User talk:John M Potter

Welcome!
Hello, and welcome to Wiktionary. I thank you for your contributions and hope you enjoy contributing here.

If you have edited Wikipedia, you probably already know some basics, but Wiktionary operates in a very different manner from Wikipedia and you will have a better experience if you do not assume the two are similar in culture. Please remember that despite your experience on Wikipedia, you are inexperienced here. While you do not need to be an expert, or anything close to one, to contribute, please be as respectful of local policies and community practices as you can: being bold is not encouraged where it goes against any of those practices. Be aware that well-meaning Wikipedians have unfortunately found themselves blocked in the past for their actions taken without forethought. (You can get more of a glimpse of the Wiktionary mindset at Help:Interacting with humans.)

Our two main policy documents are Entry layout explained ("ELE") and Criteria for inclusion ("CFI"). ELE describes our standard layout; unlike on Wikipedia, all entries must follow this layout, even if they are not yet complete. (You can get a feel for our standard layout by looking at existing entries.) CFI describes what is allowed in the dictionary, and disallows (for example) most names of specific persons. We generally follow ELE and CFI closely.

If you do create a couple of entries that are not properly formatted, someone will be glad to clean up after you. But if you do it repeatedly, you might get blocked as a temporary measure to give you a chance to read ELE.

Some other differences between us and English Wikipedia:
 * Entry titles are case-sensitive and do not have their first letters capitalized unless, like proper nouns, they are ordinarily capitalized. So we have mercury for the substance and Mercury for the planet and the god. (We do not use parentheses in titles: there's no Mercury (planet).)
 * We just want definitions of words, not long-winded explanations worthy of Wikipedia.
 * Wiktionary has very different user-space policies from Wikipedia's. We are here to build a dictionary, and userpages exist only to facilitate that. In particular, we have voted to explicitly ban all userboxes with the exception of ; please do not create or use them.
 * Other policies, including on bots, blocks, redirects, interwiki links, and original research, are very different from English Wikipedia's. And we have no counterpart to Wikipedia's three-revert rule.
 * Various templates and shortcuts that you're used to using do not exist here, or have different names. For example, don't try to use  to refer to a template! ( will do the trick.)
 * Don't add an edit summary when creating a new entry here: the software will fill a useful one in automatically. (Edit summaries are good for other edits, though.)

Also, a "citation" on Wiktionary is the same as a "quotation" and is evidence of a word being used; we use these to construct dictionary definitions. See WT:QUOTE. A "reference", on the other hand, which is called a "citation" on Wikipedia, references another secondary source, such as a dictionary, and is used predominantly for verifying etymologies and usage notes, not the definitions themselves. (That we don't use another dictionary as our source for the existence of a word is largely so that we don't fall into the trap of adding "list words", words that, while often defined, are never used in practice.)

I hope you enjoy editing Wiktionary! If you have any questions, then see the help pages, add a question to one of the discussion rooms or ask me on my talk page. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 20:11, 4 November 2010 (UTC)