Wikipedia:Tips
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Help:Editing tips and tricks)
Here you can digest how to use Wikipedia, in bite-sized morsels. The tips listed below were created for the Tip of the day project , or the Styletips project , but are listed here by title and organized by subject area for your convenience.
See also the Tip of the day talk page where most of the tips are written. Feel free to join in!
Tip of the day...
Fansites, forums, & other web page articles
When creating articles on forums, fansites, or other webpages, remember that Wikipedia has two notability requirements for these types of articles. These requirements are:
- The content itself has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself
- The website or content has won a well known and independent award
While a particular website need not meet both of these requirements, it should meet at least one of them.
Read more:
To add this auto-updating template to your user page, use {{totd2 }}
Tips about Wikipedia as a whole
[edit ]- Wikipedia in brief
- How popular is Wikipedia?
- Do not believe everything you read
- How reliable is Wikipedia?
- What the world knows about us
- How does Wikipedia stack up?
- Advice for parents
- Wikipedia etiquette = Wikiquette
- Copyrights? Copyleft
- Welcome to Wikipedia!
- Flashback to Wikipedia's past
- Spreading the WikiLove
- Ten things you may not know about Wikipedia
- What did they say?
- How to use Wikipedia offline: xowa
Tips on accessing Wikipedia pages
[edit ]- Explore Wikipedia's contents
- Digital audio support
- Spoken Wikipedia
- Screen readers for accessibility
- Wikipedia for your mobile...
- Mobile view sidebar from the desktop
- Browsing Mobile Wikipedia on your big screen
- Editing articles for web accessibility
- Souping up your Smartphone editing of Wikipedia
Finding your way around Wikipedia and beyond
[edit ]- Introduction to navigating Wikipedia
- Wikipedia's Quick directory
- To see everything on Wikipedia about a subject area...
- The Wikipedia Curriculum
- Wikipedia has 34 sections, called namespaces
- Wikipedia's alphabetical index of articles
- When to use subpages
- Wiki-exploration: beyond Wikipedia...
- Wikipedia Database reports
- Cannot find what you are looking for?
Tips on searching
[edit ]- How to easily recall a username
- Wikipedia industrial-powered search
- Highlight text on any website, then search Wikipedia for it with a single click
- Power search Wikipedia using AutoWikiBrowser
- Searching Wikipedia with regular expressions (regex)
- Search Wikipedia from any website
- Using Wikipedia's search box:
- Searching Wikipedia with Google:
- Firefox search tips:
Tips on bookmarking, creating access points, etc.
[edit ]Getting help
[edit ]- Help for new contributors
- Where to look for help
- Come visit the Teahouse
- Visit the Village Pump for technical issues
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Wikipedia's Manual of Style
- How to catch admin attention fast
- How to request help on your Talk page
- Where to post requests
- Please return the favor
Tips for contributors on getting started
[edit ]- Create a user account
- The five pillars
- A plain & simple introduction
- A self-guided tutorial
- Please read department instructions
- Where to begin?
- Article construction stages
- Article development
- Good article reassessment
- Referencing for beginners
- Please sign your name on talk pages
- How to move/rename a page
- How to add hidden editor notes in an article
- Watching for changes
- Where to write about current events
- What can be included in Wikipedia?
Tips on working with articles
[edit ]- Be neutral, like Wikipedia
- Look before you leap
- How to start a new article
- Article deletion process
- Tagging pages for problems
- Basic copyediting
- SuggestBot is a fun way to pick pages to edit
- What is BRD? the BOLD, revert, discuss cycle
- List the things to do for an article
- Table of contents
- Article size
- Cite your sources
- Acronyms and initialisms
- How do you pronounce that?
- Link to Wiktionary word definitions using Wikt:
- Introduction to tables
- Using Math
- Footnotes
- Please fill in edit summaries
- Spell Checkers
- Fix double redirects
- Collaborations
Tips on editing
[edit ]- Check your work before you save, using Preview
- Undoing edits
- Search and replace while editing an article
- Test-drive your edits using a sandbox
- Dates in Wikipedia articles
- Section editing
- Double click editing
- Edit Wikipedia faster with AutoWikiBrowser
- A better wiki editor: WikEd
- Counting your edits
- How to reduce or enlarge font sizes
Style tips
[edit ]From Wikipedia:Styletips:
- Ampersand
- Block quotes
- Case in expanded abbreviations
- Circa
- Currency symbols
- Current
- Dashes in article titles
- Dates (I)
- Dates (II)
- Downcase the generics
- Emphasizing a word
- Formatting titles of literature and art
- Gender-neutral language
- Hanging hyphens
- Hyphens can avoid ambiguity
- Including
- Instructional and presumptuous language
- Italics for emphasis
- No hyphen after -ly adverbs
- No initial the or a in article and section titles
- Number signs
- Overlinking
- Percentage ranges
- Pluralizing abbreviations
- Points and spaces in abbreviations
- Quotations within quotations
- Quotations: allowable typographical changes
- Seasons
- Subset terms
- The year 1995
- Unit symbols: figures
- Unit symbols: spacing
- US or U.S.?
