Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

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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 do). As the Introduction explains, all Wikipedia articles are collaborative efforts. You can jump right in and add your own knowledge 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 save 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.

You can dive right in and start editing without setting up a Wikipedia account (that is, getting a user name). However, there are advantages to having a user name—increased privacy and the ability to create new articles and a personal user page, to name two. So you have an option: You can follow the chapters in the order they appear, or you can skip to and get a user name first, and then read this chapter and .

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 literally hundreds of pages of policy, guidelines, and how-to information on topics such as capitalization, categorization, citations, copyrights, disclaimers, foreign language characters, headings, indentation, links, lists, neutrality, pronunciation, quotations, tags, and 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

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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 literally hundreds of pages of policy, guidelines, and how-to information on topics such as capitalization, categorization, citations, copyrights, disclaimers, foreign language characters, headings, indentation, links, lists, neutrality, pronunciation, quotations, tags, and 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 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.

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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 in one of two ways:

In the “search” box on the left side of the screen, type WP:SAND, and press Return. Make sure to type it with all capital letters and no space after the colon.
WP:SAND is a shortcut, and you’ll see others like it throughout the book. If you feel you need to burn a few more calories, type in the search box the full name of the page you want to go to, in this case Wikipedia:Sandbox. Also note that Shift+Alt+F [Shift-Control-F on a Mac] will take you directly to the search box.
Click the “edit this page” tab at the top of any page to go directly into edit mode. You’ll see, toward the bottom of the screen (scroll down if necessary), “Your changes will be visible immediately.” Immediately below, it says “For testing, please use the sandbox instead.” The word “sandbox” is a bolded link—just .

Both ways get you to the sandbox quickly. Just use whichever method you find easier to remember. shows the sandbox before editing starts.

Figure : The top of the , in normal mode. In normal mode, you can read what’s on the screen, but not make any changes to it. To enter edit mode, just click the “edit this page” tab.

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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 editbox), and then click buttons to preview and finally save your work.

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.

In the search box on the left side of the screen, type WP:SAND, and press Return to go to the sandbox.
You’ll do all your work in this chapter in the sandbox, so you won’t actually change any Wikipedia articles.
From the sandbox page (), click the “edit this page” tab.
You’re now in edit mode, complete with the edit box shown in .

Figure : The sandbox, in edit mode. The text in the box (the edit box) is only an example—what you see will depend on what the other editors have just done to the page. The edit toolbar along the top of the edit box is standard; it provides one-click options for the most common kinds of formatting of content. Also standard is all the text between the sentences “It will be deleted” and “Your changes will be visible immediately.”

If the bottom of looks intimidating, don’t worry: There are only about two dozen items that editors actually use, except in exceedingly rare circumstances. If you’re curious, provides a complete cross-reference to everything on the bottom of , as well as all the icons on the edit toolbar.

Delete everything but the first three lines, which are instructions.
The edit box contents should look like . In this box, you’ll type some text that includes bold and italic formatting, and section headings.

Figure : The edit box after deleting all but the top three lines. Now the edit box is ready for you to add text. Of what remains, the first line is a template (see ), and the second and third lines are an

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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, then do something else for five minutes, then come back to editing—your chances of an edit conflict are quite high when you attempt to save your edit.

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

The warning at the top ().
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 : When there is an edit conflict, your screen will have an additional edit box, at the bottom of the screen, with the label “Your text.” (Not all the text in is shown here, but all of it would be in the edit box.)

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, or similar.). 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, edit the section or page again (this time more quickly, if possible), do a quick preview, and save 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 edit again (more quickly). Of course, before you go into edit mode, you should check that what you were trying to fix still needs to be fixed.

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Earlier in this chapter, you learned how to create section headers, and to format text as bold or italic (see ). Such formatting is called wiki markup. 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.

