This page explains a variety of basic principles. If you learn everything on this page and edit patiently, you'll avoid at least 95% of the trouble new users have.
"Getting around the site" provides an analogy to help you try to understand the site's structure. This may help you understand why no one replies when you leave messages on your talk page, or why you get in trouble if you leave messages in articles.
"Things everyone should know (and can get into trouble for rejecting)" explains some social contracts that the Wikipedia community has agreed to. The subsection "Some experienced tips" are things that even some experienced users occasionally forget but are good to try to remember. These notes are just my summary of some different site principles, they are not policy.
"Finding sources" explains how to find sources -- you do not need to be a librarian. If you can find this site, you can usually find some sources for many topics.
"How to write articles that won't be rejected or deleted" explains, well, how to write articles. Ever since I started following these steps, none of my article have even been nominated for deletion.
"Summary of various site policies and guidelines I use selections of when welcoming most new users" summarizes almost every policy and guideline you might ever have trouble with. These policies and guidelines are not magical invocations that will automatically win your argument (no one "wins" here anyway). There are a few, rare assholes users who might use misquote even more obscure guidelines to try and "win" but that approach is not welcome (that said, a reasonable case that reflects policies very well is more likely to win than an emotional case with no connection to policy). This section is just my summary of these policies and guidelines and does not touch the manual of style -- my summary is not binding on anyone.
"Formatting" explains how to use Wiki mark up. Wiki mark up may look intimidating but you do not need to know anything about "programming" or "coding" or other "computer stuff" to learn it. Think of it as just a few extra grammar rules. If you already know anything about HTML (even if you just took an intro course a decade ago), you're in luck -- Wiki mark up is the fetal alcohol syndrome-afflicted, lead paint chip eating, sibling-cousin of HTML. You may want to look at Help:Cheatsheet as well.
The table of contents is automatically generated because there are enough sections to necessitate one.
Getting around the site
edit- Different pages are like different rooms. Articles are like displays in a museum, article talk pages are like the backstage areas where the displays are worked on. Your user page is like the front door to your office. You can decorate it up to a point, just make sure that the material there has something to do with the site. Your user talk page is like your office (so posting there is like talking to yourself).
- The Teahouse is like a reception area. The Help Desk is like, well, a help desk. The Reference Desks are supposed to be a place to find sources for articles.
- Administrator intervention against vandalism is where you report vandals. Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring is where you report someone who has made more than 3 reverts in under 24 hours. Requests for Page Protection is where you request that a page be locked (make sure there's a good reason for it). They all have templates for reports, use them.
- Administrators Noticeboard/Incidents is like the front room for the security office where incidents can be brought to administrator attention, while Administrators Noticeboard is like the back office where the admins sort out admin matters. Make sure you don't need to go to one of the above areas first.
Things everyone should know (and can get into trouble for rejecting)
edit- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. All we do here is cite, summarize, and paraphrase professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources, without addition, nor commentary. We're not a directory, nor a forum, nor a place for you to "spread the word".
- Almost all actions on the site are public record. You can see someone's contributions by putting
Special:Contributions/username
into the search bar. - Almost everyone is here to help the site or else they would not be here.
- Vandalism is deliberately trying to mess up the site. Lots of things that people call "vandalism" are not really vandalism.
- Do not revert changes to a page more than 3 times within a 24 hour period (except in cases of clear-cut vandalism). This is one of the most common definitions of "edit warring," which we don't approve of.
- Don't be an asshole, don't attack people. You don't have to act like you're in an audience with the Queen but you should comment on content instead of contributors. If you must comment on behavior, comment on actions and how they effect others, instead of what you think about the other person. Pointedly telling a specific person "don't be an asshole" (instead of leaving a general warning to no one in particular) can be considered an attack.
- If you are being paid to edit, you must put this template (filled out) on your user page
{{paid|user=InsertName|employer=InsertName|client=InsertName}}
. Refusal to do so is a violation of our terms of service. - If you make a claim, it's on you to back it up. For claims that belong in articles, you do this with sources. For claims about other user's actions, you use "diffs" that show their action taking place.
