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Welcome to Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! Meta-Wiki, within Wikimedia also called Meta, is a wiki for coordination of Wikimedia projects.

1 Origins
2 Current purpose
3 What Meta-Wiki is not
4 Meta policies
5 See also

[edit] Origins

It was first created as "Meta-Wikipedia" in November 2001 as a way to keep Wikipedia cleaner by moving all meta-content (content about the Wikipedia website and its users), as opposed to actual content (encyclopedia articles), to a new wiki.

You could interpret this as either:

Wikipedia's users and their politics aren't important enough to deserve Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia's users and their politics are important enough to warrant a whole new wiki for this purpose.

As the number of Wikimedia projects and translations increased, so did the scope of Meta. As a consequence of its history, many of the older pages here are still worded as being specific to Wikipedia, but arguably many now apply to all Wikimedia projects.

In the same way, the term "Wikipedian" should often be interpreted as "Wikimedian". Metawikian is also often used.

[edit] Current purpose

It currently serves several distinct roles:

Discussion and formulation of the Wikimedia projects, and in particular policy discussion
A forum for personal essays about the Wikimedia projects (not necessarily from a neutral point of view)
A place to discuss interlanguage co-ordination issues concerning the Wikimedia projects

The Meta-Wiki currently serves as one of the major avenues of discussion for Wikimedians, the others being the Mailing lists and the talk pages of individual articles.

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

[edit] What Meta-Wiki is not

Almost all Wikimedia wikis have a "What <this wiki> is not" page that describes inappropriate content for that site.

Meta is not

A disposal site for uncorrectable articles from the different Wikipedias, and it is not a hosting services for personal essays of all types. If you're looking for a wiki-based community, check out Wikia, or MeatballWiki's community list If you're looking for free webspace, you can find a list here. If you want to build your own wiki, check out the list of wiki engines.
A place to describe the MediaWiki software. The software has its own wiki at http://www.mediawiki.org.