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Anyone can edit Wikipedia—including you! That's right! There's no fee, and you don't have to register. You don't even have to have an email account (but if you're reading this book, you probably have one). As the Introduction explains, all Wikipedia articles are collaborative efforts. You can jump right in and add your own content with just a few clicks and some typing.
This chapter explains what you see when you look at an article in Wikipedia's editing window and how to practice, preview, and publish your edits. You'll also learn a few more basic editing skills—how to create a link from one article to another, and how to edit a section of an article rather than the whole article.
Once you've got these skills under your belt, you're ready for the first step in for-real Wikipedia editing: identifying an article in need of an edit.
Experienced Wikipedia editors understand one thing above all else: Wikipedia is a collaboration! There's no need to be intimidated, because you've got the support of an entire community of researchers, fact-checkers, and proofreaders. Keeping the following points in mind will get you into the right mindset for effective editing:
Even if you've done a lot of writing and editing with various types of software in the past, you'll need some practice with Wikipedia's tools. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a page called the sandbox, where editors can practice without worrying about damaging anything. In this chapter, you'll do your work in the sandbox, rather than editing actual articles.
Remember, as you go through the book (or whenever you're editing), if you encounter a feature that you don't fully understand, you can always go to the sandbox and do some testing there. You won't break anything, and you can experiment as much as you want until you figure out exactly how things work. You can even practice duplicating the actual edits that are shown throughout this book.
From any page in Wikipedia, you can get to the sandbox by:
If you are just getting started with Wikipedia you are probably using Wikipedia's default preferences, which place the search box at the top right of the screen. However, if you have a user account with Wikipedia, you can place the search box somewhere else by changing your skin in Wikipedia's preferences. If you use the Monobook skin, the search box is shown on the left.
Your choice of skin also affects other aspects of how Wikipedia looks. See the section about skins for more information.
Doing so gets you to the sandbox quickly. Figure 1-1 shows the sandbox before editing starts.
Editing in Wikipedia is much like using a very basic text editor, with a few word-processing tools thrown in. You type text into the edit box (less commonly written as the editbox), and then click buttons to preview and finally publish your work. Although some edits might be just saved into your own sandbox, or to a draft, we refer to every edit as being 'published', because it is made available online, and everyone can see it if they know where to look.
You edit Wikipedia articles in a big, white text box in the middle of the window. To get to that box, you must go into edit mode.
1. In the search box on the top right of the screen, type WP:SAND, and press Return to go to the sandbox.
2. From the sandbox page (Figure 1-1), click the "edit this page" tab.
3. Delete everything but the first six lines, which are instructions.
4. Type the text shown in Figure 1-4 (except the first three lines at the top, which should already be there) into the edit box.
One of the most important things after doing an edit is to preview it—to see how it's going to look.
For edits involving formatting, previewing is absolutely essential. But even if you've added only plain text, you should still preview it because you want to get in the habit of previewing every time.
Experienced editors often skip previewing when making small, routine edits. Usually that's okay, but sometimes, to their embarrassment, after seeing what the page looks like after being published online, they realize they need to do another edit to fix their own mistakes. So, until you've become an experienced editor, preview your work every time.
Before you click the "Show preview" button, however, you should do one more thing—provide a summary of the edit you just made. You should do this now, rather than later, because previewing will also show you what the edited summary will look like. Think of the edit summary as a way for you to explain your edit to other editors. The explanation can be very brief ("typo," "revert vandalism") or it can be lengthy (up to 500 characters). Keep it as short as you can, and make it as long as you need to.
1. In the "Summary" box (Figure 1-5), type a few words to describe the purpose of your edit.
Filling in the "Summary" box, to explain your edit, takes only a few seconds but can save other editors lots of time. These summaries show up on each article's "history" tab (see the section about page histories), on the page that lists a given editor's contributions (see the 'User contributions' section), and pretty much everywhere else that a list of edits appears within Wikipedia: They're important.
Edit summaries should be meaningful to all editors. If you encounter an abbreviation or other text you don't understand, check the page Wikipedia:Edit summary legend (shortcut: WP:ESL), which has a pretty comprehensive list.
