Help:Navigation

This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus.

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Wikipedia is so vast that the features that usually facilitate navigating, like hypertext and a search box, are supplemented by portals and a page theme that features a toolbox, a search box, and the category of the page, on every page. The category of a page reflects the status of that page in the continuous categorization efforts all pages undergo. Navigation is a critical priority on a Wikipedia page layout. The search box will navigate directly to a page, but this search box is also an interface to a powerful search engine developed especially for Wikipedia. Wikipedia's search box allows readers to apply six different parameters to better refine the search results that a bare word search might produce alone.

All Wikipedia articles are linked or cross-referenced for ease of navigation through the encyclopedia. Where you see text like this, it means there is a link to another article or Wikipedia page with further information if you need it. Holding your mouse over the link will show you where a link will take you. This means articles do not need to cover common ground in depth; instead, you are always one click away from more information on any point that has a link attached.

The Manual of style documents the various footer sections on a page that will contain related articles, external web sites, and reference material. At the bottom line of the article are the relevant categories of related pages which you can search and traverse in an interconnected hierarchy. The category pages are hypertext, and a graphical tool is available at Special:CategoryTree.

Search results and articles themselves may also have interwiki links to sister projects such as dictionary definitions, audiobook readings, quotations, or the same article in other languages. You can contribute by adding further links if a relevant link is missing.