- Any statement about a living or recently deceased person, positive or negative, on any part of the site, must be backed up by a source and properly attributed.
- Do not upload anything that might be copyrighted. Even if you own the copyright, we don't. You could donate material you own to us, but it's just easier to paraphrase.
- We're not affiliated with Google or any government. We're mostly bound just to US laws (but don't try to make legal threats based on those, it's the Wikimedia Foundation's lawyers' jobs to keep us in line, not yours). This site is secular so we don't apply any religions' laws (nor reject an editor just because they follow a religion). (...Ok, we will will topic ban people who are clearly only here to push strong views about Scientology and do automatically block any IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology... But we're not going to stop someone just for being a Scientologist if they're otherwise helping). Likewise, we largely do not restrict any user based on their politics as long as they are not disruptive about those views. That said, fuck Nazis. They distinguish themselves from other fascists by their support for the Holocaust (even in denial of its reality, they do not repudiate its evil) and also their racism inherently denies this site's fundamental assumptions that everyone (regardless of their demographics) deserves free access to knowledge and can contribute to that noble goal. Thus, Nazism (broadly construed) is inherently disruptive, so their choices on this site are to go to hell or stop being Nazis.
Some experienced tips
edit- If you cannot pay attention to what you're doing, don't do it.
- Make it a point to look at some policies and guidelines every once and a while.
- If possible, find a topic that we don't have much activity in that you're already interested in. That way, if you ever need to buy a book as a source, it will also a book you'd read for fun.
- Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace has useful template messages for a variety of scenarios. That said, if someone is only receiving template messages (especially without a welcome), try a hand-written note before reporting them (unless they're obviously only here to disrupt the site).
- When reporting an technical issue, note what platform you're on, what browser you're using, what page you're seeing the problem at, and describe it on the assumption that everyone has never seen it before. Describe the steps you took that resulted in the problem and what things you've tried to fix it or at least get around it. Do this for your IT guy as well.
- A lot of coding errors by new users are a result of not assuming that every single character of code is absolutely necessary. If you do not understand what some coding does, replace only the text you need to change while leaving the coding alone. Sure, be bold, experiment, and feel free to make mistakes but you'll save everyone else a lot of trouble if you use the "show preview" or "show changes" buttons before saving or even the sandbox if you need to mess with code you don't understand.
- To fight someone else (no matter how wrong they are) is to both target and become a victim of unreasonable thinking. Victory can only be found by keeping the site free of inappropriate content and discouraging inappropriate actions, starting with yourself.
- Get to the point. A lot of new users (and some old users) confuse length of content for quality. Yes, this page is long but it covers a lot of material.
- Sarcasm is super obvious. In case you didn't catch it, that was sarcasm, sarcasm is not super obvious so be careful with it. I usually put any sarcastic comments I make in that link (or link to the article Sarcasm) just to make it clear.
- Use a program like Microsoft Notepad or Notepad++ to draft stuff, whether it's articles or responses to posts.
- Look next to section titles for a button that says "edit" and click that instead of editing the whole page. This will partially fill out the edit summary so people know what you edited and reduce the risk of an edit conflict (especially on busy pages).
- People like it when you fill out the edit summary box as honestly and clearly as possible. Some people may be annoyed when you don't leave edit summaries but everyone will hate it if you leave an inaccurate or dishonest one.
- Neutrality does not mean creating artificial balance between reality and the denial thereof. Those who argue otherwise are not acting in the site's best interest but for their own biases.
- In an academic context, "myth" refers to a story regarded as sacred, the importance or truth value of which is grounded in something philosophical, metaphysical, spiritual, or otherwise ephemeral; regardless of its historicity. It does not mean "false story."
- Assume that anything you write will be read in the most stupid and hostile tone possible. Read what others write in the most pleasant tone possible.