Here are some common edit summaries:
If you start editing articles regularly, here's another advantage to creating your own Wikipedia account: Once you've created an account, as described in Chapter 3: Setting up your account and personal workspace, you can change a setting so that you get a reminder to add an edit summary, if you've forgotten one. When logged in, click the Preferences link (in the upper-right area of the screen), then click the "editing" tab, and at the bottom of the list of options, turn on the "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" checkbox. Click Save. Once you've done that, you'll never have to worry about inadvertently forgetting to fill in the "Edit Summary" field.
2. Click the "Show preview" button just below the edit window (the button is shown in Figure 1-5) to see what the Wikipedia page will look like after you publish your latest edits.
3. Now's your chance to fix mistakes before anyone else can see them. Just make any changes you want in the edit box, and click "Show preview" again.
Click the "Publish changes" button (see Figure 1-5 for the location of this button, if you need to). At this point, one of three things happens:
"Edit this page" is non-destructive and non-contentious, depending on your clicking the Cancel button. It has basically the same effect as if it had displayed "View Source". Don't hesitate. It's OK.
It's best to press the Cancel button as soon as you're done viewing, in case you accidentally alter the wikitext source and then accidentally press "Publish changes". But be bold and feel free, for vandalism is more likely than viewing accidents.
Even if you ignore the edit screen and browse away from it, it's probably going to be OK, even if you come back to it later and then accidentally press the Publish changes button. If this happens and there was a change to your page version and there was a change on the server's version, this would trigger an Edit conflict screen. But it's OK, because the default of an Edit conflict screen makes Publish changes do the same thing as Cancel: nothing. You can "edit" (view) the busiest, most content-changing page, and have it be completely harmless. Just use the Cancel button.
To truly edit, you complete 1) an alteration, 2) an edit summary, and then 3) an activation of the Publish changes button. Because intentional editing is so common, the <Enter> key becomes a shortcut to the Publish changes key at step-2. So now you know how Publish changes can get accidentally triggered.
To "edit this page", then, is really just to "view source". To get a feel for this reality, you could edit a watchlist. There is no "Cancel" option. Finally, there is the rare case of the Wikipedia:Copyrights page, where administrators changed "edit this page" to "view source". So when editing a page, make some effort to press Cancel, but don't worry about it if you forgot.
Some articles are very (temporarily or permanently) popular with editors—perhaps the article is about a current event (say, a hurricane) or a person suddenly in the news. Such articles may be edited as frequently as once every minute or two. For such an article, if you as an editor take a while to do an edit—say, you begin editing and spend ten minutes at it, or do something else for five minutes then come back to editing—your chances of an edit conflict are quite high when you attempt to publish your edit.
If there is an edit conflict, the Wikipedia screen has four parts:
The best way to handle an edit conflict depends on the circumstances. Here are two common approaches:
Of course, the best way to settle a conflict is to avoid it in the first place.
You can avoid edit conflicts entirely by using the following techniques:
In Figure 1-3, you can see (in the top line) an example of a template used to display a message on a page. You can add the {{ inuse}} template to the top of an article to tell other editors that you are in the process of making a large edit. It asks that other editors not edit for a while; the Wikipedia page on edit lock recommends using this template for no more than three hours.
In practice, use of this template is very, very rare. Wikipedia etiquette says you should never use it with a popular article (one that gets a lot of edits) or an article involving a breaking news story. But you might experiment with it for articles that get relatively few edits, assuming you really do want to do a major revision. And if you do come across this template—the message at the top of the page will say "This article is actively undergoing a major edit for a short while"—you can check the article history ( the section about page histories) to see how long the template has been in place. If it's been more than three or four hours, someone's hogging the article; if so, you have every right to delete the template so other editors can feel free to make changes.
Earlier in this chapter, you learned how to create section headers, and to format text as bold or italic (see Figure 1-4). Such formatting is called wiki markup or wikitext. As you continue through this book, you'll learn about every type of markup you're likely to encounter. As a new editor, though, you need to learn three things right away: to recognize the types of markup, how templates are used, and how to create links between articles.