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

{{pagename}} or {{pagename | info1 | info2 }} or {{pagename | this= info 1 | that= info2}}.The double curly brackets indicate a template. An example of a template appeared in and was discussed immediately thereafter (see page 7). Templates are discussed in more detail later in this chapter ().
[[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 , “Documenting Your Sources” ( to page 43).
<ref> text possibly with a URL </ref> and <references />. These are footnote tags—the text between the tags is the footnote itself—plus the instruction to Wikipedia as to where to display the footnotes. Footnotes are also described in detail in ().
<blockquote> text </blockquote> and <math> numbers and symbols</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.
One exception to the rule of pairs is the <br> tag that inserts a new line (for example, in a template). It’s just the single <br> tag with no closing tag. If you type

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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, but it also significantly increases the chances of an edit conflict (see , above). So, an important rule of editing is: Don’t edit an entire page if you’re changing only one section of the page.

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. shows an article with no table of contents but with three headings that indicate sections that can be edited.

Figure : An article with three sections that can be separately edited. To edit a specific section, click an “edit” link on the right side of the page.

If you click one of the three “edit” links in , 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.

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).

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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 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 (), to give you either a special tab (the “0” tab) or an “edit” link. You can find these scripts in the “Navigating to Edit page” section of the page Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts (shortcut: WP:JS). (Note: To do so, you must be a registered editor; see .)
The easiest way is to click the “my 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. Select “Add an [edit] link for the introduction 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.

Figure : After you’ve selected the option to add an edit link for the lead section on the Gadgets tab of the “My preferences” page, you see a new edit link to the right of the title of every article. Clicking that link will open the top section of the article for editing. (If you don’t see such a link, make sure you bypassed your browser’s cache as described at the bottom of the Gadgets tab.)

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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.

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 , “Documenting Your Sources.” If you want to jump right into wordsmithing, read on.

Wikipedia has three core policies for content. Two of them, no original research and verifiability, are discussed in the next chapter. The third, 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.

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Back in high school English, you probably learned how to add footnotes and endnotes to essays and papers. If you didn’t add information about your sources, your paper would get a very low grade.

Wikipedia’s equivalent of a failing grade is to have another editor reverse your edit, putting the article back to exactly as it was before you changed it. If you want to add new information to articles and have it stay there, you need to understand Wikipedia’s rules. This chapter explains those rules. If you follow them, you’ll help ensure the accuracy and credibility of Wikipedia articles.

To add a source (what Wikipedia calls citing a source), you also need to learn some technical matters—how Wikipedia software handles external links, and how it creates footnotes. This chapter includes two tutorials that show you how to create links and footnotes that would make your English teacher proud.

Wikipedia is not the place to document the previously undocumented, to report new discoveries, to publish new theories, or to record personally observed events that may be considered newsworthy. Such content may well be true, but as far as Wikipedia’s policies are concerned, true isn’t enough. Information must be verifiable, which means it must be backed by a published source outside Wikipedia. Simply put, Wikipedia must never be the first place that news appears. If a tree falls in a forest and it’s not reported elsewhere, then Wikipedia isn’t going to report it either.

Some places on the Web welcome original writing and reporting. You’ll find a list at the page Wikipedia:Alternative outlets. Some, such as Wikinews, are sister projects.

Here are Wikipedia’s documentation rules in brief:

What you know is true (or, more accurately, what you think is true) isn’t a criterion for what you can assert on Wikipedia. Information must come from a published, reliable source.
Ideally, always cite your source when you add new information to Wikipedia. If you add a quotation, or if you add something that is likely to be

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Wikipedia is not the place to document the previously undocumented, to report new discoveries, to publish new theories, or to record personally observed events that may be considered newsworthy. Such content may well be true, but as far as Wikipedia’s policies are concerned, true isn’t enough. Information must be verifiable, which means it must be backed by a published source outside Wikipedia. Simply put, Wikipedia must never be the first place that news appears. If a tree falls in a forest and it’s not reported elsewhere, then Wikipedia isn’t going to report it either.

