I took this after realizing there seems to be an inconsistency in how Wikbooks is displaying how you should delete some vertices. In one picture, the axis is blue and red, and in the other, it’s green and red, and the object doesn’t appear to be flipped. If it was, why didn’t the tutorial for beginners say this?
The axis you see is “the widget”. Some users use it for transforming mesh. You can disable it in 3D viewport header if you want. You shouldn’t have to worry about it.
Yes, the widget has the arrows and the lines you’re looking at are the global axes.
The views have changed but it’s irrelevant to what’s being demonstrated. If it serves any purpose beyond what the captions indicate, it’s that it also shows the verts are selected along both axes - in other words, all the verts on one side of the cube are selected.
The view isn’t “flipped”, by the way, it’s just changed from top view to front view. If the tute doesn’t mention it, be advised you will probably want to be in front view once you start extruding.
I doubt many tutorial authors would expect people to be looking at such barely visible details