Besides headings, bold, and italic text, you'll encounter the following types of markup as you edit articles:
{{
template}}
[[Article name]] or [[Article name|other name]]
[http:url] or [http:url some text]
<ref>...</ref>
<references />
, or like this: {{
reflist}}
; normally that instruction is in a section titled "References". Footnotes are described in detail in
Chapter 2: Documenting your sources.<blockquote>...</blockquote>
and <math>...</math>
<ref>
tags for footnotes; blockquote and math tags are among the more common. Tags normally come in pairs, and the ending tag must have a slash character ("/") as its second character if it is to work properly.<br>
tag that inserts a new line (for example, in a template). It's just the single <br>
tag with no closing tag. If you type <br />
, that does the same thing as <br>
. (The "br" stands for "break," as in "line break.")<!--Your comment text goes here-->
{| bunch of stuff with lots of vertical lines |}
[[Category:Name]]
Linking one article to another is very easy—with good reason. Links to other articles can add a lot of value to an article because readers can follow the links whenever they come across a word they don't know a lot about. Good places to add internal links include the lead sections of articles and at the beginning of new sections within articles. A reader should always be able to get to important, related articles via a link.
In the edit box, just place paired square brackets around the name of the article you want to link to, for example: [[Winston Churchill]]
. Figure 1-10 shows the sandbox again, in preview mode with some internal links sprinkled in.
Another kind of internal link—a piped link—is extremely useful for situations where naming varies by country. For example, you've typed the following sentence in your article: "San Francisco has an extensive public transportation system," and you want to link the words "public transportation" to the relevant article. Trouble is, there's no article in Wikipedia named "public transportation." There is, however, an article named "public transport," which was probably written by someone who speaks British English. You don't care what it's called, you just want your readers to be able to go to that article. Here's how to create the link while having the article read "public transportation": San Francisco has an extensive [[public transport|public transportation]] system
.
Wikilinks make writing on a wiki much easier than writing on paper, because you don't have to explain jargon (just link to the relevant article), and you can provide a smidgen of contextual information on people, places, and things by linking to separate articles. The resulting wiki page is easier for more people to read, since advanced readers can skip explanations they don't need, and the less advanced readers can follow links as necessary to get more context.
As helpful as links are, it's counterproductive to create internal links for a large percentage of words or phrases in an article—Wikipedians call that overlinking. You don't want your readers to spend more time hopping around to other articles than reading the one they came for.
To help decide whether you need to insert a link into an article, think of a link as a cross-reference in a book: "see such-and-such." If you wouldn't ask readers to turn to another page to read about something, don't provide a link for it either. Here's a case of excessive cross-referencing:
Mahatma Gandhi was a major (see "major") political (see "political") and spiritual (see "spiritual") leader (see "leader") of India (see "India") and the Indian independence movement (see "Indian independence movement").
Here are some general guidelines:
As mentioned in
the section about making an edit, if you go into edit mode and see some text surrounded by two curly brackets, like this: {{pagename}}
, you're looking at a template. A template tells the software to get text and formatting instructions from another place and insert that formatted text into the article when the article is displayed.
Here's a common example: If you see the {{
citation needed}}
template in the edit box when you're editing an article, it's telling the software to go to the page [[Template:Citation needed]]
, get the text there (including formatting), and insert that text into the article when the article is displayed for readers. The {{
citation needed}} template, displays the following text:
citation needed
Templates are widespread for a number of reasons:
Templates are everywhere in Wikipedia. In this book, you'll find discussions about templates in a number of chapters, for example:
That's a lot of uses of templates, and that's just in the first 11 chapters. At the moment, you just need to know these two main principles of templates:
In Figure 1-11, each parameter has a name that ends with an equal sign. The infobox will display only the text that follows the equal signs. You can edit text that appears after the equal signs, including adding text, but don't mess around with a parameter name. Also, be careful not to delete or add a parameter separator (the vertical bar symbol "|"), which marks the beginning of each parameter.
Inexperienced editors often work on entire articles in edit mode even though they're making changes only to one section of that article. Not only does this make it more difficult for other editors to understand what an editor did if the edit note lacks sufficient detail, it can make the preview much slower to load and also significantly increases the chances of an edit conflict (see the section about edit conflicts, above). So, an important rule of editing is: Don't edit an entire page if you're changing only one section of the page.
