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User:W.stanovsky/tutorial

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Before the tutorial, if possible

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  • Go to the create account page and create your account. (This is not required to edit most Wikipedia articles, but is required to link up with the Simmons University edit-a-thon.)
  • Your username will be publicly visible when you edit Wikipedia, so consider whether you want it to be personally identifiable or not.
  • Go to the introduction to editing with VisualEditor and follow the instructions in the first two paragraphs to make sure your account is set up to display both the visual editor and the source editor.

The visual editor is a new tool (still in beta) that makes basic editing tasks simpler; that introduction will show you how to start using it. My tutorial here will get you started using the source editor, which has a steeper learning curve but ultimately allows you to do anything a Wikipedia article can do.

Be bold

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  • It’s nearly impossible to break anything irreversibly.
  • If something you do does cause a problem, or if someone else reverses your edit, another user will usually explain the concern or point you to helpful tools or policies. (More on communication later.)
  • If you don’t understand something I say, don’t worry about it—just get in there and mess around, or seek out help in the Wikipedia community, and you’ll learn with time.

For more on this key principle, look at Wikipedia:Be_bold.

Make yourself at home

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  • Log in to Wikipedia and click your username at the very top of the page, between the person icon and the bell icon. This is your user page; it doesn't exist yet if you just created your account.
    • You can get to the same place by typing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:YOURNAME into your browser address bar (replacing "YOURNAME" with the user name you just registered).
    • NOTE: Your user page is not private; it is to introduce you to others on Wikipedia, help you communicate with them, and give you a place to work on projects outside of the actual encyclopedia articles (which are called the "mainspace").
  • If you don't see a big text box taking up most of the page, click the link that says Start the User:YOURNAME page.
  • In the big text box, called the editing area, type the following, replacing YOURNAME with your user name. Note that your username is case sensitive, so capitalize just as you did when you registered.
[[User:YOURNAME/sandbox]]
  • Scroll down and click "Publish changes."

You just created your user page! You can personalize your user page later if you want. For now, the only thing here will be a red link that you just created, which will look like this: User:W.stanovsky/sandbox

Start editing

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  • Click on the red sandbox link you just created.
  • Like your user page until a moment ago, this "sandbox" page doesn't exist yet; let's create it:
    • In the editing area, type Hello World!
    • Scroll to the bottom and click "Publish page."
  • Now your sandbox page exists, and you're looking at it. All it says is "Hello World!"

People often use "sandbox" pages to work out bugs, save information or links for later, or store pieces of work in progress that aren't ready to go into a published article yet. You can have as many sub-pages of your user page, like this sandbox, as you want. Just create a red link, click it, and save something there, like we just did. However, the page User:YOURNAME/sandbox is a bit special, because you'll be able to get back there from anywhere on Wikipedia with one click, using the "Sandbox" link in the at the very top right of every page near your username.

  • Just below the page title, click the link where it says <User:YOURNAME.
  • You're now back at your main user page, and you'll see that the sandbox link is now blue.

In Wikipedia, a blue link goes to an existing page and a red link is dead, because it points to a page that doesn't exist yet. That fact is the basis for the name of Women in Red, a project to address gender bias on Wikipedia, in part by creating more articles about notable women, their works, and women's issues. Contributing to that effort is one way to participate in the Simmons University Edit-A-Thon; the dashboard has more info.

The color of a link is also important in checking that your Wikitext works as intended.

  • Click "Edit source" at the top of your user page and change a letter in the word "sandbox" so it says something like [[User:YOURNAME/sandborx]].
  • Now scroll to the bottom and click "Preview" instead of "Publish changes."

It will render the Wikitext for you to review without saving the changes to the page. You can see that the link is read, meaning something isn't working right.

  • Scroll down to the text box below the preview, correct the change you just made, and click "Publish changes."

Editing wikitext

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The very basics

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You can edit the vast majority of articles (and other types of Wikipedia pages, like user pages) just by clicking "Edit" at the top of the article or next to the heading of an individual section you want to edit. The Wikipedia articles you're used to seeing result from the website rendering underlying "wikitext" or "wiki markup." The wikitext is what you'll see in the editing area after you click "edit."

Wikitext is basically a simple programming language designed to make it easy for non-programmers to edit Wikipedia. If you've ever used HTML, you'll find that wikitext can include many HTML elements. Some pieces of Wikitext are hard to decipher, but it's usually not too hard to find the blocks that correspond to the main body sections in a rendered article.

Especially in long articles, it's much easier to edit a single section using the "Edit" link next to the section heading, rather than clicking "Edit" at the top of the whole article.

Be sure to close those pages without publishing unless you've got additions to the article!)

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The wikilink, a simple way to link between internal Wikipedia pages, is the most important bit of wikitext code that makes Wikipedia what it is. Wikilinks are made by enclosing text in double square brackets. Wikipedia will (with special exceptions) render any wikitext between double square brackets as a link from the page you're editing to the Wikipedia page with that exact name. If you create one and get a red link, the page doesn't exist. If you think it should, check that the capitalization, spelling, punctuation, etc. within the brackets in your wikitext exactly match the name of the page you're linking to.

You already made your first wikilink by creating the link to your sandbox, but let's make it a little prettier. We still want to link to the sandbox, but instead of User:W.stanovsky/sandbox, we would like to see: 

To see what I'm working on, check out my sandbox.
  • To do that, click "Edit" at the top of your user page.
  • Currently, your wikitext is just [[User:YOURNAME/sandbox]]. Replace that with:
To see what I'm working on, check out [[User:YOURNAME/sandbox|my sandbox]].
  • Click "Publish changes" at the bottom.

