User:W.stanovsky/tutorial

0. Before the tutorial, if possible

• 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.

1. Be bold

• It’s nearly impossible to break anything irreversibly
• If something you do does cause a problem, or if someone else reverses it, most often someone will explain the concern or point you to helpful tools or policies.
• 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.

2. Let's make ourselves at home

• Go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:YOURNAME (where "YOURNAME" is the user name you just signed up). This is your user page; it doesn't exist yet if you just created your account.
  • 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”.

• Note that this 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").
• In the big text box, called the editing area, type the following (replacing YOURNAME with your user name):

[[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

3. Starting to edit

• To start editing, 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.
  • 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 pages, like this sandbox, as you want. Just create a red link, click it, and save something there, like we just did.
• 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.

4. Editing wikitext — the very basics

OK, now you've created your user page, created a sandbox

• 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.

I'll show the article on M. Wylie Blanchet, which I started on vacation last year.

• • After glancing over the article, I'll click "Edit" near the top right of the page.
• 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 see in general how most of the wikitext corresponds to the rendered article.

Helpful tools

• For the most common examples of rendered text and the wikitext that produces it, check out Help:Cheatsheet
• For way more detail and a much more comprehensive set of examples try Help:Wikitext.