- Within-text attribution
Tips on creating and editing links
[edit ]- How to make links to articles
- When not to use links
- How to make links look the way you want
- Linking to a section of an article
- Using Special:MyPage to make private links
- External links
- How to link to a category
- Google search link
- Sister projects & interwiki linking
Category tips
[edit ]- Category tips
- How to add an article to a category
- Find uncategorized articles
- How to create a category
- How to plant a CategoryTree!
- Find stubs and expand them
Tips on working with specific types of pages
[edit ]- Biographies
- Portals
- Subject bar template
- Working on the Main Page
- Featured content
- Articles about notable books
- Using the Authority control template
- Beware of instruction creep
- Redirects
- Fansites, forums, & other web page articles
- Editing projects for school and university classes
List tips
[edit ]- General topics lists
- The topic list
- Why have lists when there are categories?
- List building
- Alphabetical list of articles
Disambiguation page tips
[edit ]Tips on working with images
[edit ]- Image processing tools
- Graphics Lab
- How to find legal photographs and graphics
- Where to upload images and media files
- Where on the page to put images
- Brilliant pictures
Boilerplate/template tips
[edit ]- How to create reusable boilerplate
- What are templates used for?
- Displaying one page within another = Transclusion
- Pick from a list of template parameter choices
User page tips
[edit ]- Your user page
- Are you jealous of others' user pages? (WP:UPDG)
- Calendar date display for your user pages
- Displaying Tip of the day on your user page
- Motto of the day...
- Your very own Wikipedia bookmark page
- User Sub Pages
- Userboxes
Other ways to contribute
[edit ]- Help reduce the Wikipedia backlog
- Wikipedia:Today's articles for improvement
- Translating content
- Join a WikiProject
- Welcoming Committee
- Wikipedia needs pictures. How you can help...
- Wikipedia banners and buttons
- How to help prepare the Main page
- Giving editor awards
- Help test the MediaWiki software
- Becoming an Administrator
- Writing articles for The Signpost
Communicating with other editors
[edit ]- Be forgiving to new users
- Love thy neighbor
- Talking to Wikipedians
- How to send a message to other editors
- Thanks - send a notification
- Guestbooks
- Screenshots
- Posting on the Wikipedia Community Bulletin Board
- Try to see it my way!
- Centralizing project discussion
- Wikimedia-wide issues
- Wikimedia has mailing lists
Watchdogging (monitoring) Wikipedia
[edit ]- Use your watchlist
- Preview tomorrow's Featured Article
- Join the Recent Changes Patrol
- What is Page curation?
- Intruder alert! Intruder alert! (Vandalism-level warning)
Configuring and customizing your account
[edit ]- How to change your username
- Customize appearance of dates
- Setting Wikipedia time to your time zone
- Super-customize your account with gadgets
- Troubleshooting Wikipedia's look and feel with skins
- How to adjust the height of your edit window
- How to enhance Recent changes
- User scripts
- Install your first javascript
Tips on working faster
[edit ]- Automating tasks on Wikipedia
- The semi-automated article peer-reviewer
- What are dummy edits good for?
- Breaking the 500-edit limit in "View History"
- Making the editbox more visually pleasing
- Shortcut for minor edit box
- Supercharge your browser
- Toolbar links to access the WP pages you use the most
- Article banner templates
- Templates for Age and Dates
- Archives for lengthy pages
- Search box bookmarklet for your browser
- Wikipedia search box focus
- Are your hands full? (Use search box as a small but convenient clipboard)
Shortcuts
- Shortcuts
- Navigate faster using Wikipedia shortcuts
- Work faster with keyboard shortcuts
- Keyboard shortcuts
Navigation
- Use your browser's toolbar to navigate Wikipedia
- Your customizable Wikipedia navigation hub
- Navigation popups
- How to skip scrolling and clicking
- How to turn links to disambiguation pages orange so you can see them
- How to turn redirects green
MetaTips
[edit ]- Wikipedia's top ten essential tips
- Wikipedia's top ten power tips
- Wikipedia's ten most powerful tips
These need sorting into the above categories
[edit ]Be sure to check for duplication - do not include them if they are already there!
Note: this section is currently empty.
Tip of the moment...
External links
Wikipedia is not a web directory; no page should consist solely of a collection of external links. Wikipedia prefers internal links (wikilinks) over external links. However, adding a limited number of relevant external links is of valuable service to our readers.
To add this auto-randomizing template to your user page, use {{totd-random }}
See also
[edit ]
- Tip of the day related
- Wikipedia:Tip of the day – main page
- Chronological list of tips
- Alphabetical list of tips
- Tip display template types
- Tip display template gallery
- Manual of Style related
- Wikipedia:Simplified Manual of Style – an overview of commonly used style guidelines.
- Wikipedia:Styletips – a list of advice for editors on writing style and formatting n a bullet-point format
- Help:Introduction to the Manual of Style – a quick introduction to the style guide for articles
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Reading schedule – a reading schedule designed to assist editors in becoming familiar with Manual of Style
- General formatting
- Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a page that provides information on the basics needed to edit Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia:Writing better articles – guidance on how to improve articles
- Help:Cheatsheet – a page that provides the most commonly used wiki markup
- Wikipedia:Dos and don'ts – summaries of Wikipedia's policies, guidelines, and formatting standards in a bullet-point format
Find this page confusing? Just use this link to ask for help on your talk page ; a volunteer will visit you there shortly!
