LibGuides: Editing and Contributing to Wikipedia: Home

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Introduction

This guide was designed by Meghan Sitar at Cornell to introduce new Wikipedians to the basics of contributing to one of the largest open educational resources in the world. It provides a brief overview of editing existing entries and creating new entries. Megan was kind enough to share this resource and allow me to add specific Art+Feminism links that may be useful for the Wikipedia edit-a-thon today!

This very basic introduction to editing can be supplemented with this helpful pdf brochure from Wikipedia.

All of the content below is sourced from the Wikipedia help documentation and Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam's Rewriting Wikipedia Project, especially their guide to How to Create Wikipedia Entries that Will Stick.

Wikipedia:Meetup/Rochester/ArtandFeminism 2015
This Meetup page contains some basic information about today's event.

Create an Account

Create an Account
Limits of being a new user: "Users who edit through an account they have registered may immediately create pages in any namespace (except the MediaWiki namespace, and limited to eight per minute) and may also e-mail other users if they activate an email address in their user preferences. All logged-in users may mark edits as minor. They may purge pages without a confirmation step, but are still required to answer a CAPTCHA when adding external links. They may also customize their Wikimedia interface and its options as they wish, via Special:Preferences or by adding personal CSS orJavaScript rules to their vector.css or vector.js files."

Tip: A classroom full of new Wikipedia editors may get blocked because they're all contributing from the same IP address with new accounts. For class assignments, you might structure work to be done at home/off-campus.

Basic Editing of Existing Entries

Contributing is easy: see how to edit a page. For a quick summary on participating, see the Plain and simple guide. The Cheatsheet will remind you of basic wiki markup. You can practice editing and experiment in a sandbox.
Be bold in improving articles! When adding facts, please provide references so others may verify them. If you are affiliated with the article subject, please see the conflict of interest guideline.
If you're looking for places you can help out, the Community portal is the place to go.
How to Edit Wikipedia Brochure

Tips:

Make small edits and save after each one, rather than making a number of edits in one session before saving. That way, if an editor disagrees, they can undo your changes more selectively rather than un-doing all of your changes.
Annotate your changes on the Talk page.
Add peer-reviewed citations from well-regarded, fact-checked sources.
Link to other existing Wikipedia pages.
- To add links, use 2 brackets on each side of the words you want to link to an entry.
  - For example: [[Cornell University]] automatically creates a link to the entry on Cornell. Be sure to doublecheck these links.
- If you want to link to an entry from a word other than the title of the entry, use this format: [[title of entry | words in your text]].
  - For example, if I want to say "the university" and have it link to the Cornell University entry: [[Cornell University | the university]]
Link to external sites
- For example: [http://cnn.com Breaking News] will link the words "Breaking News" to CNN's website.

Basic formatting:

To create a section, use = on each side of the title. Different numbers of = affect weight/size of header in hierarchy.
- If an article has at least 4 headings, a Table of Contents will be automatically generated.
To create a bulleted list, use * in front of each item.
To create a numbered list, use # in front of each item. Numbers will be automatically generated.

Workshop Librarian

Wendy Way

she/her

Email Me

Contact:

313F Carlson Library
River Campus Libraries
University of Rochester

Subjects: American Sign Language, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Engineering, Medicine, Science, General

Adding References to Existing Entries

To add a reference, put your cursor in place and then hit the Reference button. A pop-up window will appear where you can enter your citation information. References will automatically number.

Referencing for beginners
Identifying reliable sources

Creating a New Entry

Once you've created an article, see Writing better articles for guidance on how to improve it and what to include (like reference citations).
Check Your first article to see if your topic is appropriate, then the Article wizard will walk you through creating the article.
For contributing images, audio, or video files, see the Introduction to uploading images. Then the Upload wizard will guide you through that process.
Article development guide

Tips:

To create a section, use = on each side of the title. Different numbers of = affect weight/size of header in hierarchy.
To create a bulleted list, use * in front of each item.
To create a numbered list, use # in front of each item. Numbers will be automatically generated.

On Notability in Wikipedia

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability:

"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.

'Significant coverage' addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention but it need not be the main topic of the source material.^[1]
'Reliable' means sources need editorial integrity to allow verifiable evaluation of notability, per the reliable source guideline. Sources may encompass published works in all forms and media, and in any language. Availability of secondary sources covering the subject is a good test for notability.
'Sources' should be secondary sources, as those provide the most objective evidence of notability. There is no fixed number of sources required since sources vary in quality and depth of coverage, but multiple sources are generally expected. Sources do not have to be available online and do not have to be in English. Multiple publications from the same author or organization are usually regarded as a single source for the purposes of establishing notability.
'Independent of the subject' excludes works produced by the article's subject or someone affiliated with it. For example, advertising, press releases, autobiographies, and the subject's website are not considered independent.
'Presumed' means that significant coverage in reliable sources creates an assumption, not a guarantee, that a subject should be included. A more in-depth discussion might conclude that the topic actually should not have a stand-alone article—perhaps because it violates what Wikipedia is not, particularly the rule that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.

If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article."

Ideas for Editing

ArtandFeminism Tasks
Here is a list of possible articles to edit (in blue) or create (in red) related to Art+Feminism.

Ways to begin

The Community portal includes lists of editing tasks you can work on including adding images, fixing links, and more.
Template messages\Cleanup: These messages are used to notify other editors that an entry could use some work.

Like to write?

Wikipedia articles that need copy editing
Stubs are articles that need to be written
Articles to be expanded are more than stubs, but still need work

Like to do research?

Of Local Interest

A group of Wikipedians has organized to improve Cornell University-related articles as a Wikiproject. Look under "Articles" for lists of project articles needing clean-up and other improvements.
Here is a list of C ornell University-related stubs.
The Finger Lakes Portal includes a list of articles that need work or have been requested (see "Things you can do" area)
The Cornell University article needs a few improvements, too (look for "vague" and "not in citation given" tags)
The I thaca, NY article links to a number of non-existent articles on local entities.

Wikipedia in the Classroom

Looking for ways to incorporate Wikipedia into course assignments?

Resources: Wikipedia Classes/Assignments/Brochures from Postcolonial Digital Humanities
Education/Case Studies from the Wikipedia Education Program
Brochures and other classroom handouts from the Wikipedia Education Program

Tracking Changes

Watchlists: "Watching pages allows any logged-in user to keep a list of 'watched' pages and to generate a list of recent changes made to those pages (and their associated talk pages). In this way you can keep track of and react to what's happening to pages you have created or are otherwise interested in"
Follow Twitter accounts that track anonymous edits by IP addresses:
- @congress-edits tweets anonymous Wikipedia edits that are made from IP addresses in the US Congress.
- @valleyedits tweetsanonymous Wikipedia edits from Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Wikimedia Foundation IP addresses.