You'll know an article has sections if you see a table of contents near the top of the article. Even if there is no table of contents, if you see headings within an article, then the article has sections that can be edited. Figure 1-12 shows an article with no table of contents but with three headings that indicate sections that can be edited.
If you click one of the three "edit" links in Figure 1-12, then the edit box shows only the text in the section, not the text of the entire article. That makes it easier to edit (less text in the edit box), and it significantly lessens the likelihood of an edit conflict, because if another editor is editing a different section, your two edits can't collide.
From the previous section, you know the importance of editing only a section rather than an entire article, whenever possible. But you may have noticed that in Figure 1-12 there was no [edit] link for the first sentence in the article, what Wikipedia calls the lead section. So, it appears that if you want to edit that section, you have to click the "edit this page" tab, just as if you wanted to edit the entire article.
In fact, it is possible to edit only the lead section of an article, though most editors don't know how. There are actually three different options:
Now that you've read about the basics of editing, and (hopefully) followed the step-by-step instructions for doing a sandbox edit, you're almost ready to start editing actual articles. Before you do so, you need to understand a bit more about the rules of Wikipedia. Then you'll be prepared to find some articles that you can improve.
Taken to an extreme, there are basically two kinds of edits (other than removing vandalism, spam, and other problematic material):
But before you start adding new information, you should read Chapter 2: Documenting your sources. If you want to jump right into wordsmithing, read on.
Wikipedia has three core policies for content. Two of them, no original research and verifiability, are discussed in the next chapter. The third, neutral point of view, is worth mentioning now, because wordsmithing is often about a point of view.
Consider, for a moment, the goal of the people doing public relations or in a marketing department: to write about organizations, products and services, and leaders in a way that casts them in the best possible light. Or consider the wording of a press release by a political party, which tries to make the opposition look as bad as possible. In both of these situations, the writers have what Wikipedians call an extreme point of view (POV). By contrast, Wikipedia's policies require editors to follow these principles:
Wikipedia has much, much more detail that you can read about this policy (type the shortcut WP:NPOV in the search box on the left of the screen). Many (probably most, maybe even all) editors at Wikipedia have very strong opinions about one thing or another—cultural values, religion, politics, science, whatever. Good editors avoid problems by either focusing on making articles as factual as possible or working on articles where their potential biases aren't triggered. So if you're absolutely, positively sure you're right about a topic where many, and possibly most, other editors at Wikipedia wouldn't agree with you, it's a good idea to work on the other six million (or so) articles in Wikipedia that aren't about that topic. (Keep in mind that there are lots of places on the Web—blogs, personal pages, wikis other than Wikipedia, and more—where proactive opinions are welcome.)
Ready to edit? If so, you'll want to find articles that you can improve with copyediting. One way is to click the "Random article" link on the left side of the screen (see Figure 1-14).
When you click this link, there's a good chance you'll get a very short article (a stub), or a list, or a page that starts "XYZ may refer to ..." followed by a list of related topics (a disambiguation page), or a very specialized article. You can edit these, of course, but you may want to try again. When you get an article that you're not interested in editing, just click the "Random article" link again. (Do this twenty or so times, and you get a reasonable sense of the variety in the over six million articles in Wikipedia.)
An alternative to using the "Random article" link is to go to articles that other editors have identified as problematic. Several good places to find such articles are:
When you see the name of an article that seems interesting, just click the article name to go to it and start editing as described earlier in this chapter.
If you find what looks like a spelling mistake, don't leap into edit mode and correct it. What you think is an error may be a perfectly legitimate spelling in context. For example, you may have stumbled upon a national variant of a word: What is "analyse" in the United Kingdom is "analyze" in the United States; neither is wrong.
Wikipedia's spelling rules are mostly based on consistency. For example, don't mix variants of the same word within a single article. If an article is about (say) a major city in Australia, then spellings used in that country are correct for the article; if an article has evolved primarily with one variety of English, the whole article should conform to that variety. (For more details, use these shortcuts to get to two guideline pages: WP:SPELLING and WP:ENGVAR.)
VisualEditor (VE) is a way to edit pages without needing to learn wikitext markup. Registered users can opt-in by changing their preferences. Since 2015 it has been available to new registered users by default. For instructions on using Visual Editor, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide.