- Write, criticize it as much as you can, rewrite it, get people to point out everything that's wrong with it, rewrite it again, get people to deface it, rewrite it to incorporate the defacement, throw it away, and repeat. When you finally write something good, forget about it and never expect credit. (The same goes for all forms of art, language, or anything else creative because they are processes and not products).
- Forget everything you know and write only about what the sources say.
- Regularly go to Have I Been Pwned? and make sure your email and password don't show up there. Use Gibson Research's Haystack Calculator to make sure that your password takes at least a thousand centuries to break. Install decent security software and also occasionally run McAfee Stinger. If you're using a computer that anyone else could possibly use, always log out and never save your password.
- If you have to ask, you're not ready to be an admin. If you're absolutely positive that you're ready to nominate yourself to be an admin, oh God no, you're not. You're probably only ready for WP:Requests for adminship when you know damn well why you shouldn't be an admin but other people insist you'd do a good job for some reason.
Finding sources
editGoogle is your friend. Don't cite the search page, cite the address for specific results. Google Books, Google scholar, and Google News are especially useful, just make sure that the publisher is reputable.
We try to avoid a definitive list of what sources always are good because it can vary based on the situation. Still, the community is quite clear that some select sources are usually good and some sources are almost always bad.
Sources by accredited academics in a relevant field, published by a university press or by academic publishers (such as ABC-CLIO, Brill Publishers, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Springer Publishing, T&T Clark, Taylor & Francis, Walter de Gruyter, or Wiley-Blackwell) are almost always reliable (unless multiple tertiary sources of comparable weight isolate a particular author's views as not mainstream). Sources by someone with questionable academic qualifications, writing outside of that field, published by popular press are more likely to be unreliable. If we have an article about an author, and their views are described as pseudoscience, pseudohistory, conspiracy theory, outdated, "now rejected," fringe, racist, etc... They're obviously not reliable. You should exercise caution if an author's views are described as "controversial."
Self-published books or books from pay-to-print publishers like Lulu.com are generally rejected, except maybe for statements about the author about themselves, or (perhaps) by recognized authorities within a field (though these sources are a lot weaker than lesser-known academics from reputable publishers).
When it comes to journalism, the Associated Press, the BBC, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek, the Pew Research Center, PolitiFact, Reuters, Rolling Stone, Snopes.com, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, and Wired are almost always reliable. Someone questioning or doubting the wholesale reliability of those publications (not just questioning individual pieces; but especially the Associated Press, Snopes, or Reuters as institutions) is generally going to be considered way too far off in some biased political extreme to be of much use to the site. However, opinion pieces should be attributed and some of those publications host blogs on their site that are not reliable. For example, Forbes is generally reliable, Forbes.com contributors are not.
WikiLeaks are primary sources that sometimes raise questions of authenticity or provenance, and must be interpreted by secondary or tertiary sources instead. Also, "Wiki" is just a software, we're not affiliated with them.
InfoWars is so obviously a fake news source that defending it can (and probably will) lead to a blocked for "not being here to improve the encyclopedia" or even "lacking competency necessary to improve the encyclopedia." If someone defends InfoWars, feel free to ignore anything else they have to say. Sites that cite InfoWars as authoritative are likewise full of shit.
Breitbart News, the Daily Mail, the National Enquirer, The Sun, TheBlaze, and WorldNetDaily have well-deserved reputations for caring more about sensationalism than accuracy. Sources from the official companies behind them can be reliable for attributed claims about themselves.
Sources that anyone can create or change are never reliable. This especially includes Wikipedia, Wikia, or WikiNews. This includes blogs (except maybe by individuals so recognized as authorities on a subject that we have articles on them), Amazon listings and reviews, Baidu Baike, Ancestry.com entries, Discogs listings, eBay listings, Find a Grave entries, Goodreads, or IMDb. This includes most social media posts (such as Facebook posts, Tweets, or Tumblr posts), except by the subject of an article for an official and uncontested statement about themselves (and even then, it's better to cite a secondary source that puts things into context). The same goes for press releases. Youtube comments are not reliable. Youtube videos are almost never reliable or if they are reliable there's a good chance they're a copyright violation.