Some places on the Web welcome original writing and reporting. You’ll find a list at the page Wikipedia:Alternative outlets. Some, such as Wikinews, are sister projects.

Here are Wikipedia’s documentation rules in brief:

What you know is true (or, more accurately, what you think is true) isn’t a criterion for what you can assert on Wikipedia. Information must come from a published, reliable source.
Ideally, always cite your source when you add new information to Wikipedia. If you add a quotation, or if you add something that is likely to be challenged, you absolutely must cite a published, reliable source.

Wikipedia has three core policies for content. discussed one of them—Neutral point of view (). The other two policies are mostly about new content: No original research and Verifiability. You can (and probably should) read those two policies yourself. The shortcuts are WP:NOR and WP:V; on any Wikipedia page, just type one of those into the search box on the left, and then click Go. Misunderstandings of these policies abound. The rest of this section is devoted to clearing up some of the biggest.

Only reliable sources hold up to the scrutiny of the Wikipedia community. But what makes a source reliable? To quote from Wikipedia’s Reliable sources guideline (shortcut: WP:RS): “Articles should rely on reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.” Most international and national newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals put significant resources into avoiding mistakes, to maintain their credibility and readership (and their survival in the face of libel and other lawsuits). On the other hand, an anonymous blogger can feel pretty free to post anything on the Web without worrying about the consequences. The general rule is: “Self-published books, personal Web sites, and blogs are largely not acceptable as sources.” (

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Much, if not most, of the information in Wikipedia is documented by online sources. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a link to such a source. Links to Web pages outside Wikipedia are called external links.

You need to know how to create an external link if you want to do a proper citation, but the external link itself isn’t enough. In the steps on , you’ll learn the other parts of a proper citation.

On any Wikipedia page, in the search box on the left, type WP:SAND.

You’re editing in the sandbox (), so you can play around without damaging anything if you make a mistake.

At the top of page, click the “edit this page” tab.
You’re now in edit mode. Note the edit box, the Edit summary box, and the various symbols and markup below the warning that begins “Do not copy.” (To double-check whether you’re in edit mode, look at .)

Delete all the text in the edit box.
At the end of this tutorial, you’re not going to be saving your edit, so it’s okay to delete text such as “Please leave this line alone”.

Type the following three sentences into the edit box:
Here’s how to create an external link in Wikipedia. [http://www.slate.com/id/2654/]
Always put brackets around a URL. Here’s the URL without the brackets, so you can see what it would look like (remember, this is '''wrong'''): http://www.slate.com/id/2654/

Figure : The edit box shows the text for the external link example described on these pages. Notice the edit toolbar just above the edit box—that’s a standard landmark when you’re in editing mode. As discussed on , the triple apostrophes around the word “wrong” are wiki markup; they make the word appear in boldface.

Press the Tab key to go to the “Edit summary” box. (It’s just above the bolded warning, “Do not copy text from other websites ...”) Type a few words explaining your edit into that box. Then, just below that box, click the “Show preview” button. (See if you need a refresher.)

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Inserting an external link into an article to show where you got information is better than nothing, but by itself it’s not the proper way to cite a source. An embedded link (an external link in the middle of an article) isn’t a proper citation because links, like milk, have a tendency to go bad over time. Links can stop working when a Web site goes out of business, someone moves or deletes a Web page you linked to, or a URL changes for any number of reasons. When links go bad, so does any substantiation of the sentences that the links were supposed to support.

The general problem of links going bad is called link rot. A non-working link without any other information is almost worthless. Page 349 discusses some ways to try to fix a bad link.

The best way to reduce the impact of bad links is to fully cite your source, to include more information than just the URL.

Currently, Wikipedia lets you use one of the three different methods for a proper citation. All three use a “References” section at the bottom of the article.