This help page needs to be updated. The reason given is: this manual may contain out of date images. Please help update this help page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. (February 2020) |
Anyone can edit Wikipedia—including you! That's right! There's no fee, and you don't have to register. You don't even have to have an email account (but if you're reading this book, you probably have one). As the Introduction explains, all Wikipedia articles are collaborative efforts. You can jump right in and add your own content with just a few clicks and some typing.
This chapter explains what you see when you look at an article in Wikipedia's editing window and how to practice, preview, and publish your edits. You'll also learn a few more basic editing skills—how to create a link from one article to another, and how to edit a section of an article rather than the whole article.
Once you've got these skills under your belt, you're ready for the first step in for-real Wikipedia editing: identifying an article in need of an edit.
Experienced Wikipedia editors understand one thing above all else: Wikipedia is a collaboration! There's no need to be intimidated, because you've got the support of an entire community of researchers, fact-checkers, and proofreaders. Keeping the following points in mind will get you into the right mindset for effective editing:
Even if you've done a lot of writing and editing with various types of software in the past, you'll need some practice with Wikipedia's tools. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a page called the sandbox, where editors can practice without worrying about damaging anything. In this chapter, you'll do your work in the sandbox, rather than editing actual articles.
Remember, as you go through the book (or whenever you're editing), if you encounter a feature that you don't fully understand, you can always go to the sandbox and do some testing there. You won't break anything, and you can experiment as much as you want until you figure out exactly how things work. You can even practice duplicating the actual edits that are shown throughout this book.
From any page in Wikipedia, you can get to the sandbox by:
If you are just getting started with Wikipedia you are probably using Wikipedia's default preferences, which place the search box at the top right of the screen. However, if you have a user account with Wikipedia, you can place the search box somewhere else by changing your skin in Wikipedia's preferences. If you use the Monobook skin, the search box is shown on the left.
Your choice of skin also affects other aspects of how Wikipedia looks. See the section about skins for more information.
Doing so gets you to the sandbox quickly. Figure 1-1 shows the sandbox before editing starts.
Editing in Wikipedia is much like using a very basic text editor, with a few word-processing tools thrown in. You type text into the edit box (less commonly written as the editbox), and then click buttons to preview and finally publish your work. Although some edits might be just saved into your own sandbox, or to a draft, we refer to every edit as being 'published', because it is made available online, and everyone can see it if they know where to look.
You edit Wikipedia articles in a big, white text box in the middle of the window. To get to that box, you must go into edit mode.
1. In the search box on the top right of the screen, type WP:SAND, and press Return to go to the sandbox.
2. From the sandbox page (Figure 1-1), click the "edit this page" tab.
3. Delete everything but the first six lines, which are instructions.
4. Type the text shown in Figure 1-4 (except the first three lines at the top, which should already be there) into the edit box.
One of the most important things after doing an edit is to preview it—to see how it's going to look.
For edits involving formatting, previewing is absolutely essential. But even if you've added only plain text, you should still preview it because you want to get in the habit of previewing every time.
Experienced editors often skip previewing when making small, routine edits. Usually that's okay, but sometimes, to their embarrassment, after seeing what the page looks like after being published online, they realize they need to do another edit to fix their own mistakes. So, until you've become an experienced editor, preview your work every time.
Before you click the "Show preview" button, however, you should do one more thing—provide a summary of the edit you just made. You should do this now, rather than later, because previewing will also show you what the edited summary will look like. Think of the edit summary as a way for you to explain your edit to other editors. The explanation can be very brief ("typo," "revert vandalism") or it can be lengthy (up to 500 characters). Keep it as short as you can, and make it as long as you need to.
1. In the "Summary" box (Figure 1-5), type a few words to describe the purpose of your edit.
Filling in the "Summary" box, to explain your edit, takes only a few seconds but can save other editors lots of time. These summaries show up on each article's "history" tab (see the section about page histories), on the page that lists a given editor's contributions (see the 'User contributions' section), and pretty much everywhere else that a list of edits appears within Wikipedia: They're important.
Edit summaries should be meaningful to all editors. If you encounter an abbreviation or other text you don't understand, check the page Wikipedia:Edit summary legend (shortcut: WP:ESL), which has a pretty comprehensive list.
