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Many new users of Wikipedia, familiar with social networking services like Facebook, assume that Wikipedia is similar. But if you try to use Wikipedia like a social networking service, you will experience a great degree of frustration, for Wikipedia is fundamentally different from social networking services. This essay discusses some of the differences.
Purpose edit
As the term indicates, the purpose of a “social networking service” is to build social networks or social relations. The purpose of Wikipedia, on the other hand, is to build an encyclopedia; an important part of the purpose is to produce content that is reusable under a free license. This difference of purpose is at the root of the other differences.
Profiles edit
Many social networking services encourage users to create user profiles. They allow you to say almost anything you want about yourself. Wikipedia is not like that: Although Wikipedia articles include biographies, those biographies (like all articles) must be encyclopedic, written from a neutral point of view, and verifiable by references to published independent reliable sources. And the subjects must be “notable” by our standards; most people are not important enough to have encyclopedia articles about them. Since it is our experience that it is extremely difficult to write a neutral, verifiable autobiography, we have a content guideline that “writing an autobiography is strongly discourged.”
User pages edit
On Wikipedia the closest thing to a user profile is a user page. But since the purpose of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopedia, user pages should be used primarily to present information relevant to working on the encyclopedia. In particular, the content guideline for user pages says that a user page that simulate an article “should be deleted as incompatible with the purpose of the project.”
Company or organization profiles edit
Some social networking services allow you to create a profile for a company or organization you represent. Wikipedia is not like that: Although Wikipedia includes articles about companies and organizations, all articles must be encyclopedic, written from a neutral point of view, and verifiable by references to published independent reliable sources. And the subjects must be “notable” by our standards; most companies and organizations are not important enough to have encyclopedia articles about them.
Ownership of pages edit
Social networking services typically allow you to control your profile, other pages you create, and information about yourself. Wikipedia takes the opposite point of view: Official policies say, “No one "owns" an article or any page at Wikipedia. If you create or edit an article, others can make changes, and you can not prevent them from doing so.” Even “your user page is not yours. It is a part of Wikipedia, and exists to make collaboration among Wikipedians easier, not for self-promotion.”
Indeed, in editing about yourself, your company, or your organization, your interests may be in conflict with the aim of Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia. See the behavioral guideline on “Conflict of interest.” Conflict of interest editing is “strongly discouraged.”
Usernames edit
Users of social networking services frequently choose as usernames their real names or the name of a company or organization they want to publicize. Although some new users try to do the same on Wikipedia, doing so is likely to be a bad idea.
If you use your real name as a username, that does not give you added credibility in creating or editing an article about yourself. Indeed, your username would only attract negative attention to your contributions, for you are strongly discouraged from creating or editing an article about yourself.
Wikipedia’s username policy does not permit the unambiguous use of the name of a company or organization as a username because doing so is considered promotional. If you do try to use such a username, you will be asked (gently at first) to change it. If you also edit to promote the company or organization, you probably will be summarily blocked from editing.
Copied content edit
Some social networking services allow users to repost material they find elsewhere on the internet—perhaps because the service is unaware of the copying or perhaps because they believe the original creator of the content would approve of the use. Wikipedia is not like that: All pages on Wikipedia must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. You may not reuse text you find elsewhere unless it is licensed under that license. Even the subject’s approval of the content or explicit permission to use it on Wikipedia is not enough.
Theoretically you could get acceptable permission to use the content as described at Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission. But even then the content is likely to be unacceptable, for most content that people try to copy is promotional or otherwise un-encyclopedic.