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MHS 594 Music, Gender, Body, Performance

Creating Your Sandbox

Wikipedia sandboxes are a great way to work on editing an article without making direct edits to a live entry. While your sandbox is considered your own personal space on Wikipedia's website, anyone that knows your username can access your sandbox's contents so you should avoid including personal information or any other information that you wouldn't want to be made public for all time (information on Wikipedia is not easily removed...it remains in an entry's version history).

While all users are given a default sandbox to work in, you can also create sandboxes for specific projects. Creating a project-specific sandbox is an effective way to retain a record of your contributions to an entry and manage multiple editing projects at the same time.

Follow the directions below to learn how to access your sandbox and create a project-specific sandbox for your class.

  Accessing Your Sandbox
  Creating a Project Sandbox

Practice Editing

Being comfortable editing Wikipedia takes time and practice – mistakes can be fixed and nothing is "gone" forever...so be bold!

One way to get more comfortable with Wikipedia's editing language is to create a "fake" entry in your sandbox.  This will allow you to focus on the markup/style of Wikipedia, rather than the content.

Use the templates linked below to create a fictional biography for a person or character of your choosing – remember, don't include personal information in your entry!


Basic Editing Tasks

There are two types of links on Wikipedia – internal links and external links.

Internal links, also known as wikilinks, point to other Wikipedia entries or content. When you are looking at an article and you see a word displayed in blue, that's a wikilink. The purpose of wikilinks is to help users quickly connect with related articles and provide context around the terms used in an entry. If you see a link displayed in red, that means that a Wikipedia entry matching that term does not exist.

External links point to websites outside of Wikipedia. These links are also displayed in blue, but are followed by a symbol to let you know that the link points to a non-Wikipedia source. Wikipedia encourages you to limit the use of external links except when a site contains "meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article". Additional guidelines on using external links can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links.

  Adding Internal Links (Wikilinks)
  Adding External Links

Wikipedia requires that you use images that are part of the Wikimedia Commons.  You can search the Wikimedia Commons for images uploaded by other users or upload an image of your own.  To incorporate an image into your Wikipedia entry choose one of the following options:

  Use an Image from Wikimedia Commons
  Add Your Own Image (Upload to Wikimedia Commons)

Wikipedia has a built-in citation feature that makes it relatively easy to add citations to your entry. If you are creating a new entry, or editing an existing entry without a references list, you will also need to add a reference list – directions for both of these processes are below:

  Adding a Citation/Reference
  Adding a Reference List