Meta, or Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki, at meta.wikimedia.org, is a wiki-based web site that is auxiliary for coordination of all the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Created as Meta-Wikipedia in November 2001, it now serves several distinct roles:

1. Discussion and formulation of the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, and in particular policy discussion.
2. A forum for personal essays that are not necessarily NPOV.
3. A place to organize and prepare content, to discuss interlanguage co-ordination issues.
4. A place to coordinate the development process.
5. A help guide to using the MediaWiki software when the help is not in the MediaWiki website.
6. A place for co-ordination of anti-spam and small wiki anti-vandalism.

Meta currently serves as one of the major avenues of discussion for Wikimedians including Wikipedians, the others being the mailing lists, the IRC channels, and the talk pages of individual articles and users. Meta is an independent and autonomous project from the English language Wikipedia and thus has its own policies and customs, which often differ from those here. Pending full implementation of unified login, users and administrators will need to create another account at Meta.

Originally focused on the English language version of Wikipedia, Meta has, since its upgrade to Wikipedia's custom MediaWiki software, become a multilingual discussion forum used by all Wikimedia language communities.

[edit] Referring to Meta

Some types of discussion should be referred to appropriate places on Meta.

• Issues referred from other Wikipedias, such as help requests relating to policy, should be referred to meta:We need your help. English editors are encouraged to follow such referrals to Meta and provide input there, as Meta may receive much less traffic than English Wikipedia.

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Canonicalization
• Wikipedia:Wikinews

[edit] External links

• Meta main page
• Meta's "About"