If you're making any sort of claim relating to medicine, you need to cite tertiary meta-analysis, not isolated studies or sensationalist news reports on those isolated studies.
How to write articles that won't be rejected or deleted
editI've also tailored a version specifically for editors trying to create pages about their companies at User:Ian.thomson/Company.
If you're going to write an article about anyone or anything that is not you or something you are connected to, here are the steps you should follow:
- 1) Choose a topic whose notability is attested by discussions of it in several reliable independent sources.
- 2) Gather as many professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources you can find. Google Books is a good resource for this. Also, while search engine results are not sources, they are where you can find sources. Just remember that they need to be professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources.
- 3) Focus on just the ones that are not dependent upon or affiliated with the subject, but still specifically about the subject and providing in-depth coverage (not passing mentions). If you do not have at least three such sources, the subject is not yet notable and trying to write an article at this point will only fail.
- 4) Summarize those sources left after step 3, adding citations at the end of them. You'll want to do this in a program with little/no formatting, like Microsoft Notepad or Notepad++, and not in something like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer. Make sure this summary is just bare statement of facts, phrased in a way that even someone who hates the subject can agree with.
- 5) Combine overlapping summaries where possible (without arriving at new statements that no individual source supports), repeating citations as needed.
- 6) Paraphrase the whole thing just to be extra sure you've avoided any copyright violations or plagiarism.
- 7) Use the Article wizard to post this draft and wait for approval.
- 8) Expand the article using sources you put aside in step 3 (but make sure they don't make up more than half the sources for the article, and make sure that affiliated sources don't make up more than half of that).
Doing something besides those steps typically results in the article not being approved, or even in its deletion.
If you are writing about yourself, or someone or something you are connected with (such as a friend, family member, or your business), the following steps are different:
- 0) If the subject really was notable, you wouldn't need to write the article. Remember that articles are owned by the Wikipedia community as a whole, not the article subject or the article author. If you do not want other people to write about you, then starting an article about yourself is a bad idea.
- 8a) If the article is accepted, never edit it again. Instead, make edit requests on the article's talk page.
- 8b) If the article is rejected, there will be a reason given. Read it carefully and closely. If there are links in the reason, open them and read those pages.
Summary of various site policies and guidelines I use selections of when welcoming most new users
editDo not post the whole damn thing on someone's page, FFS
|
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The following are social contracts that members of the site have (directly or indirectly) agreed to prevent larger problems:
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Formatting
editFormatting matters. The above section break was created with the following code: = Formatting =
This is how you do a header in wiki-markup
editThe above section break was created with the following code: == This is how you do a header in wiki-markup ==
This is a subsection header
editThe above section break was created with the following code: === This is a subsection header ===
You can even do subsubsection headers
editThe above section break was created with the following code: ==== You can even do subsubsection headers ====
Links, italicizing, bolding, citing, green-text quoting, signing
editWhat you would type | What will show |
---|---|
1. You put in links to articles on the site like [[this]], unless you want [[that|a link that reads different from the article title]]. Links to other sites, like [https://archive.org/ Internet Archive] go in single brackets with the web address first, a space, and then the text for the link.<br/>HTML style line breaks work (or you could just do a carriage return like a normal person). | 1. You put in links to articles on the site like this, unless you want a link that reads different from the article title. Links to other sites, like Internet Archive go in single brackets with the web address first, a space, and then the text for the link. HTML style line breaks work (or you could just do a carriage return like a normal person). |
