your suggestion is not already in the Wikipedia manual of style. For instance, the manual of style already invites writers to provide pronunciation keys.
Wikipedia articles are written by unpaid volunteers operating through the Internet. We cannot force them to heed every recommendation of the manual of style.
If your suggestion is not already there, please discuss it at the appropriate discussion page. Please make sure to read the top of that page, since some suggestions come often and have already been evaluated.
We do not accept suggestions by email, because our volunteers at the email help desk cannot act as proxies on your behalf for a discussion. That is, you will have to defend your suggestion yourself.
You received a mysterious email from us or you think you have been subscribed to a mailing-list without asking so
- Some spammers send out vast amounts of advertisements using fake addresses, sometimes including addresses @wikipedia.org or @wikimedia.org. We have nothing to do with it and cannot do anything about it. Please do not write to us about it, even to warn us.
- Our mailing-list system always requires confirmation before subscribing people. Therefore, it is impossible that you have been subscribed without your consent. Our mailing-lists have names such as wikien-l
 lists.wikimedia.org or similar. If you seem to receive mailing-lists talking of Wikipedia but coming from other kinds of addresses, we have nothing to do with them.
Our search engine is insufficient, it should do spelling correction etc.
The Wikimedia Foundation has very limited resources in terms of money and personnel; redesigning the internal search engine ("MediaWiki search") would be a significant endeavour.
However, Wikipedia also offers searches through third-party engines, which tend to support many features that users request. On the search page, you may select other search engines (Google...) including some engines specially adapted for Wikipedia (Exalead, etc.).
Problems viewing the pages (fonts etc.)
Such problems can include: fonts are too small, unreadable etc.
In almost all cases, these are due to problems on the user's machine, including preferences in the browser (fonts, colors, image views, proxy servers etc.). Please try looking before contacting us. It seems that certain popular Web browsers have bad default settings for "Unicode", "ISO-10646-1" or "UTF-8" page viewing, in particular too small fonts; we suggest you fiddle with these particular font settings.
Think of the following: such problems, if on our servers' side, would be likely to affect hundreds of thousands of users. It is thus very unlikely that you would be the first person to advise us of such an issue.
If you still want to contact us (see address below), please give the following details:
- browser (Internet Explorer vs Firefox vs Konqueror vs...) and version number
- operating system (Microsoft Windows vs Mac OS X vs GNU/Linux vs...) and version
- any special settings that you have
- username on Wikipedia, if you have an account
- the kind of text you were looking at, if applicable, especially if the text is in a non Latin script (Chinese, Thai, Hebrew, etc.)
- possibly, a screenshot of the display.
We just cannot process requests such as "your main page is garbled" because, either we have a general problem and we already know, or it is a problem depending on certain parameters and it displays fine on our machines.
Bugs in the MediaWiki software
File a bug report on Bugzilla: bugzilla.wikimedia.org (you will need to create a free login there)
Donations
See our donations page.
Problem with an article about you or someone you represent
See our special page for such matters.
Other problems with articles
Please see Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Factual error.
Error messages when searching, editing or viewing articles
All errors are logged, and the web site is closely monitored. Technical staff are aware of these problems whenever they happen. Please do not email us regarding them.
Article does not appear when searching
The database for searching is updated approximately every 4-6 weeks. Changes do not appear there right away.
Similar constraints apply to Google and other external search engines: their databases get updated every so often. We have no control about their operations and cannot force them to update themselves.
Partnerships, joint ventures, and governmental and regulatory affairs
Contact the Wikimedia Foundation.
Other problems or questions related to Wikipedia
- Routine editing disputes are not resolved via e-mail. See the dispute resolution page.
- Please do not email us about mistakes in articles unless the article is about you or someone you represent. Instead, fix it yourself or use the talk page to leave a message for other editors.
- If you use a spam filter, be sure that it will allow our reply to reach you.
- If your question is already explained on this page or Wikipedia:Contact us, or if you don't have a good summary as the email topic and first sentence, your email may be deleted without response. Please bear in mind that this service is operated by volunteers.
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