User talk:Just A Person I Guess

Welcome![edit]

Hello, Just A Person I Guess, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help. Need some ideas about what kind of things need doing? Try the Task Center.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Mathglot (talk) 02:20, 23 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Spreading the information[edit]

Once again, Just A Person I Guess, welcome. I noticed your motive on your User page, and that's fine, but as a new user, there are certain things to learn about as you come aboard at Wikipedia. You're very welcome to edit any article you want, but some articles are more difficult than others for new users, especially ones that are in certain topic areas. This includes some, but not all articles in the gender space. Some of these articles can be controversial, and the wording you see now, may be the result of hammering out compromises on the Talk page of the article among many editors, over weeks, months, or even years. (Go to some article, and click the "Talk" tab at the top, to see what a "Talk page" looks like.)

The reason I mention this, is that I don't want you to be discouraged, if some, or even all of your early edit attempts in the LGBT space are undone by some other editor (Wikipedia uses the word, reverted, when somebody undoes an edit by somebody else). These articles have interested editors who monitor what's going on at their favorite articles (click the 'star' icon at the top, to "favorite" a page). For example, the Nicole Maines article has 77 watchers; I'm one of them, which is how I learned of your edit. (LGBT community has 282 watchers; Transphobia has almost a thousand.) When anybody changes so much as a comma, these editors get an alert that somebody changed the article (depending on their Preference settings, they might not all be alerted). So the point is, you have to step carefully when editing articles in controversial topic areas, and be wary of changing language that may have stabilized after a great deal of effort among many editors. You can always try, and WP:BE BOLD is a core principle here, so go ahead and try if you want; I just want you to have a realistic idea of what's involved in starting out as a new editor, especially in the LGBT space.

If I were you, I'd start out editing at the fringes: try to find poor grammar, misspellings, awkward language that can be improved, or areas of content that don't have footnotes, and fix those. The "LEAD" of the article is the top part, above the first section header (in bold, larger type) and above the Table of Contents, if there is one. Editing the lead of any article is difficult because it has special guideline that applies to it (see WP:LEAD) and takes longer to hammer out than the "body" of the article (everything under the lead). So if I were you, I'd also avoid editing the lead, for now.

Spreading the information about LGBT issues can be a valid goal, and you'll be able to do a better job at that down the road, if you get some early experience on simpler tasks as you start out, and learn the ropes. Follow some of the links in the Welcome message above, they will help. And this is just my advice as another editor like yourself; in the end, you get to decide whether to follow it or not. As you get started, feel free to reply below, or contact me at my Talk page if you have any questions. You can also ask any question about editing Wikipedia at the WP:Help desk. Once again, welcome! Mathglot (talk) 02:44, 23 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]