Embedded citations. You put an embedded link into the article (as described earlier), and then put the same URL, plus additional information about the source, into the “References” section. For details on this method, go to WP:ECITE.
Footnotes. You add all the source information into the body of the article, plus special footnote markup. When the Wikipedia software displays the article, it puts a footnote number in the body of the article and the citation information in the “References” section at the bottom. When readers click a footnote number, it takes them to the footnote information at the bottom of the article. (You can learn exactly how to create footnotes starting on ; also check out WP:FOOT.)
Harvard referencing. You put the citation’s cross-reference information (author, year of publication, and page number) into the body of the article, and also put that information, plus the title of the article or book, the name of the publisher and other publication information into the “References” section. If you use templates (which isn’t required), then the information in the body of the article is linked to the information in the “References” section. If you use only plain text, then the two aren’t tied together by the software. (For details, go to

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If you’ve been paying attention in this chapter so far, you know that if you want to add information to a Wikipedia article, you need to have a reliable source, and you need to cite that source in the Wikipedia article. In the previous section, you also learned that footnotes are the most reliable way to provide your readers with documentation.

Wikipedia has two ways to create footnotes: freeform and citation templates. Citation templates take longer to learn upfront, but they have advantages, as discussed on .

Open the sandbox for editing.
If you’re not there already, on any Wikipedia page, type WP:SAND into the search box, and then, at the top of page, click the “edit this page” tab. (And if you’re in preview mode, that’s fine too.)

In the sandbox, delete all the text, and then type the following text (see ):
== Body of the article ==
In 1997, Chrysler was more profitable, with earning of $2.8 billion, than Daimler, which earned $1.8 billion.<ref>Surowiecki, James. [http://www.slate.com/id/2654 “The Daimler-Chrysler Collision: Another Merger in Search of That Elusive Synergy"], ''Slate'' magazine, May 15, 1998, retrieved September 12, 2007</ref>
== References ==
<references/>
As shown in , Wikipedia’s footnote system has two distinct parts:
- Footnote information appears in the body of the article. It must have a ref tag (<ref>) in front and the companion closing tag (</ref>) at the end, to tell the Wikipedia software to treat it like a footnote.
  You don’t have to type these two tags. Instead, highlight the text to go in the footnote, then click the “ref” icon on the far right of the edit toolbar (see for
- There must be a “<references/>” tag somewhere on the page to tell the software exactly where to display all the footnotes. (Notice the ending “/” that is part of this tag is necessary for the footnotes to work correctly.)

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With what you’ve learned so far, you now know how to document information in Wikipedia in just about any situation—you can create links, footnotes, and multiple footnotes, and use citation templates. The three techniques described in the rest of this chapter are completely optional. But if you spend a lot of time creating and editing citations, you may find a need for automated citation-creating tools, viewing footnotes for just a section of an article, and adding page numbers to footnotes.

When you want to cite a source, you usually have to cut and paste various elements—one by one—from the Web page where you found the source into the edit box where you’re assembling the citation. But sometimes, computerized tools can vastly simplify your work: You can simply cut and paste the whole citation, not its individual parts. Here’s an assortment of tools to check out:

If you start a Google Scholar search with the Wikipedia {{citation}} Assistant at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~ms609/Wiki/Scholar, you can just click the {{Wikify}} link that’s part of each search result. That link generates a citation for you.
For books, try OttoBib at http://www.ottobib.com/, enter an ISBN, click the Wikipedia button, and then click Get Citations.
If you have access to and use specialized databases, and know the DrugBank ID, HGNC ID, PubMed ID, or PubChem ID of a document, you can simply enter that ID into the Wikipedia template-filling page at http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/templates/. Click “Submit” to get a complete citation, ready to copy and paste.
If you use citation templates to create your footnotes, you might want to look at the Reference generator, a smarter version of the citation templates available in Wikipedia. It’s at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/makeref.php. You specify the type of citation you want (online news Web site, journal article, book, conference report, and so on), and the form then shows you the mandatory parameters (for example, the title and URL for online news), plus other optional parameters. It also shows you examples of each parameter that you might enter, so you get the format correct.

