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These portals are good places to start when you're searching for information within a broad subject area. With the help of Wikipedia's broad base of editors and contributors, these portals compile up-to-date and relevant information within these areas, including current events as well as significant historical anniversaries. They can also recommend popular articles and related topics and categories that may help you to further narrow down your focus. Several portals even have bibliographies or links to external subject resources that can further guide your research and discovery of sources. The portals will direct you to key topics within a field and guide you to articles that suit your research needs.


The English Wikipedia is one of many Wikimedia projects, and has the URL Versions in other languages have other labels, usually a two or three letter code. For example, the Spanish Wikipedia is at Other Wikimedia sister projects such as Wikisource and Wiktionary have different names in their URLs. Links to these projects (such as s:Main Page) usually appear in a different shade. Wikimedia Commons ( has a special role, housing many of the images accessed from Wikipedia. Many of the projects at the other URLs are organized in a way that is quite similar to Wikipedia, but you can always tell which project you are viewing by the logo and text at the top left of the page.


Contents and index browsing

Wikipedia is comprised of a vast amount of information on a broad range of subjects that include politics, science, history, music, religion, pop culture, and sports. To help the reader navigate this world of knowledge, Wikipedia has certain kinds of pages that organize and group the individual articles. These "contents pages" are overviews, outlines, lists, portals, glossaries, categories, and indices that provide links—organized by subject and topic, as well as alphabetically or chronologically—to numerous individual articles (which themselves contain cross links to related articles). Another type of contents page is for high-quality articles, those that appear in Wikipedia's featured content. Each Wikipedia contents page is compiled by editors to serve as an overarching subject guide and to organize aspects of key topics within a subject. An overview of Wikipedia's contents pages appears below.

These lists, outlines, and categories can be a vital tool in developing subject expertise to help you in your research. If you are in the early stages of narrowing down a topic, these index features will offer you a broad to narrow spectrum of topics within a given field. Similarly, specific articles or topics can be navigated more broadly to reveal related areas of their classification, such as geographically similar areas to a given city or historical events occurring as part of a given movement. For many topics, Wikipedia's editors have created timelines outlining historical events and achievements, as well as timelines that offer a chronological outline of the development of certain technologies or theories within a field. These features can help to contextualize a given topic and can give you an opportunity to field this related subject information by gaining a background provided by Wikipedia's contributors, who often have a professional expertise in areas that they contribute to.

Category browsing

Every article has a list at the bottom of all the major categories it belongs to. For example, Albert Einstein is listed under (inter alia):

1879 births, 1955 deaths, Cosmologists, German physicists, German-Americans, Nobel laureates in Physics, Refugees, World federalists.


Try browsing the various categories below right now:



Categories are one of the more helpful clusters for directing users to both broader topics and related topics. Listed categories demonstrate the former option—broader topics by classifying your subject into larger groupings; you will be able to locate information on other German physicists or navigate through the indexes discussed in the section above, paired with the information in categories and portals to glean information about physicists studying the same or similar topics. If you are using it to gain a point of contrast, you may not need to delve into all cited sources or conduct scholarly research, but you can rest assured knowing that information on Wikipedia usually comes from reliable, cited sources. Studying such related topics gives you a chance to expand your knowledge on a subject and discover noteworthy or standout facts about your starting article.

Additionally, to find additional categories, search the Category Tree, a Wikipedia feature that allows users to search for a category and see its structure and how it relates to other categories and topics. Wikipedia's Category Tree offers something of a birds-eye view of the categories to map out content in a hierarchical view.

Other useful buttons and panels

Here is the default theme of a Wikipedia page:



Sidebar (left)


Navigation options:

Interaction options:

  • Help - the main menu for all the help pages
  • About Wikipedia - an introduction to the Wikipedia project for visitors
  • Recent changes - articles that are being edited at this moment
  • Contact Wikipedia

Toolbox options:

  • Create a book - for making a page collection


Top tabs (above the article)




  • watch/unwatch - adds or removes a page from your watchlist, the list of pages you are tracking. You can view your watchlist with the user option button "my watchlist" at the top right of the screen. See Help:Watching pages for details. As it allows you to track changes to a given topic, it will keep you up to date on subjects of interest to you. You can also add category pages and portals to your watchlist to save for future research or to identify areas that you wish these articles covered more closely. Adding such pages to your watchlist will alert you to any changes. While many of these category pages and portals will feature changes less often than other articles, they offer a chance to gain additional information from previous versions. Adding these pages to your watchlist gives you a chance to view all topics associated with your initial area of interest to get a better sense of key aspects to pursue in your research moving forward. This will enable you to maximize the research you are able to accomplish with Wikipedia as well as to better locate materials that may prove useful later in your investigations to a given topic, as you look to expand the scope of information you are seeking.

Using the search box to navigate





More advanced navigating:

  • Use interlanguage prefixes to navigate directly to a page on another Wikipedia. For example, fr:Wikipedia:Principes fondateurs goes to the French version of Wikipedia's Five pillars.
  • Other Wikipedias have the same sister projects, so to go to the French definition of fondateurs, type fr:wikt:fondateurs.


Using Wikipedia to locate information elsewhere

One of Wikipedia's strengths is in its ability to provide a clear and detailed overviews of issues related to different subjects. Not only is this information useful for conducting research and typically backed up by citations, but also, Wikipedia's content can be used to locate additional information on other sites. In addition to searching the citations for useful resources, the information found there can be used to gain additional information. By examining the publications, like journal titles, you may have a better idea of publications that deal in this subject matter or encounter names of researchers who have pronounced roles within the position.

Additionally, determining where the articles you have been focusing on sit within Wikipedia's organizational schemes, you can use related topics to glean further information. The organizational structure offers ways to easily identify broader or similar topics. By using the organizational schemes to see related topics, you can expand your search to include additional topics and gain deeper information on your subject of interest.

Many sources cited are from larger works that encompass more than the particular topic they were used to cite. In this way, they can contribute to your research by offering expanded and additional information about the topics you are interested in. Many of these sources can be located using the tools and strategies available on the Find Your Source page of Wikipedia.