User:Eurodyne/Adoption/Anaviv

Hi Anaviv. Welcome to your adoption school. By the time you've completed the tests and tasks here, you should have a good working knowledge of Wikipedia's policies and processes, and should have no difficulty understanding and dealing with 99% of the the things you'll encounter on this site. You can ask me questions on my talkpage at any time if you aren't sure about anything here, and I also welcome suggestions for ways of improving this course.

You can complete the sections in any order; let me know when you've finished one and I'll mark it and close it for you. Save for a few cases, there are generally multiple ways to answer the questions; not many of them have clear right/wrong answers. Although I'll always try and give a reason for each mark, the basic responses you'll see are:

• Y Good answer; interprets policy correctly and shows a sound understanding of the issues involved.
• Y Incomplete/insufficient answer; whilst partly correct, there are better responses to this question.
• N Poor answer; shows an inadequate understanding of the policies and guidelines concerned.

In general, you need around an 80% ratio of ticks to crosses before I'll close a section - you're also free to have another go at questions which are yellow-ticked or crossed.

Have fun!

Five Pillars

Wikipedia is governed by a large number of policies and guidelines - don't worry, you aren't expected to know all of these when you start out (or even after being here for a while!). All of these rules, however, stem in one way or another from Wikipedia's fundamental principles, which are known as the Five Pillars. Learn these and you can hazard an educated guess at all the rest. Please take a few minutes to read through the following pages:

• Pillar 1: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
• Pillar 2: Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view
• Pillar 3: Wikipedia's content is free to reuse
• Pillar 4: Editors should be civil in their interactions
• Pillar 5: There are no firm rules

Cleanup

The Random article button (located in your left-hand sidebar menu) is very useful for locating articles that are in need of improvement (although I find that 90% of the time you get a random article on either an obscure village in the mountains of Pakistan or a little-known Eastern European football team...). However, there are easier ways to locate articles that need attention.

When editors come across a page that needs to be improved but they are unable to do so themselves (due to time constraints, lack of sources or just because they don't feel like it) they will often tag it with a cleanup tag. As well as placing a notice at the top of the page to say what needs doing, this also has the effect of listing the article in one of several cleanup categories. You can access most of these categories here.

What I'd like you to do is this: First, locate an article in need of cleanup. I'd suggest something fairly straightforward, like a page that needs copyediting for spelling and grammar (there's a full list of pages tagged thus here). Make three improvements to the page; these can be minor changes to word order, wikilinks, punctuation or typo fixes, I'm not fussed. When you've done this post a link to the article here - type the page name and enclose it in double square brackets, like this: [[Name of page]].

Now go to the page Commonly misspelled words and select a word from the list there. Put the incorrect spelling of the word into the Wikipedia search bar at the top right, prefacing it with a single tilde, like this "~mispeling". The tilde means that, rather than searching for an article titled "Mispeling", the search engine will instead return a list of pages which contain the word "mispeling". You can now open each of these in turn, locate the typo, and change it to the correct spelling. Post here when you've fixed three typos in this way.