Here are some common edit summaries:
If you start editing articles regularly, here's another advantage to creating your own Wikipedia account: Once you've created an account, as described in Chapter 3: Setting up your account and personal workspace, you can change a setting so that you get a reminder to add an edit summary, if you've forgotten one. When logged in, click the Preferences link (in the upper-right area of the screen), then click the "editing" tab, and at the bottom of the list of options, turn on the "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" checkbox. Click Save. Once you've done that, you'll never have to worry about inadvertently forgetting to fill in the "Edit Summary" field.
2. Click the "Show preview" button just below the edit window (the button is shown in Figure 1-5) to see what the Wikipedia page will look like after you publish your latest edits.
3. Now's your chance to fix mistakes before anyone else can see them. Just make any changes you want in the edit box, and click "Show preview" again.
Click the "Publish changes" button (see Figure 1-5 for the location of this button, if you need to). At this point, one of three things happens:
"Edit this page" is non-destructive and non-contentious, depending on your clicking the Cancel button. It has basically the same effect as if it had displayed "View Source". Don't hesitate. It's OK.
It's best to press the Cancel button as soon as you're done viewing, in case you accidentally alter the wikitext source and then accidentally press "Publish changes". But be bold and feel free, for vandalism is more likely than viewing accidents.
Even if you ignore the edit screen and browse away from it, it's probably going to be OK, even if you come back to it later and then accidentally press the Publish changes button. If this happens and there was a change to your page version and there was a change on the server's version, this would trigger an Edit conflict screen. But it's OK, because the default of an Edit conflict screen makes Publish changes do the same thing as Cancel: nothing. You can "edit" (view) the busiest, most content-changing page, and have it be completely harmless. Just use the Cancel button.
To truly edit, you complete 1) an alteration, 2) an edit summary, and then 3) an activation of the Publish changes button. Because intentional editing is so common, the <Enter> key becomes a shortcut to the Publish changes key at step-2. So now you know how Publish changes can get accidentally triggered.
To "edit this page", then, is really just to "view source". To get a feel for this reality, you could edit a watchlist. There is no "Cancel" option. Finally, there is the rare case of the Wikipedia:Copyrights page, where administrators changed "edit this page" to "view source". So when editing a page, make some effort to press Cancel, but don't worry about it if you forgot.
Some articles are very (temporarily or permanently) popular with editors—perhaps the article is about a current event (say, a hurricane) or a person suddenly in the news. Such articles may be edited as frequently as once every minute or two. For such an article, if you as an editor take a while to do an edit—say, you begin editing and spend ten minutes at it, or do something else for five minutes then come back to editing—your chances of an edit conflict are quite high when you attempt to publish your edit.
If there is an edit conflict, the Wikipedia screen has four parts:
The best way to handle an edit conflict depends on the circumstances. Here are two common approaches:
Of course, the best way to settle a conflict is to avoid it in the first place.
You can avoid edit conflicts entirely by using the following techniques:
In Figure 1-3, you can see (in the top line) an example of a template used to display a message on a page. You can add the {{ inuse}} template to the top of an article to tell other editors that you are in the process of making a large edit. It asks that other editors not edit for a while; the Wikipedia page on edit lock recommends using this template for no more than three hours.
In practice, use of this template is very, very rare. Wikipedia etiquette says you should never use it with a popular article (one that gets a lot of edits) or an article involving a breaking news story. But you might experiment with it for articles that get relatively few edits, assuming you really do want to do a major revision. And if you do come across this template—the message at the top of the page will say "This article is actively undergoing a major edit for a short while"—you can check the article history ( the section about page histories) to see how long the template has been in place. If it's been more than three or four hours, someone's hogging the article; if so, you have every right to delete the template so other editors can feel free to make changes.
Earlier in this chapter, you learned how to create section headers, and to format text as bold or italic (see Figure 1-4). Such formatting is called wiki markup or wikitext. As you continue through this book, you'll learn about every type of markup you're likely to encounter. As a new editor, though, you need to learn three things right away: to recognize the types of markup, how templates are used, and how to create links between articles.