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You can edit Wikipedia articles to your heart’s content—for the rest of your life even—without ever registering with Wikipedia. But the sooner you register (that is, get a user name), the sooner you’ll have the benefits of a user account—like being able to create entirely new articles and to monitor changes to articles. A user account costs nothing, and you don’t even have to provide any personal information. In fact, having an account actually protects your privacy better than editing anonymously. In this chapter, you’ll learn more about these perks, get some suggestions on picking a user name, and find out about the personal user pages you can set up after you register.

If you sometimes feel as if every Web site, product manufacturer, and service provider wants you to register, you may be right—when you give someone your name, address, phone number, and so on, you’re potentially opening yourself to junk mail, intrusive phone calls, and even the (small) possibility of identity theft. Registering with Wikipedia isn’t like that at all. When you register, you don’t provide any personal information except (optionally) your email address. It takes only a minute or two to get a Wikipedia user account, and it has many advantages. As you can see by the graph in , you have plenty of company.

Figure : Since July 2006, the average number of newly registered accounts at Wikipedia has exceeded 7,000 per day. This graph is provided courtesy of editor Dragons Flight (Robert A. Rohde), based on a September 2007 database download of Wikipedia logs.

You can do a number of things as a registered (logged in) editor that anonymous IP users can’t. With a registered account, you can:

Monitor articles you’ve edited, or are interested in, using a watchlist ().
Add an external link, as described on , without typing in a cryptic code—as you would if using an anonymous IP address—to prove you’re a human being.
Upload an image.
Create a new page, including new articles () and your personal

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If you sometimes feel as if every Web site, product manufacturer, and service provider wants you to register, you may be right—when you give someone your name, address, phone number, and so on, you’re potentially opening yourself to junk mail, intrusive phone calls, and even the (small) possibility of identity theft. Registering with Wikipedia isn’t like that at all. When you register, you don’t provide any personal information except (optionally) your email address. It takes only a minute or two to get a Wikipedia user account, and it has many advantages. As you can see by the graph in , you have plenty of company.

Figure : Since July 2006, the average number of newly registered accounts at Wikipedia has exceeded 7,000 per day. This graph is provided courtesy of editor Dragons Flight (Robert A. Rohde), based on a September 2007 database download of Wikipedia logs.

You can do a number of things as a registered (logged in) editor that anonymous IP users can’t. With a registered account, you can:

Monitor articles you’ve edited, or are interested in, using a watchlist ().
Add an external link, as described on , without typing in a cryptic code—as you would if using an anonymous IP address—to prove you’re a human being.
Upload an image.
Create a new page, including new articles () and your personal user page (discussed below).
Customize your user interface, as discussed in Part 5 and many of the “Power Users’ Clinic” boxes in this book.
Email other users, and receive email from them (see ).
Mark edits as “minor” (while this isn’t that useful to you, it helps other editors; see for details).
Edit an article that is semi-protected against vandalism.
Move (rename) an article ().

Once you have registered, you still have to wait 4 days before you have move/rename privileges. Similarly, you have to wait 4 days before you can edit semi-protected pages (until then, you don’t see the “edit this page” tab at the top of such pages). All the other benefits kick in immediately. The 4-day waiting period is to discourage vandals from registering, since it takes away their immediate gratification. At the end of the period, you become

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Be prepared: Before you follow the steps in the next section to create your account, have a user name (or at least a couple of ideas) all picked out and ready to go. You may get your best ideas away from the computer screen. Read this section, then take a walk, carry a notepad, or go wherever you do your best thinking. When you come back, the registration process will go much faster.

