User:NeuroPerrino/sandbox
Introduction for Students
[edit]Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has over ten million registered users and 75,000 active contributors(Wikipedians) as of 2009, many of whom are students like you. The vast majority of them are volunteers who find editing this site to be an enjoyable experience, even a hobby. Therefore I hope you will enjoy this exercise! After all, there are not many assignments that tell you to do something that over a million people think is 'fun'. :)
Before starting this assignment, you need to create an account (Wikipedia:Why create an account?). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to edit any page (otherwise I will be unable to confirm if you have completed the assignment). After you create an account, share your user name with your group members, and link to that account from your name next to the topic you chose.
| Best places to start | Description |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia:Tutorial | Has a good video walkthrough |
| Help:Sandbox tutorial | How to create a user subpage |
| Template:Invitation to edit/tutorial | This overview page links to some of the more detailed info below |
| Wikipedia:Cheatsheet | Shows exactly what to type in to get your desired formatting output |
| Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) | How to find proper sources and referencing |
| Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines | How not to anger the WP community |
| Wikipedia:FAQ/Editing | Detailed editing "how to" info |
if you have any questions, check the Help:Contents and if you cannot find what you are looking for, ask the friendly people at Wikipedia:Help desk - or just contact me.
Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to Boston College. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our BI481 course is the first one at our university to use Wikipedia to such an extent, so please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university—and of yourselves.
You should expect that the teaching assistant, other students, your friends, even (or especially) other Wikipedia editors (not affiliated with our course) or I will leave you various messages on your talk pages. When working on the exercises below, you should log in to Wikipedia and check your messages at least daily. Whenever you have a new message and are logged into Wikipedia, you will see a large orange message, 'You have new messages', on every Wikipedia page you access. To make this message disappear, you should click on it and read the message. Note that it is customary to leave new messages at the bottom of the talk/discussion pages, and to reply to somebody's messages on their talk pages. If you want to leave somebody a message, make sure you are editing their talk page, not their user page. Remember to sign your talk and discussion messages.
Some other useful tips: whenever you are done with an edit and want to save a page, fill out the edit summary box and view a preview of the page after your edit to make sure it looks as you actually want it to look. Only then click the "Save Page" button. You may find the page history tool and watchlist tools to be very useful when you want to check what changes by other editors have been made to the article(s) you are working on.