Wikipedia:Tips
Wikipedia's tips library
 | Welcome!  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...
Counting your edits
Instead of counting your edits 500 at a time in your contributions list, you can use X's tools Edit counter which tallies your edits of each area of Wikipedia, and displays subtotals and total as well as general statistics, year counts, month counts and top edited pages. – – Read more: To add this auto-updating template to your user page, use {{totd2}} |
Tips about Wikipedia as a whole
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- 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:
Getting help
[edit]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]Category tips
[edit]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]Disambiguation page tips
[edit]Tips on working with images
[edit]Boilerplate/template tips
[edit]User page tips
[edit]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]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
MetaTips
[edit]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...
 Editcountitis
Editcountitis, obsessive edit-counting disorder (OECD), is the mistaken belief that a Wikipedian's overall contribution level can be measured solely by their edit count. This is a phenomenon which some think may be harmful to processes such as requests for adminship, as well as to the Wikipedia community in itself. The problems with using edit counts to measure relative level of experience are that it does not take into account a user's edit history prior to registering an account (posting anonymously), and that major and minor edits are counted equally, regardless of whether the edit is a typo fix or the creation of a full article. And edit counts give no consideration to the quality of the edits made. – – Read more: To add this auto-randomizing template to your user page, use {{totd-random}} |
See also
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- 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
