Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Practicing in the Sandbox

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.

  Tip

  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 click it.

Both ways get you to the sandbox quickly. Just use whichever method you find easier to remember. Figure 1-1 shows the sandbox before editing starts.

Figure 1-1. The top of the sandbox page, 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.