User:Proteins/Introduction to the article tabs

At the top of most articles on Wikipedia, you'll find six tabs that play an important role in editing. They are "article", "discussion", "edit this page", "history", "move" and "watch". This tutorial introduces these tabs and discusses what they do.

The six tabs found at the top of most articles are highlighted here in yellow.

Article tab

Not surprisingly, clicking on the "article" tab brings you to the article, if you aren't there already. Improving the article should always be the main focus. The other tabs only help to improve the article more efficiently.

Articles are not the only type of page on Wikipedia. For example, various pages beginning "Wikipedia:" serve in helper roles, such as describing guidelines or best practices on Wikipedia, or helping to organize Wikipedians towards a common task. Instead of an article tab, these pages have a "project page" tab, so that casual readers don't confuse them with an encyclopedia article.

Discussion tab

Clicking on the "discussion" tab brings you to the talk page of the article. On the talk page, you and other editors can discuss how to present the topic, such as what topics require more coverage, which images best illustrate a point, where to find references for a given assertion, etc.

A basic principle of Wikipedia is that everything should be discussed calmly and rationally until consensus is reached. Therefore, every type of page on Wikipedia has a discussion tab, not only articles. For example, user pages have talk pages, as do Wikiprojects. There are extensive talk pages for policies and guidelines on Wikipedia, such as the Manual of Style.

+/new section tab on Talk pages

Talk pages also have an extra tab labeled "+" or "new section". Clicking on this tab opens a new section on the talk page, with a slightly modified edit window. Using this tab helps other Wikipedians recognize when a new topic of discussion has been opened, which they might wish to participate in.

Edit tab

History tab

Move tab

Watch/unwatch tab

Special tabs on other pages

Not logged in: only four tabs

Readers who are not logged in will see only four article tabs: "article", "discussion", "edit this page" and "history". The "move" and "watch" tabs are missing, because those are reserved for people who have created a user name for themselves.

Missing move tab

In some cases, the "move" tab is missing from the top of an article. This is often seen when articles are likely to be vandalized by moving them, that is, by changing their name. The following example is taken from the Featured Article for December 10, 2008. The "move" tab was disabled, since it wouldn't make sense to allow the article to be moved while it was being featured on the Main page of Wikipedia.

This Featured Article has only five tabs; the "move" tab is missing.

View-source tab

In some cases, vandalism of an article may be so severe that editing is restricted to trusted users. If that occurs, you may see a "view source" tab instead of "edit this page". This allows you to read the wikimarkup that defines a page, but not to change it.