A few details:

Pipe character. The vertical bar | is called a "pipe" character, created on your keyboard with shift + backslash. It's the first exception to Wikipedia rendering a link using only the exact text between the brackets. When you put a pipe in a wikilink, Wikipedia renders it as an internal link directed at the page whose name is the text before the pipe, but the link appears as the text after the pipe.

Linking to a section within a page. To create a wikilink that goes to a particular section, rather than just to the top of the page, just add the section name after the # symbol (and before the pipe character, if you're using one). For example, the wikitext [[Rosalind Franklin#Discovery of DNA structure]] will render as a link to the section we looked at above within Rosalind Franklin's article: Rosalind Franklin#Discovery of DNA structure.

Namespaces. In the one we just created, the text User: indicates that the link will go to a user page. In Wikipedia jargon, user pages are in the user "namespace." There are a number of different namespaces, the most important of which is the "main" or "article" namespace, which contains all the encyclopedic content pages—what everyday users experience as Wikipedia. A wikilink to a mainspace page doesn't need any text like "User" or the colon that follows. A link to a page in any other namespace needs the name of the namespace and a colon before the page name, like in the example we've been using with your user page, which exists in the user namespace. There's much more information about the different namespaces and what kinds of pages they contain at Wikipedia:Namespace.

Wikilinks are the single most important bit of wikitext, but I've included links at the bottom of this tutorial to help you figure out more of the basics of formatting, citing, and linking.

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Wikitext also makes it very easy to add links from an article to external resources. Many articles have an "External links" section, and the edit-a-thon team suggests adding to those lists as a good way that beginners can contribute to articles. External links can go in other places too; for guidance on when they're appropriate and how to use them, see Wikipedia:External links.

To add external links, we use single square brackets, rather than double, and the syntax is a little different than a wikilink. As an example, let's suppose that in the Rosalind Franklin article, we want to add an external link to the European Space Agency's page about its Mars rover named after her (but let's just use our own sandboxes for now).

  • From your sandbox page, click "Edit," add the following text, and publish changes:
[https://exploration.esa.int/web/mars/-/45084-exomars-rover]

That will render as a numbered link that looks like this: [1]. The little arrow icon indicates that the link points outside Wikipedia, not to another article.

Adding text to the link is just as easy as with a wikilink, but slightly different. Instead of a pipe character, just leave a space after the URL and then type whatever text you want the link to display as, before your closing square bracket.

  • Now click "Edit" again and publish changes after replacing the line above with:
[https://exploration.esa.int/web/mars/-/45084-exomars-rover Mars rover named after Rosalind Franklin]

That will render as: Mars rover named after Rosalind Franklin. Now let's edit once more, to embed that link in some text, include a wikilink to a related Wikipedia article in addition to our external link, and use an asterisk in the wikitext to format the resulting text as a bulleted list item.

  • Replace the previous wikitext with:
* [[European Space Agency]] website about its [https://exploration.esa.int/web/mars/-/45084-exomars-rover planned Mars rover named after Rosalind Franklin]

That renders as follows, and you're off to the races!

Talk pages

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Every article has an associated "talk" page for dealing with behind-the-scenes issues about the article that are not part of the encyclopedic content. You can get there with the "Talk" link near the very top left of each page.

Like any other link, the "Talk" link will be red if the talk page for an article hasn't been created yet. You can create it by clicking the link. Talk pages also use wikitext, and editing them works pretty much like editing any other page.

  • To see what that looks like, go to Talk:Rosalind Franklin.
    • Typically you'll see some (occasionally many) yellow boxes at the top, related to rating and categorizing the article.
    • Then you'll see sections of text where different users discuss issues about the article.

There is a talk page for each user page, just like there is for each article. If you want to communicate directly with another Wikipedian and have the best chance of them seeing it, your best bet is to start a section on their talk page. When you do, before clicking "Publish Changes," check the "watch this page" box if you want to be notified when they respond.

Note: It's possible to edit another user's user page, but is generally not appropriate without permission. Their (and your) user talk page is for conversation and collaboration.

  • You can try editing my talk page if you want. Go to User_talk:W.stanovsky#Women's History Month edit-a-thon and leave me a note!
  • You can indent a paragraph of text (in a talk page or anywhere else) by adding one or more colons at the start. Usually, in talk exchanges, users indent responsive posts one level of indentation deeper than the post their responding to so that it's easy to tell who's saying what to whom. So if you respond to my post at the link above, put one colon at the start of your line of wikitext. You can see examples at Help: Talk pages#Indentation.
  • At the end of whatever text you add, insert four tildes: ~~~~. Wikipedia will automatically render that into signature information like this, so that other users know who said what, when, in a discussion: W.stanovsky (talk) 09:17, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
  • If you want to start a discussion about a new topic within a talk page, it's easiest to click "New Section" near the top, rather than "Edit." If you click "Edit" you can do it, but you'll have to wade through the wikitext for every conversation on the page and you'll have to manually add a new section heading.

Next steps: citing sources and new articles

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Unfortunately, getting the format right for both citations and new articles can be a bit tricky for new users, and getting them wrong can cause an article not to display properly or can lead to your edits being reverted due to insufficient sourcing. Also, Wikipedia has extensive guidelines on "notability," which is the main test of whether a topic should have its own Wikipedia article or not.

When in doubt, be bold but also consider asking for help (including from me) or leaving a message in an article's talk page to explain what you're struggling with or what you intend to add soon that you haven't gotten around to yet.

A couple of my helpful links below address citations and new articles for beginners.

Helpful tools

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Today's tutorial is just a crash course. Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia's parent) has a series of Wikipedia training modules that look like a great next step (though I haven't personally tried them) to learn some more basics of how Wikipedia works, as well as more of the policies and principles that the community has developed to self-regulate.

In addition, here are some references to help you figure things out as you go:

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