Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Editing for the first time

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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:

• You don't need to know everything about Wikipedia to edit an article. Wikipedia has over hundreds of pages of policy, guidelines, and how-to information on topics such as
  templates
  , to name just a few. If you don't get something exactly right, don't worry—no one else gets everything right every time, either.
• You don't need to know everything about your subject to edit an article. If you add something that's constructive and 90-percent right, that's far better than not doing an edit at all. As in sports, you don't need to hit a home run or score a goal on every play to be a valuable contributor. If you don't get something exactly right, someone else is likely to come along and help by fixing or finishing it.
• You can contribute without editing articles at all. If you see a problem in an article, but you don't (yet) know how to fix it, or you do know how to fix it, but you can't edit the article (some articles are fully protected, typically for short periods of time), you can still help by posting a constructive comment on the article's talk (discussion) page. (Chapter 8 discusses talk pages in detail.) If you don't want to or can't edit an article directly, you can still help to improve it!

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:

• In the "search" box at the top right of the screen, type
  WP:SAND
  , and press Return.

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.

Adding text

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

You'll do all your work in this chapter in the sandbox, so you won't actually change any Wikipedia articles.

2. From the sandbox page (Figure 1-1), click the "edit this page" tab.

You're now in edit mode, complete with the edit box shown in Figure 1-2.

3. Delete everything but the first six lines, which are instructions.

The edit box contents should look like Figure 1-3. In this box, you'll type some text that includes bold and italic formatting, and section headings.

If you compare Figure 1-1 to Figure 1-3, you may be puzzled about a couple of things: What is the purpose of the curly brackets (the first line in the edit box in Figure 1-3), and why is the text in Figure 1-1 ("Welcome to the Wikipedia Sandbox! This page allows you to carry out experiments") not the same as the underlying text in Figure 1-3?

The answer to both questions is essentially the same: The curly brackets indicate a template, and the purpose of templates, generally, is to add standard text to a page. Because templates are so important—you'll find them everywhere at Wikipedia—there's a separate section on them later in this chapter (see the section about templates).

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.

For this example, you don't have to type all the text if you don't want to. You can even type some text of your own invention, as long as it includes each of the following:

• Section headings. Type two equal signs at the beginning and two more at the end of a line of text. (If you create at least four headings, Wikipedia automatically creates a table of contents, as you'll see in a moment.)
• Boldface. Type three apostrophes (') before and after the text you want to bold.
• Italic. Type two apostrophes (') before and after the text you want to italicize.

Previewing

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.

In other words, follow the instructions in the fine print: "Briefly describe your changes." For example, in this case you might type Test edit – first time using the Sandbox. (See the box below for information about edit summaries.)

Once you've added an edit summary, it's time to check your work.

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.

A Wikipedia preview screen has three parts. The very top of the screen (Figure 1-6) shows a warning that you're not looking at a published version of the page. The middle and bottom of the screen (Figure 1-7) show both what the page will look like after you press the "Publish changes" button (if you don't change it further) and the edit box and related tools.

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.

When you're satisfied with what the preview shows, it's time to publish the edit, which will change the version that readers see when they come to the page.

Saving

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:

• Most of the time, the page changes, incorporating your edit. That is, the page looks like it did when you looked at it in preview mode, except now there is no preview warning on top. Your edit is complete; you're done.
• You might see a cached version of the page. You'll see a version of the page that looks like it did before you edited the page. In this case, you should refresh the page in your Web browser; typing Ctrl-R (⌘-R on the Mac) does the trick in most browsers. Once you see your edit has taken effect, you're done. (In the rare case where refreshing in your browser doesn't work, you need to tell Wikipedia's servers to refresh their cache as well. See the page
  WP:PURGE
  .)
• The worst case scenario is that Wikipedia refuses to make the change because someone else changed the page while you were editing it. Figure 1-8 shows what the page will look like in case of an edit conflict.

The "edit this page" non-issue

"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 warning at the top (Figure 1-8).
• A text box with the text for the current version of the page. It's Wikipedia saying "Here's what you can edit—the current version," plus all the other editing stuff (edit summary box, buttons, wiki markup symbols, and so on.)
• A Differences section that shows how your version (the one you saw in "show preview") now differs from the existing page (the one revised by someone else while you were working on your revision).
• At the very bottom, an additional text edit box, with your edit in it (Figure 1-9).

The best way to handle an edit conflict depends on the circumstances. Here are two common approaches:

• If you were adding information, then you should copy that information from the lower text box to another place (a word processing document,
  Windows Notepad, TextEdit
  , or similar) or just copy it to the clipboard. Once you have the information in a safe place, go back to the page (in reading mode) and review whether what you were adding still needs to be added. If so, go back into editing mode, paste from the clipboard or edit the section or page again (this time more quickly, if possible), do a quick preview and publish the edit.
• If you were doing a small amount of copyediting, just go back to the page (in reading mode), go into edit mode, and do your edits again, saving more frequently. Of course, before you go into edit mode, you should check that what you were trying to fix still needs to be fixed.

• Edit a section of an article, not the entire article (editing of sections is discussed in the 'Editing article sections' section).
• Click the "history" tab to see if an article is getting a lot of edits; if so, do a series of small (quick) edits rather than trying to do a lot of changes within a single edit.
• Prepare lengthy additions offline, in a word processing document or Windows Notepad or something similar, or on a subpage (see the section about creating your personal sandbox). After the text is ready, you can then go into edit mode for the article, copy and paste the text into the edit window, preview, and 'publish changes', all in a short amount of time.