2. You can <i>italicize</i> or <b>bold</b> that way or by using ''two single quotes for italics,'' '''three single quotes for bold''', or '''''five single quotes for bold italics'''''. "Double quotes" just produce regular quotation marks, no matter how many you add. | 2. You can italicize or bold that way or by using two single quotes for italics, three single quotes for bold, or five single quotes for bold italics. "Double quotes" just produce regular quotation marks, no matter how many you add. |
3. You put references at the end of statements (either sentence fragments, sentences, or even paragraphs) using reference tags.<ref>Author, title, page number, publisher, year published</ref> | 3. You put references at the end of statements (either sentence fragments, sentences, or even paragraphs) using reference tags.[1] |
4. {{tq|This does green text, which is used for quoting stuff on talk pages}} | 4. This does green text, which is used for quoting stuff on talk pages |
5. ~~~~ produces a time-stamped signature. Put this at the end of your talk page posts but not your article contributions. | 5. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:21, 1 December 2018 (UTC) - A time-stamped signature. Put this at the end of your talk page posts but not your article contributions. |
6. ~~~ produces just your signed name. | 6. Ian.thomson (talk) - Just a signed name. |
7. ~~~~~ produces just the time-stamp for your post. | 7. 21:21, 1 December 2018 (UTC) - Just a time stamp. |
Bullet points
edit* If you put an asterisk at the beginning of a line, you automatically get a bullet point. For example:
- If you put an asterisk at the beginning of a line, you automatically get a bullet point.
(Indented) numbers
edit# If you put a pound sign at the beginning of a line,
# you
# automatically
# get
# numbers. For example:
- If you put a pound sign at the beginning of a line,
- you
- automatically
- get
- numbers.
Don't put spaces at the beginning of lines
edit<-- (This is where the line normally starts)
putting one or more spaces at the beginning of a line just does some weird formatting that you will almost never need to use. For example:
putting a space at the beginning of a line just does some weird formatting that you will almost never need to use
Indenting and responding
edit:If you put a colon at the beginning of a line, it indents everything on the line by one press of tab (even if it wraps around). Indent your responses to someone on a talk page. For example:
- If you put a colon at the beginning of a line, it indents everything on the line by one press of tab (even if it wraps around). Indent your responses to someone on a talk page.
::You can put multiple colons to indent even further. Do this when responding to a response on a talk page. For example:
- You can put multiple colons to indent even further. Do this when responding to a response on a talk page.
{{od}} draws the above line to signal to talk page reader that the next line is a response to the a previous line that has way too many indents.
- (For example, a line like this)
Responses go below the line they are responding to,
- don't respond in the middle of people's posts, even if their post is broken up into paragraphs
without breaking the response up.
Sign the end of your response using four tildes (~~~~ as shown above). Don't preface your post with the signature, don't title the section with your signature, don't type out your signature before your signature -- just sign with four tildes at the end of your signature. Don't sign every single line or paragraph in your post (unless you are posting multiple responses to different posts in different parts of page), just sign each response once.
Linking within this project
editUse two brackets to link to a page on this site. [[Example]] produces Example.
Use pipe links when you need to text to link to an article. [[Example|this]] produces this. Don't do this to hide Easter eggs.
When using a shortcut, such as MOS:LINK, do not pipelink the the full article name (e.g. [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking|MOS:LINK]]) -- that defeats the entire point of shortcuts. If you are linking to another page on en.wikipedia, just link to the page name and do not include the full web address. <nowiki>[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page|Main page]] will act like an external link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page|Main.
You don't need to link to a user's page or talk page every time you mention them. You can use {{u|Example}} to produce Example the first time you mention them.
Linking to other projects
edit[[:wikt:name|Name]] links to Name. Replace "wikt" with other project codes (which you can find at Help:Interwikimedia links and meta:List of Wikipedias for appropriate codes) to link to different projects.
Linking to other websites
edit[https://about:blank] produces the link like [1].
[https://about:blank this] produces a link like this.
Listing references
editWhen you have references somewhere in the page, you need to put {{reflist}} somewhere toward the bottom, to show this:
- ^ Author, title, page number, publisher, year published