Here you can digest how to use Wikipedia in bite-sized morsels. The tips listed below were created for the Tip of the day project, or the Styletips project, but are listed here by title and organized by subject area for your convenience.
To search a specific namespace, include the prefix in searches
To search for a topic in a specific namespace, precede the topic with that namespace's prefix, followed by a colon. If the topic has a page with that name, pressing Enter will take you right to it. Otherwise, a list of relevant search results will appear.
For example, one way to get a listing of articles on ancient Greece is to type Category:Ancient Greece in the search box. To go to the portal for the Ancient Greeks, you would type: Portal:Ancient Greece.
The namespace prefixes are: Category:, Portal:, File:, User:, Talk:, Wikipedia:, Help:, Book:, Draft:, and Template:.
You can also search in sister projects by using the full name of the sister project, or its abbreviation (e.g.- Wiktionary: or wikt:).
On talk pages, it may be useful to provide a google search link directly in a discussion of a topic's notability or in debates about which name for a subject is the most common. The Wikimedia software that powers Wikipedia lets you make links to Google by including google: as the prefix for the link, like this:
Note: It is important not to use spaces in the search. To add more parameters to the search, separate them by a plus sign, +. For a phrase search, use a hyphen (minus sign), -, between each word. E.g. to search for "Tip of the day", use Tip-of-the-day.
To provide a link to a Wikipedia-specific search, include in the google-link +site:en.wikipedia.org (no spaces before or after), like this:
For a listing of current collaborations, tasks, and news, see the Community portal. For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the Dashboard.