Why spend so much time thinking about your user name? There are approximately five million registered accounts at Wikipedia. So your chances of getting an easily remembered user name of (say) six characters or less are fairly low. You could use your real name. If you don’t want to do that, you should understand what types of pseudonyms are not acceptable (see ), and then you might want to look at some pages on Wikipedia for ideas.

You can use your own name as the name of your Wikipedia account, assuming no one else with the same name has done so already. You won’t be the only editor using a real name, but you’ll certainly be part of a small minority of editors.

A real name makes it easier for you to remember your account name, and may encourage you to keep your edits polite and balanced. On the other hand, a pseudonym may make it easier for you to edit controversial topics. You should use a pseudonym if you don’t necessarily want your friends and colleagues to see your name on Wikipedia.

Pseudonyms have no disadvantages. You’ll probably want to use your real name only if it’s important to you that the world knows that you are editing Wikipedia.

If you were planning to build a custom home, you’d walk through model homes to get ideas. Similarly, you may get a good idea for a user name by looking at others’ user names. Here’s how to browse for user names:

You can type Special:Listusers into the search box (left side of screen) to look at the indexed list of all five million registered names. After you click Go or press Return, you see the Users page.

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Now that you’re well informed about why you want to create an account, and have some thoughts about your user name, it’s time to register. Here are the steps:

When you don’t have an account, or aren’t logged in, you see at the upper right of every Wikipedia page (that is, every page on en.wikipedia.org), a link to “Sign in / create account”. Click that link.
You arrive at the screen in .

Figure : Wikipedia’s standard sign-in screen includes a “Create one” link for you to create an account and get yourself a user name.

Click the link that reads, “Create one”.
(The “E-mail new password” link makes you go through several more steps than you’d otherwise do to create an account; don’t go there.) You’ll see something like .

Figure : 5 on , providing an email address is important. After you register, you get an email message from wiki@wikimedia.org, with the subject “Wikipedia e-mail address confirmation.” You must click the link in the confirmation notice if you want Wikipedia’s administrators to be able to contact you. (You can change your email address anytime you want, once you’ve confirmed it.)
Type your proposed user name.
Consider the following points:
- Try to keep your user name shorter than 25 characters. The shorter it is, the easier to customize your signature (), and the less irritating it will be to other editors. Long names result in long signatures, which occupy a lot of space and make editing talk pages () more difficult for other editors.
- Capitalization counts. User “fred smith” isn’t the same as User “Fred Smith,” so type the name exactly the way you want it with regard to capitalization. (This is also true of titles of articles, and in fact of every page in Wikipedia—except for the very first character of a page name, capitalization does matter.)
Type your password.
Not all passwords are created equal. To make sure your password prevents people who aren’t you from using your account, your password should

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One benefit of registering is that you have your own personal page in Wikipedia—your user page. Editors don’t have to have a main user page, but the rest of this book assumes that you have one. You also can create additional pages (called user subpages) for things like drafts of articles, lists of helpful pages, and so on. For example, has you work in your personal sandbox (), as opposed to using the common Sandbox, as you did in the tutorials in and .

You can use your user page for anything that you find helpful as an editor, including:

Putting links to information pages and other pages you may want to refer to, post questions at, and so on. shows an example.
Putting links to additional personal pages (called subpages) that you can create. Later in this chapter, you’ll learn how to create one—a personal sandbox, which you’ll use in tutorials in later chapters.
Adding notes to yourself about what you want or might do next—articles to write or edit, WikiProjects () you might want to create, etc. (In short, a “wish list” or “to do” list.)
Your interests and language skills (see ).
Items from collaborative aspects of editing, like barnstars (awards for service, given by other editors), names of editors you’ve adopted (agreed to be a mentor for), and WikiProjects to which you belong.

In addition, it’s okay to post some information about yourself that might be helpful to other editors—for example, that you have specific language skills. You don’t want to post information such as your home address, phone number, email address, or your age (especially if you’re a minor), because you don’t know who’s going to read the posting, or what they might do with it. Furthermore, posting personal information can be considered disruptive, if your intent is clearly to start a social interaction with other editors (if your user page resembles a page on Facebook.com, for example).

