Hello everyone! My name is Sharvika and I am currently editing the articles Alzheimer's disease and Early-onset Alzheimer's disease on Wikipedia. I look forward to learning from my fellow Wikipedians while we work together to enhance access to medical knowledge across the globe :)
I have refrained from editing my introduction since then as I wanted to keep it intact, but thought it might help to add on, especially since...: Ever since that class, I have learned a lot about Wikipedia editing (along with the value of knowledge translation), and still continue to oversee and/or work on updating sources, content, and readability to various articles on Wikipedia. The AD article itself has moved up to B-class (yay)! It's also been interesting to see pageview statistics[1] on the AD article and others throughout this as well - hoping my work helps the thousands of readers! I've learned a lot from everyone else on the platform in the process and thank you for all that you do too!
Feel free to connect with me through email or my talk page!
A list of things I learned in the process—keeping it here for easy access and in case anyone else that's new stumbles across my account—hope this helps!
/* Heading */ => Used to directly show which section you edited in an article (hyperlinked to that heading)
Userboxes => "fun fact boxes" for users on Wikipedia (use templates - see above)
Barnstars => Wikipedia awards given by other users to you
WikiProject => Houses a group of articles that fit into a category where Wikipedians may choose to be a part of that project and aim to improve articles under that category - i.e. WikiProject Medicine: houses articles with topics on health-related science (medicine). These pages list out article statuses -- see those in C-class (like previously)
~~~~ => signing usernames
@ => to @ others (mostly talk pages)
Citation bot[2] => fixes citations (figuring out)
General:
- Better to do smaller edits at a time (others can better review those changes - also easier for you to describe while making, revert those changes if necessary, or add on to those changes)
- Especially important when editing large sections (in high importance articles) and when you plan to add a lot of information i.e. when I did the diagnosis (criteria) section in the AD article
- Helpful to keep a running document of edits you plan to make and add them in slowly
- Grey literature is not recommended due to potential copyright risks
- Open access scientific review articles are better - I stick to just using these
- {{Citation needed}} fun to see other articles needing these (helps improve search strategies and database searching & related skills)
- See: Citation hunt tool[3] (random generator of articles needing a citation)
- If you know the codes, edit by Visual Source (slightly easier at times, especially re-organizing in bulk)