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.

Types of markup

Besides headings, bold, and italic text, you'll encounter the following types of markup as you edit articles:

{{

template

}}

The double curly brackets indicate a template. An example of a template can be found in Figure 1-3 and was discussed immediately thereafter (see the section about adding text). Templates are discussed in more detail later in this chapter (the section about templates).

[[Article name]] or [[Article name|other name]]

Double square brackets create internal links (wikilinks), which are hyperlinks between pages in Wikipedia. They're described in the next section.

[http:url] or [http:url some text]

Single square brackets around a URL create external links. This formatting is discussed in

Chapter 2: Documenting your sources (see the section about external links

).

<ref>...</ref>

These are footnote tags—the text between the tags is the footnote itself. Later in the article will be an instruction as to where to display the footnotes, which will look like this: <references />, or like this: {{

Chapter 2: Documenting your sources

.

<blockquote>...</blockquote> and <math>...</math>

In articles, you'll find a few other types of paired tags besides the <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.

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.

To link or not to link

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:

• Don't link plain English words or phrases; do link technical terms.
• Don't link the same word or phrase multiple times, at least not in the same section of an article.
• Avoid linking two words that are next to each other, because these will look to the reader as if they are a single link (if necessary, reword the sentence).

Understanding and using templates

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:

• Consistency. Every cleanup template looks the same, each type of infobox (see the section about article appearance) looks the same, and so on. Editors don't have to constantly figure out how to present a particular type of information in an article.
• Time savings. You don't have to type out standard information, and you don't have to know how to format information in standard ways (such as superscript or message boxes). You just have to find out the name of the template and put it in double curly brackets. The software does the rest.
• Automatic updating. If the Wikipedia community decides to change a template, changing just one page—the template page itself—automatically changes what's displayed on every other page that uses the template. (High-use templates are protected from being changed by normal editors, to prevent easily-done extensive vandalism.)

Templates are everywhere in Wikipedia. In this book, you'll find discussions about templates in a number of chapters, for example:

• Formatting footnotes (smaller font size, multiple columns) (the section about citation templates in Chapter 2)
• Putting information about yourself, using userboxes, on your user page (the box about userboxes in Chapter 3)
• Marking a new article as needing categories (the box about categorization in Chapter 4)
• Posting warnings to users about vandalism and spam, and reporting vandalism (the sections on issuing warnings and reporting vandalism in Chapter 7)
• Using an archive box to neatly organize links to archived talk pages (the section about creating an archive page in Chapter 8)
• Indicating that an article is within a topic being worked on by a group of editors (a WikiProject) (the section about WikiProject recruitment in Chapter 9)
• Marking text as needing a source, and notifying the editor who posted the unsourced information about their mistake (the section about proper sourcing in Chapter 10)
• Posting warnings about personal attacks (the section about community enforcement in Chapter 11)

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:

• Templates add text and formatting, which are stored on another page. To add a template to an article, you type its name between double curly brackets, at the place in the wikitext where you want the template to appear.

• If the template contains parameters, you can edit the text that has been added to those parameters just like you can edit other text in the article, without understanding any of the complexities of templates. For example, take a look at Figure 1-11, which shows a template with a lot of parameters.

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.

Editing article sections

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.

Editing one section

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.

Tip:

Sometimes editing an entire article at once is necessary—for example, if you're moving sections around, or moving text from one section to another. But often when you plan to edit two or three sections of an article, you can efficiently do these as separate edits of individual sections, rather than editing the entire article. If nothing else, it makes previewing much easier (but the preview shows only part of the article, not the entire article).

Editing the lead section

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:

• The manual way is to click the [edit] link for a section below the lead section, then go to the URL at the top of the screen and change the number at the end of the URL to "0". (The lead section of an article is always numbered section "0".) Press Enter, and you're then editing the lead section.
• The most complicated way is to add JavaScript code to your personal JavaScript page (see
  WP:JS). (Note: To do so, you must be a registered editor; see the section about reasons for registering
  .)
• The easiest way is to click the "Preferences" link on the upper right of the page (which you won't see unless you have a registered account and are logged in), go to the "Gadgets" tab. Under the "Appearance" heading Select "Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page" and then click Save button. Thereafter, whenever you're editing an article, you'll see something similar to Figure 1-13.

Editing for real

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.

Wordsmithing versus adding information

Taken to an extreme, there are basically two kinds of edits (other than removing vandalism, spam, and other problematic material):

• You can change the wording and/or formatting of an article, leaving the information in the article more or less intact.
• You can add new information.

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.

A few words about content

Wikipedia has three core policies for content. Two of them,

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:

• Present significant viewpoints in proportion to the (published) prominence of each. Fringe theories, for example, deserve much less space (word count) in an article than mainstream/conventional theories.
• Represent fairly any differing views about a topic. Fairly means presenting the best case for each view, while avoiding extreme rhetoric from either side.
• Write without bias. The best way to do this is to write about facts, not about opinions. For example, instead of saying "X murdered Y," which is an opinion (was it self-defense?), write "X was convicted of murdering Y," a documentable fact.

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.)

Selecting a random page

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.)

Tip:

If you encounter vandalism, you might want to look at Chapter 7: Dealing with vandalism and spam to learn your options for fixing it. Or, if you're very new at editing, there's nothing wrong with leaving the vandalism for a more experienced editor to fix.

Working on a known problem

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:

• CAT:UP
  )
• CAT:M
  )

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.

Spelling doesn't (always) count

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:ENGVAR

.)

Alternative method of editing

Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide

.

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