Besides headings, bold, and italic text, you'll encounter the following types of markup as you edit articles:
{{
template}}
[[Article name]] or [[Article name|other name]]
[http:url] or [http:url some text]
<ref>...</ref>
<references />
, or like this: {{
reflist}}
; normally that instruction is in a section titled "References". Footnotes are described in detail in
Chapter 2: Documenting your sources.<blockquote>...</blockquote>
and <math>...</math>
<ref>
tags for footnotes; blockquote and math tags are among the more common. Tags normally come in pairs, and the ending tag must have a slash character ("/") as its second character if it is to work properly.<br>
tag that inserts a new line (for example, in a template). It's just the single <br>
tag with no closing tag. If you type <br />
, that does the same thing as <br>
. (The "br" stands for "break," as in "line break.")<!--Your comment text goes here-->
{| bunch of stuff with lots of vertical lines |}
[[Category:Name]]
Linking one article to another is very easy—with good reason. Links to other articles can add a lot of value to an article because readers can follow the links whenever they come across a word they don't know a lot about. Good places to add internal links include the lead sections of articles and at the beginning of new sections within articles. A reader should always be able to get to important, related articles via a link.
In the edit box, just place paired square brackets around the name of the article you want to link to, for example: [[Winston Churchill]]
. Figure 1-10 shows the sandbox again, in preview mode with some internal links sprinkled in.
Another kind of internal link—a piped link—is extremely useful for situations where naming varies by country. For example, you've typed the following sentence in your article: "San Francisco has an extensive public transportation system," and you want to link the words "public transportation" to the relevant article. Trouble is, there's no article in Wikipedia named "public transportation." There is, however, an article named "public transport," which was probably written by someone who speaks British English. You don't care what it's called, you just want your readers to be able to go to that article. Here's how to create the link while having the article read "public transportation": San Francisco has an extensive [[public transport|public transportation]] system
.
Wikilinks make writing on a wiki much easier than writing on paper, because you don't have to explain jargon (just link to the relevant article), and you can provide a smidgen of contextual information on people, places, and things by linking to separate articles. The resulting wiki page is easier for more people to read, since advanced readers can skip explanations they don't need, and the less advanced readers can follow links as necessary to get more context.
As helpful as links are, it's counterproductive to create internal links for a large percentage of words or phrases in an article—Wikipedians call that overlinking. You don't want your readers to spend more time hopping around to other articles than reading the one they came for.
To help decide whether you need to insert a link into an article, think of a link as a cross-reference in a book: "see such-and-such." If you wouldn't ask readers to turn to another page to read about something, don't provide a link for it either. Here's a case of excessive cross-referencing:
Mahatma Gandhi was a major (see "major") political (see "political") and spiritual (see "spiritual") leader (see "leader") of India (see "India") and the Indian independence movement (see "Indian independence movement").
Here are some general guidelines:
As mentioned in
the section about making an edit, if you go into edit mode and see some text surrounded by two curly brackets, like this: {{pagename}}
, you're looking at a template. A template tells the software to get text and formatting instructions from another place and insert that formatted text into the article when the article is displayed.
Here's a common example: If you see the {{
citation needed}}
template in the edit box when you're editing an article, it's telling the software to go to the page [[Template:Citation needed]]
, get the text there (including formatting), and insert that text into the article when the article is displayed for readers. The {{
citation needed}} template, displays the following text:
citation needed
Templates are widespread for a number of reasons:
Templates are everywhere in Wikipedia. In this book, you'll find discussions about templates in a number of chapters, for example:
That's a lot of uses of templates, and that's just in the first 11 chapters. At the moment, you just need to know these two main principles of templates:
In Figure 1-11, each parameter has a name that ends with an equal sign. The infobox will display only the text that follows the equal signs. You can edit text that appears after the equal signs, including adding text, but don't mess around with a parameter name. Also, be careful not to delete or add a parameter separator (the vertical bar symbol "|"), which marks the beginning of each parameter.
Inexperienced editors often work on entire articles in edit mode even though they're making changes only to one section of that article. Not only does this make it more difficult for other editors to understand what an editor did if the edit note lacks sufficient detail, it can make the preview much slower to load and also significantly increases the chances of an edit conflict (see the section about edit conflicts, above). So, an important rule of editing is: Don't edit an entire page if you're changing only one section of the page.
