User:Nick Moyes/sandbox/textblocks

• Show all my user sub-pages

This page contains a suite of potentially useful text blocks for pasting into my Teahouse responses

Copyright images

Thank you for declaring your connection with the subject - this is appreciated. However, Wikipedia requires absolute neutrality. You may know lots of things about the subject, but this is an encyclopaedia, so it can only accept statements of fact if they can be supported by reliable 'third party' sources.

You may also only upload photographs that you have personally taken, or which are freely availably under certain Creative Commons licences. I am afraid I have felt the need to flag some of the images you have uploaded and inserted on this page for 'speedy deletion'. If you took these images, you can discuss this on the images' talk page.

Friendly encouragement

I am really sorry to sound so negative, but editing Wikipedia is not easy, especially when you know the people or subject very well. Do take the time to learn how to make the best contributions possible - maybe you have friends who can help ensure your spelling and grammar are also up to standard? Then your enthusiasm and efforts really will be valued by everyone, and no images will be breaching anyone's copyright.

Reliable Sources / Registering

Hi there. Just to let you know that I've removed INSERT DETAIL HERE. Although I'm sure it was added in good faith, I'm afraid it iINSERT EXPLANATION HERE. So, welcome to Wikipedia, and don't be put off if content you add gets reverted, but do please be aware of the risk of INSERT DETAIL. If you'd like more info on adding reliable sources, do visit WP:RELIABLE. If you'd prefer to edit without your IP address being visible, you might like to consider registering for a named account. (See WP:BENEFITS). If you have any questions, leave a note on my Talk Page, or leave an open question at the WP:TEAHOUSE. Regards. SIGNATURE

Is Wikipedia RELIABLE, and why does it have a poor REPUTATION in schools?

Hello xxxxxx. That's a very interesting question, and it really merits a detailed essay of a reply (but I won't force that on you!). I suspect you may have a very out-of-date schoolteacher or lecturer who has unfortunately given you their ideas from maybe 10 or 15 years ago which they've not yet shaken off. So, I'm sorry if you've been given the wrong idea about our huge project.

In its early days, yes, Wikipedia was raw and nothing like as accurate as it is today. We now have innumerable policies required Reliable Sources to enable you or anyone to Verify what published sources say, and those sources include academic books and publications. We even have extra requirements for higher reference standards on articles on medical topics (see WP:MEDRS), and absolutely nothing contentious about living or recently deceased people can be put into articles without proper, accurate and reliable sources supporting those statements. (See WP:BLP for our policies on that).

Quite a few studies were carried out some years ago (including one from 2012) which have shown that the number of errors in Wikipedia's 6.2 million English pages were equal to and often fewer than those that found their way into formal encyclopaedias written just by a panel of experts. (see List of academic studies about Wikipedia).

Most vandalism here gets fixed very quickly, and troublesome editors or trolls are eventually blocked, though some clever and very rare hoaxes have indeed slipped through from time to time (see WP:HOAXLIST, but see also Piltdown Man!).

Wikipedia now works with schools, universities and museums and art galleries to mobilise content, and Wikipedia editors are even employed within those museums in many parts of the world (see WP:GLAM for more details). In one example I personally know of, researchers at the Sanger Laboratories in Cambridge University have even shared their finding on all protein structures in the human genome so that the wider research community in poorer countries can have free access to data that they might not otherwise be able to reach.

To be honest, I think that for the majority of people, Wikipedia really has become their 'go to' place to get information or to find further detailed references to delve deeper into subjects. For many people, students included, Wikipedia has become the start of their information journey on most important topics. But, because all our pages are user-generated, and simply summarise other properly published sources, we never assert that Wikipedia should be relied upon as the basis of doing writing coursework or essays. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place. So always use the 'References' list at the bottom of every article to do your own research. See Wikipedia:FAQ/Schools and maybe even Wikipedia:School and university projects for our formal advice on that.

Nowadays, even Google places Wikipedia content in its Knowledge Boxes in most search results, so there are even more 'eyes on' articles, and correction of mistakes, and filling-in of missing content than ever before. We have formal education programmes in place and many universities teach using Wikipedia and set editing challenges in collaboration with trained staff. Wikipedia itself is even the subject of many academic researchers. See Wikipedia:Research, Wikipedia:Researching Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Statistics for further information which I hope may help dispel your misunderstanding of Wikipedia, and any unfortunate view you might have been given.

Of course, it would be lovely to hear from you why you feel the way you do, or any examples you have found of errors here. We know we still have gaps and mistakes, but all of us here are committed in our own way to making this encyclopedia even better. I hope you might consider joining us in that, so if you need help, just ask.

Spell-checking

Thank you for contacting me. The edit I made resulted from use of a Wikipedia tool called Lupin Live Spellcheck to check en masse the spellings of articles which have been recently edited. The link will take you to a list of common errors in spelling that it uses to offer corrections. It's that list that I use as my starting point for correcting typos. I then work by eye to assess whether the highlighted word is within a url, an image name, a foreign word, is proper name or has been helpfully flagged as ' [sic]' or uses the template 'notatypo'. After that I quickly assess whether the spellchecker is still likely to be right in flagging it up within the context of the sentence or paragraph (I rarely read the whole article whilst doing bulk spellchecks, though I do quickly scan for other related errors or potential vandalism).

