Wikipedia:Historical archive/Explore

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This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference.
Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

"Where do I begin?"

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and contains articles which explain over a million different things about the world, the people and things on it, and beyond. There are 2 ways to look things up in Wikipedia: by searching or by browsing...

If you know the name of the topic you are looking for, simply type it into Wikipedia's search box and press Go.

If you would like to look around the encyclopedia to see what's on it, here are some ways to explore Wikipedia:

List of overviews - browse overview articles for major subjects.
Portal:List - browse the various portals, or summary introductions to a topic.
Wikipedia:Categorical index - browse the categories of the encyclopedia.
Click on Random article in the sidebar.
Find pages that link to a given page; click What links here in the sidebar's toolbox. This also works for pages that do not exist (if there are links to the page it is extra useful to create it). See also Wikipedia:What links here.

There are also several other "Tables of Contents" type pages on Wikipedia. They are:

Wikipedia also has an alphabetical index of all of its articles.

See also