The easiest way to get a sense of the possibilities of your user page is to click the names of other editors, which will take you to their user pages. You’ll find a wide variety of user pages, some minimal or utilitarian, some clearly reflecting the personality of the editor. You can find names of other, established editors in many places, including:

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As shown in , once you’re registered and logged on, Wikipedia shows, in the screen’s upper right, a link to your personal page (click your user name). There’s also a link to your user talk page (click “my talk”), which is described in detail as described in Chapter 8 (starting on ). This page is for other editors to talk to you. These two standard links are in red if not yet created, or in blue, if they exist.

You’re not limited to one personal page in Wikipedia (or two, if you count the user talk page, but that’s really a discussion page, not a page for you to play with). You can create additional personal pages if you want. In Wikipedia, these additional pages are called subpages.

Don’t use the techniques in this section to create a subpage of an article. Although you can create such a subpage, an administrator will soon either move or delete it. Don’t create such a subpage as a test—that’s considered vandalism. It wastes the time of editors who monitor new page creation, and of administrators, who are the only people who can delete Wikipedia pages.

In , while editing the common sandbox, you saw the problem of an edit conflict (). Creating your own page to practice at—that is, your own sandbox—takes care of the edit conflict problem. You also don’t see any of the standard warnings or hidden text that come with the common sandbox. Plus it’s good practice for creating other personal subpages that you may later decide you need.

In the screen’s upper right corner, click your user name.
You need to be logged in, of course, to see that link. You arrive at your personal user page.

Click “edit this page”.
You’re now in edit mode; in the edit box, you see the existing text (as in ).

In the edit box, enter the text that’ll become a link to the subpage you’re going to create.
shows you the two different ways to create a link. You can pick either one, or use both, to confirm that both links will go to the same page. If you want to call your sandbox something other than “My sandbox”, feel free to do so.

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Wikipedia needs more articles. Yet of the thousands of articles that are created every day, about half end up being deleted or otherwise removed. Most of the deletions happen within a day of the article’s creation. If you’re thinking about adding an article to Wikipedia, this chapter will help you avoid having that article become instant roadkill. (This chapter also discusses when it’s better not to write the article at all, or write it for another wiki or other Web site besides Wikipedia).

Even if you’re not thinking about creating a new article, this chapter can be useful. You’ll get a much better sense of what articles in Wikipedia should be like, which will help you when you want to improve existing articles. You’ll also have some criteria to use when you come upon an existing article that you suspect might not belong in Wikipedia at all. (Chapter 19 discusses the process for getting an article deleted.)

Before you even start thinking of writing a new article, you’ll want to make absolutely, positively sure that Wikipedia doesn’t already have an article on the same subject.

Wikipedia’s internal search engine isn’t the greatest, but it’s the easiest place to start. Try searching for just part of what you think the article should be called (two or three words is plenty), and try any likely alternative names and spellings. (The page Wikipedia:Searching—shortcut WP:S—has more details. It also has a link to an alternative internal search engine, WikEh?)

After you’ve done a reasonable amount of internal searching of Wikipedia, try an external search engine. For example, to use Google to find all Wikipedia pages with the word “Wyly,” type Wyly site:en.Wikipedia.org into the Google search box. An external search engine could turn up a page that the internal search engine missed, since external search engines can be more tolerant of misspellings than Wikipedia’s.

If you’re not a registered user (see ), you can’t create new articles, at least as of January 2008. (A proposal to allow non-registered users to make new articles, in November 2007, didn’t gain consensus.) Instead, you have to submit a proposed new article for review by other editors, using the Articles for Creation wizard (). That wizard is a five-step online interview that questions you about three things: the proposed article’s motivation, notability, and sources. This section discusses all three issues, one by one. They’re important for all new articles, no matter who creates them.

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