You'll know an article has sections if you see a table of contents near the top of the article. Even if there is no table of contents, if you see headings within an article, then the article has sections that can be edited. Figure 1-12 shows an article with no table of contents but with three headings that indicate sections that can be edited.
If you click one of the three "edit" links in Figure 1-12, then the edit box shows only the text in the section, not the text of the entire article. That makes it easier to edit (less text in the edit box), and it significantly lessens the likelihood of an edit conflict, because if another editor is editing a different section, your two edits can't collide.
From the previous section, you know the importance of editing only a section rather than an entire article, whenever possible. But you may have noticed that in Figure 1-12 there was no [edit] link for the first sentence in the article, what Wikipedia calls the lead section. So, it appears that if you want to edit that section, you have to click the "edit this page" tab, just as if you wanted to edit the entire article.
In fact, it is possible to edit only the lead section of an article, though most editors don't know how. There are actually three different options:
Now that you've read about the basics of editing, and (hopefully) followed the step-by-step instructions for doing a sandbox edit, you're almost ready to start editing actual articles. Before you do so, you need to understand a bit more about the rules of Wikipedia. Then you'll be prepared to find some articles that you can improve.
Taken to an extreme, there are basically two kinds of edits (other than removing vandalism, spam, and other problematic material):
But before you start adding new information, you should read Chapter 2: Documenting your sources. If you want to jump right into wordsmithing, read on.
Wikipedia has three core policies for content. Two of them, no original research and verifiability, are discussed in the next chapter. The third, neutral point of view, is worth mentioning now, because wordsmithing is often about a point of view.
Consider, for a moment, the goal of the people doing public relations or in a marketing department: to write about organizations, products and services, and leaders in a way that casts them in the best possible light. Or consider the wording of a press release by a political party, which tries to make the opposition look as bad as possible. In both of these situations, the writers have what Wikipedians call an extreme point of view (POV). By contrast, Wikipedia's policies require editors to follow these principles:
Wikipedia has much, much more detail that you can read about this policy (type the shortcut WP:NPOV in the search box on the left of the screen). Many (probably most, maybe even all) editors at Wikipedia have very strong opinions about one thing or another—cultural values, religion, politics, science, whatever. Good editors avoid problems by either focusing on making articles as factual as possible or working on articles where their potential biases aren't triggered. So if you're absolutely, positively sure you're right about a topic where many, and possibly most, other editors at Wikipedia wouldn't agree with you, it's a good idea to work on the other six million (or so) articles in Wikipedia that aren't about that topic. (Keep in mind that there are lots of places on the Web—blogs, personal pages, wikis other than Wikipedia, and more—where proactive opinions are welcome.)
Ready to edit? If so, you'll want to find articles that you can improve with copyediting. One way is to click the "Random article" link on the left side of the screen (see Figure 1-14).
When you click this link, there's a good chance you'll get a very short article (a stub), or a list, or a page that starts "XYZ may refer to ..." followed by a list of related topics (a disambiguation page), or a very specialized article. You can edit these, of course, but you may want to try again. When you get an article that you're not interested in editing, just click the "Random article" link again. (Do this twenty or so times, and you get a reasonable sense of the variety in the over six million articles in Wikipedia.)
An alternative to using the "Random article" link is to go to articles that other editors have identified as problematic. Several good places to find such articles are:
When you see the name of an article that seems interesting, just click the article name to go to it and start editing as described earlier in this chapter.
If you find what looks like a spelling mistake, don't leap into edit mode and correct it. What you think is an error may be a perfectly legitimate spelling in context. For example, you may have stumbled upon a national variant of a word: What is "analyse" in the United Kingdom is "analyze" in the United States; neither is wrong.
Wikipedia's spelling rules are mostly based on consistency. For example, don't mix variants of the same word within a single article. If an article is about (say) a major city in Australia, then spellings used in that country are correct for the article; if an article has evolved primarily with one variety of English, the whole article should conform to that variety. (For more details, use these shortcuts to get to two guideline pages: WP:SPELLING and WP:ENGVAR.)
VisualEditor (VE) is a way to edit pages without needing to learn wikitext markup. Registered users can opt-in by changing their preferences. Since 2015 it has been available to new registered users by default. For instructions on using Visual Editor, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide.