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

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Anyone can edit Wikipedia - including you. Right. There are no fees, and you do not need to register. You do not even need to have an email account (but if you're reading this book, you probably have it). As explained by the Introduction, all Wikipedia articles are a collaborative effort. You can jump right and add your own knowledge with just a few clicks and some typing.

This chapter describes what you see when you view articles in the Wikipedia editing window and how to practice, preview, and publish your edits. You'll also learn some basic editing skills - how to create links from one article to another, and how to edit the article section rather than the entire article. Once you have these skills under your belt, you are ready for the first step in real Wikipedia editing: identifying articles that require edits.

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

Cara pengeditan Wikipedia

The experienced Wikipedia editor understands one thing above all: Wikipedia is a collaboration. It does not need to be intimidated, as you get support from the entire research community, fact-checkers, and proofreaders. Considering the following points will get you into the right mindset for effective editing:

• You do not need to know everything about Wikipedia to edit articles . Wikipedia has hundreds of pages of policies, guides, and information about topics such as capitalization, categorization, quotations, copyrights, disclaimers, foreign language characters, titles, indents, links, lists, neutrality, pronunciation, quotes, tags and templates just a few. If you do not get something right, do not worry - nobody else gets everything right every time, either .
• You do not need to know all about your subject for editing articles . If you add something constructive and 90 percent true, it's much better than not doing any editing at all. As in sports, you do not have to hit home runs or score goals in every game to become a valuable contributor. If you do not get something right, someone else will likely come and help with fixing it or getting it done .
• You can contribute without editing at all . If you see a problem in the article, but you have not (yet) known how to fix it, or you know how to fix it, but you can not edit the article (some articles are protected completely, usually for short periods of time), you can still help by posting comments constructive on the discussion page (discussion) article. (Chapter 8 discusses the discussion page in detail.) If you do not want or can not edit the article directly, you can still help fix it .

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

Practicing in sandbox

Even if you've written and edited many different types of software in the past, you'll need some exercise with Wikipedia tools. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a page called sandbox , where editors can practice without worrying about damaging anything. In this chapter, you will do your work in the sandbox instead of editing the actual article.

Remember when you search for a book (or whenever you edit), if you find a feature you do not fully understand, you can always go to the sandbox and do some testing there. You will not break anything, and you can experiment as much as you want until you find the right way to work. You can even practice the actual editing duplications that are displayed throughout this book.

From any page on Wikipedia, you can enter the sandbox in one of two ways:

• In the "search" box at the top right of the screen, type WP: SAND, and press Return. Be sure to type it in all caps and without spaces after the colon.

• Click the "edit this page" tab at the top of any page to go straight into edit mode. You'll see, to the bottom of the screen (scroll down if necessary), "Your changes will be visible soon." Just below, it says "For testing, use sandbox instead." The word "sandbox" is a bold link - just a click.

Both ways take you to the sandbox quickly. Just use any method you find easier to remember. Figure 1-1 shows the sandbox before editing begins.

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Start, preview and save your edits

Editing on Wikipedia is similar to using a very basic text editor, with some word processing tools thrown. You type text into an edit box (which is less frequently written editbox ), then click the button to view and finally publish your work. Although some edits may only be stored in your own sandbox, or to a draft, we call each edit as 'published', because it's available online, and everyone can see it if they know where to look.

Added text

You edit a Wikipedia article in a large white text box in the middle of the window. To get to that box, you have to go into edit mode.

1. In the search box at the top right of the screen, type WP: SAND, and hit Return to enter the sandbox.

You will do all your work in this chapter in the sandbox, so you will not actually change the Wikipedia article.

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

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

3. Remove everything except the first three lines, which is the instruction.

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

If you compare Figure 1-1 with Figure 1-3 , you may be confused about several things: What is the purpose of curly brackets (first line in edit box in Figure 1-3 ), and why the text in Figure 1-1 ("Welcome to Simple Sandbox! This page allows you to experiment") is not the same with the underlying text in Figure 1-3 ?

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

4. Type the text shown in Figure 1-4 (except the first three lines at the top, which should already exist) into the edit box.

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

• Section title . Type two equal marks at the beginning and two more at the end of the line of text. (If you create at least four titles, Wikipedia automatically creates a table of contents, as you will see shortly.)
• Boldface . Type in three apostrophes (') before and after the text you want to bold.
• Italics . Type in two apostrophes (') before and after the text you want to skew.

Preview

One of the most important things after editing is preview - to see how it looks. For edits involving formatting, previewing is very important. But even if you've added only plain text, you still have to look first because you want to get used each time .

Experienced editors often skip the preview while doing minor routine edits. Usually it's okay, but sometimes, because of their embarrassment, after seeing what the page looks like after it's published online, they realize they need to make other edits to fix their own mistakes. So, until you become an experienced editor, preview your work every time.

Before you click the "Show preview" button, you'll need to do one more thing - provide a summary of the edits you just created. You should do this now , rather than later, because the preview will also show you what the edits are like. Think of an editing summary as a way for you to explain your edits to other editors. The explanation can be very short ("typo," "return vandalism") or it can be long (up to 200 characters). Make it as short as possible, and make it as long as you need.

1. In the "Summary" box ( Figure 1-5 ), type a few words to describe your editing purpose.

In other words, follow the instructions in fine print: "Describe briefly the changes you have made." For example, in this case you might type Test edit - first use Sandbox . (See the box below for information on editing summaries.)

After you add an edit summary, it's time to check your work.

2. Click the "Show preview" button just below the edit window (the button shown in Figure 1-5 ) to see what the Wikipedia page looks like after you publish your last edit.

The preview screen of Wikipedia has three sections. The topmost part of the screen ( Figure 1-6 ) shows a warning that you do not see the published version of the page. The middle and bottom of the screen ( Figure 1-7 ) shows what will look like a page after you press the " Publish changes " (if you do not change it) and the box edit and related tools.

3. Now is your chance to fix the error before anyone else can see it. Just make any changes you want in the edit box, and click "Show preview" again.

When you're happy with what the preview is showing, it's time to publish the edits, which will change the version that readers see when they get 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, pages change, merging your edits. Meaning, the page looks like it when you see it in preview mode, except now there's no preview alert above. Your edit is complete; done.
• You may see a cached version of cache . You will see a version of the page that looks like it before you edited the page. In this case, you should refresh the page in your Web browser; typing Ctrl-R (? -R on a Mac) does the trick in most browsers. Once you see your edits apply, you're done. (In rare cases where refreshing in your browser is not working, you need to tell the Wikipedia server to refresh their cache as well.See Wikipedia page: Clean shortcut WP: PURGE.)
• The worst case scenario is that Wikipedia refuses to make changes because someone else changes the page as you edit it. Figure 1-8 shows what the page looks like in case of edit conflict .

The "edit this page" does not matter

"Edit this page" is not destructive and does not differ, depending on you clicking the Cancel button. It basically has the same effect as if it's displayed "View Source". Do not hesitate. It is okay.

We recommend that you press the Cancel button as soon as you finish looking, if you accidentally change the wikitext source and then accidentally hit "Publish changes". But brave and feel free, because vandalism is more likely than to see an accident. Even if you ignore the edit screen and explore it, it might be fine, even if you go back there later and then accidentally hit the Publish changes button. If this happens and a change occurs on the version of your page and a server version changes, this will trigger the Edit conflict screen. But that's okay, because the default of the Edit conflict screen makes Publish changes do the same with Cancel: no . You can "edit" (view) the busiest pages, change the most content, and make it completely harmless. Just use the Cancel button.

To actually edit, you complete 1) the changes, 2) the editing comments, and then 3) the Publish button activation change. Because deliberate editing is very common, & lt; Enter & gt; key to a shortcut to the Publish changes button in step-2. So now you know how Publish changes can be triggered by accident.

To "edit this page", then, is really just to "see source". To experience this reality, you can edit the watchlist. There is there is no "Cancel" option. Finally, there is a rare case of the Copyright article , where the administrator changed "edit this page" to "view source". So when editing a page, try to hit Cancel, but do not worry about it if you forget.

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Dealing with conflict edit

Some articles are very (temporarily or permanently) popular with editors - maybe this article is about current events (say, storms) or someone suddenly in the news. Such articles can be edited as often as every minute or two minutes. For such an article, if you as an editor take a long time to make edits - say, you start editing and spending ten minutes for it, or do something else for five minutes then go back to editing - your chances of editing conflicts are high when you try to publish your edits.

If there is an edit conflict, the Wikipedia screen has four sections:

• The above warning ( Figure 1-8 ).
• Text box with text for the current page version. This Wikipedia says "Here's what you can edit - current version," plus all other editing stuff (edit summary box, button, wiki markup symbol, and so on.)
• The Differences section that shows how your version (which you see in "show preview") now is different from the existing page (revised by others when you are working on your revision).
• At the very bottom, an additional text text box, with your edit in it ( Figure 1-9 ).

The best way to handle editing conflicts depends on the situation. Here are two common approaches:

• If you add information , then you should copy that information from the text box below to another (word processing document, Windows Notepad, TextEdit, or something similar) or just copy to the clipboard. Once you have the information in a safe place, go back to the page (in read mode) and review whether you add still need to be added. If so, go back to editing mode, paste it from the clipboard or edit the section or page again (faster this time, if possible), preview it quickly and publish the edit.
• If you do a small amount of copyediting , simply return to the page (in read mode), go into edit mode, and do your edits again, save more often. Of course, before you go into edit mode, you should make sure that what you're trying to fix still needs to be fixed.

Basically, you have not lost the text you added (you can copy it), but if you do multiple copies, you may have to do it again, because the alternative is overwriting what other editors or other editors do it. You really do not want to do that, assuming that the other editor (s) fix the article.

Of course, the best way to resolve conflicts is to avoid them from scratch. You can avoid completely editing conflicts using the following techniques:

• Edit one section of the article, not all articles (section edits are discussed in the 'Section editing article' section).
• Click the "history" tab to see if the article gets a lot of edits; if so, do a series of small (quick) edits instead of trying to make many changes in one edit.
• Set up long offline additions, in word processing documents or Windows Notepad or something similar, or on the subpage (see the section on creating your personal sandbox). Once the text is ready, you can go into edit mode for articles, copy and paste text into the edit, preview, and 'publish changes' window, all in no time.

src: www.super-memory.com

Wiki Markup: From the edit box to the screen

Earlier in this chapter, you learned how to create section headers, and format text as bold or italic (see Images 1-4 ). This format is called wiki markup . As you proceed through this book, you will learn about every type of markup you might encounter. As a new editor, you need to learn three things immediately: recognize the type of markup, how the template is used, and how to create links between articles.

Type of markup

In addition to the title, bold, and italic text, you'll find the following markup types when you edit an article:

{{template}}

Double curly braces indicate the template. Template samples can be found in Images 1-3 and have been discussed shortly thereafter (see section on adding text). Templates are discussed in more detail later in this chapter (section on templates).

[[Article name]] or [[Article name | another name]]

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

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

Single brackets around the URLs create external links. This format is discussed in Chapter 2: Documenting your sources (see section on external links).

& lt; ref & gt;... & lt;/ref & gt;

This is a footnote tag - the text between the tags is the footnote itself. Later in the article there will be instructions where to display footnote, which will look like this: & lt; reference/& gt; , or something like this: {{reflist}} ; usually the instruction is in the section titled "References". Footnotes are described in detail in Chapter 2: Documenting your sources.

& lt; blockquote & gt;... & lt;/blockquote & gt; and & lt; math & gt;... & lt;/math & gt;

In the article, you'll find some other types of tags other than tags & lt; ref & gt; for footnotes; blockquote and math tags are the most common. Tags usually come in pairs, and the closing tag should have a slash character ("/") as the second character if it works properly.

& lt ;! - Your comment text is put here - & gt;

This markup converts the text into invisible comments; an example appears in Figure 1-3 . "Invisible" means the text is not displayed in normal view mode; You can see it only in edit mode.

{| lots of stuff with lots of vertical lines |}

This format creates tables. Chapter 14 discusses the details.

One or more lines starting with "*" or "#"

This character creates a list in an article ("#" number list, while "*" just puts a bullet at the beginning of the line). Chapter 14 discusses the details.

[[Category: Name]]

This markup looks like wikilink, and that, by the way, but puts the category link at the bottom of the page. Chapter 19 discusses the details.

How to create internal links

Connecting 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 links every time they come across a word they do not know much about. A good place to add internal links includes the main section of the article and at the beginning of a new section in the article. Readers should always be able to get important related articles through links.

In the edit box, simply place the square brackets around the name of the article you want to link to, for example: [[Winston Churchill]] . Figure 1-10 displays the sandbox again, in preview mode with multiple internal links sprinkled.

Other types of internal links - radiated links - are especially useful for situations where the naming varies by country. For example, you type the following phrase in your article: "San Francisco has an extensive public transport system," and you want to connect the word "public transport" with relevant articles. The problem is, there is no article on Wikipedia called "public transport." However, there is an article called "public transport," which may be written by someone who speaks English English. You do not care what the name is, you just want your readers to go to that article. Here's how to create links while reading "public transport": San Francisco has a broad [[public transport]]] system .

Understanding and using templates

As mentioned in the section on making edits, if you go into edit mode and see some text surrounded by two curly braces, like this: {{pagename}} , you viewing template. The template tells the software to get text instructions and formatting from other places and inserts formatted text into articles when articles are displayed.

Here's a typical example: If you see the template {{item}} in the edit box when you edit the article, it tells the software to go to the [[Template: Facts]] , get the text there (including formatting), and enter that text into the article when the article is displayed for the reader. The {{fact}} template, showing the following text:

Templates are widespread for a number of reasons:

• Consistency . Each cleanup template looks the same, each type of infobox (see section on article view) looks the same, and so on. The editor does not have to constantly figure out how to present certain types of information in the article.
• Time savings . You do not need to type in standard information, and you do not need to know how to format information in standard ways (like superscript or mailbox). You just need to find out the name of the template and put it in double brace. The software does the rest.
• Automatic updates . If the Wikipedia community decides to change the template, change only one page - the template page itself - automatically changes what is displayed on every other page that uses the template. (High use templates are protected from being changed by normal editors, to prevent extensive vandalism done easily.)
• Categorization . Templates can include text that places pages into categories (see Chapter 18: Better articles: Systematic approach). Then you and other editors can enter the category page to find, for example, all articles that have been categorized require editing.

Templates are everywhere on Wikipedia. In this book, you will find discussions about templates in chapters, for example:

• Format footnotes (smaller font sizes, multiple columns) (section on quotation templates in Chapter 2)
• Enter information about yourself, use userboxes, on your user page (box about userboxes in Chapter 3)
• Marking a new article as a need category (box about categorization in Chapter 4)
• Post a warning to users about vandalism and spam, and report vandalism (section on issuing warnings and reporting vandalism in Chapter 7)
• Use the archive box to neatly organize links to archived conversation pages (the section on creating an archive page in Chapter 8)
• Indicates that the article is in a topic that is being worked on by a group of editors ( WikiProject ) (section on WikiProject recruitment in Chapter 9)
• Mark text as needing a source, and notify editors who post untrusted information about their error (the section on the right procurement in Chapter 10)
• Post a warning about personal attacks (the section on community enforcement in Chapter 11)

It uses a lot of templates, and that's only in the first 11 chapters. Currently, you only need to know the two main principles of this template:

• Templates add text and formatting, which are stored on other pages. To add a template to an article, you type its name between double curly braces, in place of the wikitext where you want to display the template.

• If the template contains a parameter, you can edit the text you've added to the parameter as you can edit other text in the article, without understanding the temptation of the template. For example, see Figure 1-11 , which shows templates with many parameters.

In Figure 1-11 , each parameter has a name that ends with the same sign. Infobox will only display text that follows the same mark. You can edit the text that appears after the same alerts, including adding text, but not messing with parameter names. Also, be careful not to delete or add parameter separators (vertical bar symbols "|"), which mark the beginning of each parameter.

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Edit article section

Inexperienced editors often work on all articles in edit mode even though they make changes only to one section of the article. This not only makes it harder for other editors to understand what the editor is doing, if the edit notes are not detailed enough, but can make the preview slower to load and also significantly increase the possibility of edit conflict (see section on edit conflict, above). So, the important editing rules are: Do not edit the entire page if you only change one part of the page .

Edit a section

You will know the article has a section if you see a table of contents near the top of the article. Even if there is no table of contents, if you see the title in the article, then the article has an editable section. Figure 1-12 shows an article without a table of contents but with three titles indicating editable sections.

If you click on one of the three "edit" links in Figure 1-12 , then the edit box shows only text in the section instead of the entire article text. Which makes it easier to edit (less text in the edit box), and it significantly reduces the possibility of edit conflict, because if other editors edit different sections, your two edits can not collide.

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Edit the leads section

From the previous section, you know the importance of editing only sections instead of the entire article, if possible. But you may have noticed that in Figure 1-12 there is no link [edit] for the first sentence in the article, what Wikipedia refers to as part of lead . So, it seems that if you want to edit that section, you should click on the "edit this page" tab, just as if you wanted to edit the entire article.

In fact, it's is possible to edit only the main part of the article, although most editors do not know how. There are actually three different options:

• The manual way is to click on the [edit] link for the section below the prospect 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 beginning of the article is always numbered "0".) Press Enter, and you then edit the leads section.
• The most complicated way is to add JavaScript code to your personal JavaScript page (see section on your personal JavaScript page), to give you a custom tab ("0" tab) or "edit" link. You can find this script in the "Navigation to Edit" section of the Wikipedia page: WikiProject User Scripts/Scripts (shortcuts: WP: JS). (Note: To do so, you must be a registered editor; see the section on the reasons for signing up.)
• The easiest way is to click on the "Preferences" link at the top right of the page (which you will not see unless you have a registered and signed-in account), go to the "Gadgets" tab. Under the heading "Appearance" Select "Add link [edit] for page lead" and then click Save button. After that, every time you edit an article, you'll see something similar to Figure 1-13.

src: thinking.is.ed.ac.uk

Editing for real

Now that you've read up on the basics of editing, and (hopefully) following step by step instructions to edit sandboxes, you're almost ready to start editing the actual article. Before you do that, you need to understand a little more about Wikipedia rules. Then you'll be ready to find some articles that you can improve.

Wordsmithing versus adding information

Taken to the extreme, there are basically two types of editing (other than removing vandalism, spam, and other problematic material):

• You can change the order of words 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 to wordmithing, read on.

Multiple words about content

Wikipedia has three core policies for content. Two of them, no original research and assurance , will be discussed in the next chapter. The third, neutral point of view , needs to be mentioned now, because wordmithing is often about point of view.

Consider, for a moment, the purpose of people in public relations or in the marketing department: to write about organizations, products and services, and leaders in a way that throws them in the best possible light. Or consider words from press releases by political parties, who try to make the opposition look as bad as possible. In both of these situations, the authors have what are called Wikipedians as extreme points of view (POV). Instead, Wikipedia policies require editors to follow these principles:

• Present a significant point of view in proportions to excellence (published) respectively. The periphery theory, for example, deserves less space (number of words) in an article than the mainstream/conventional theory.
• Representing fairly each different view of a topic. Simply means presenting the best case for each view, while avoiding extreme rhetoric from both sides.
• Write without bias . The best way to do this is to write about facts, not about opinions. For example, instead of saying "X kill Y," which is an opinion (what is self-defense?), Write "X punished for killing Y," a fact that can be documented.

Wikipedia has many, more details you can read about this policy (type WP shortcut: NPOV in the search box on the left of the screen). Many (probably most, if not all) editors on Wikipedia have a very strong opinion of one thing or another - cultural, religious, political, scientific, whatever. Good editors avoid trouble by focusing on making factual articles possible or working on articles where their potential biases are not triggered. So if you really believe that you're right about a topic where a lot, and probably most, other editors on Wikipedia will not agree with you, it's good to work on three million other (or more) articles on Wikipedia that > no about that topic. (Keep in mind that there are many places on the Web - blogs, private pages, wikis other than Wikipedia, and more - where proactive views are accepted.)

Selecting a random page

Ready to edit? If so, you will want to look for articles that you can improve with copyediting. One way is to click on the "Random article" link on the left side of the screen (see Figure 1-14 ).

When you click on this link, there is a good chance you will get a very short article (a stub ), or list, or the page that started "XYZ can refer to..." followed by a list of related topics ( page disambiguation ), or a very specific article. You can edit this, of course, but you may want to try again. When you get an article that is not interested in editing, just click the "Random article" link again. (Do this twenty times, and you get a sensible sense of diversity in over five million articles on Wikipedia.)

Working on known issues

An alternative to using the "Random article" link is to go to an article that other editors have identified as problematic. Some great places to find the article are:

• Category: Wikipedia articles that require updates (shortcut: CAT: UP)
• Category: Wikipedia maintenance (shortcut: CAT: M)

When you see the name of an article that seems interesting, just click the article name to go and start editing as described earlier in this chapter.

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Alternate editing method

VisualEditor (VE) is a way to edit pages without having to learn wikitext markup. Registered users can opt-in by changing their preferences. Since 2015 it's available to new registered users by default. For instructions on using VisualEditor, see Wikipedia: VisualEditor/User guide.

Source of the article : Wikipedia