If you disagree with my edit, please free to change it back to the 'wrong' version (LOL), but be aware that I and other users may well repeat the edit correction when they use Lupin's tool in future - simply because we can't remember the names of the thousands of articles we have edited, unless they stand out.

second version:

Spellchecking with Lupin

Lupin's spellcheker is one of a small suite of anti-vandal tools which must first be installed by the user into their x x x.js file. Details can befound at WP:LUPIN.

Lupins spellchecker samples a live feed of edits every 30 seconds and creates a new entry to a growing report, suggesting possible corrections. The default process runs for 200 samples before halting and saiting for a user prompt to continue.

I have modified the script so that it now runs for 1000 samples before prompting you to continue, and have added a clearer edit summary prior to stating the correction being made, which states: Randomly fixing recent typos with Lupins spellchecking tool: carribean->Caribbean

Anyone using Lupin must recognise that the program match misspellings in the entire page, including urls and filenames. It is essential that you look to see wherethe reported mispelling appears, as you must not change these.

Don't be put off

I see you have added a sort of reference to your article on XXXXX. You will actually need to put in a proper reference, not just a redlink to a non-existent article, I'm afraid. For a guide on how to do that, see adding references Help:Referencing for beginners. You will also need to provide one or more references from third party sources to demonstrate that Hjalmar Thesen is sufficiently notable to merit an article on Wikipedia. There are two things you should read, firstly the general guide to determining whether or not people meet 'Notability' criteria see WP:GNG. (Has he had a biography or news stories publishe about him by other people, for example?) Then there's this one about whether or not authors are to be deemed notable. I fear that the article you started does not yet demonstrate sufficient notability for it to be retained in Wikipedia's so-called 'Mainspace'. Can you enhance this? It might have been better if you had prepared the article, either in your own Sandbox (see link at top of page) or by using this link to draft and submit an article when you're ready. (You might wish to copy and paste it into your sandbox anyway, as non-notable content - especially about living people - tends to be deleted quite rapidly, for obvious reasons (see WP:BLP).

Please, please don't be put off if your first article does get deleted following this proposal - it may seem hurtful and upsetting, but it is the only way to ensure Wikipedia as an encyclopedia contains good, notable content. (It happened to me when I first started writing articles here, too. (See here). I do hope this helps and that you can find a way to demonstrate that XXXX does deserve an article on him. We do need good editors, willing to take risks by creating articles. You can always prepare an article and then submit it when you're ready (often the best way for newcomers to editing).

==Discussion page==
Hello. Watchers of this article will see that this page has been flagged because of one or more concerns over its style or content. Do please take the time to consider how to improve this page . . .etc

DYK assessment

:* :* The article is a 5-fold expansion in last7 days: {{ok}} :* The article is long enough: {{ok}} :* The hook is interesting: {{ok}} :* The hook is referenced: {{ok}} :* The hook is below 200 characters: {{ok}} :* No (0%) copyvio found with Earwig's tool: {{ok}} :* The article follows most other important policies: {{ok}} :* QPQ: {{ok}} :* [[File:Symbol confirmed.svg|16px]] Article is good to go.

I want to add a PHOTO

ANSWER #1

Welcome to the Teahouse, username. So that we can help you more effectively please can you explain your precise need?:

• Is the picture you want already on Wikimedia Commons (search here), and therefore free to use, and you simply want to know how to insert it into a page?
• Do you want to upload a photo you have taken yourself on your own camera, and therefore have the legal right to make it freely available?
• Do you want to use a photo you happen to have found somewhere on the internet? (You are not permitted to do this unless it is very clearly licenced for free, commercial reuse).

Perhaps you could supply a link to it for us to check for you? That way we can properly assist you. (Or you can follow the tutorial links at Wikipedia:Images. Thanks, Nick Moyes (talk) 10:49, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

ANSWER #2

• Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive_700#I_want_to_add_a_picture

Have a cup of tea and enjoy seeing Commons images on Wikipedia

I am assuming you have already found an image image you want to use on Wikimedia Commons? If not, go to this main page and type a keyword in the search box (it's at the top right in desktop view). If you find an image you like, but it's not quite the right one, you could click one or more of the "Categories" listed at the very bottom of the page. This helps keep related images together and helps you find others.

It could be like this one of a cup of tea that you want to use. Using an existing one is easier that a brand new image of your own that you would first have to upload from scratch. So, click on the link in the previous sentence, or click the photograph you see here - you're taken to the same place - and look just above the picture, and beneath the filename where you'll see a line of five small links. Look for the link with the tiny Wikipedia 'W' logo and the words "Use this file". Click that link and select the text offered to "Use this file on a Wiki as a Thumbnail". (The convention is always to add an image as a thumbnail, no matter how much you'd love to make it larger.) Copy the link to your clipboard and then go to the Wikipedia page you want to add it to (let's assume we want to add it to the page we're on now). Edit the page (ie click the tab labelled Edit Source). Scroll down to the section you'd like to add it to, and paste in the text you copied at the very top of that section. By default, this adds the thumbnail picture and its caption on the right hand side of the page, as you see here. To change the caption text, just edit the text to the right of the vertical bar - or 'pipe'. Don't change the filename.jpg text itself or the image link will be broken. There are some useful links on this help page: Wikipedia:Images with further guidance and tweaks, or detailed layout possibilities at Wikipedia:Picture tutorial.

Of course, if you are using the alternative Visual Editor (which is a bit more WYSIWYG), the process is slightly different. You once again navigate to the section where the image is needed, then, in the editing toolbar, click Insert > Media. At the search bar in the popup that then appears, type the keyword to search for certain image types, or just type in the filename of your image you've already chosen from Wikimedia Commons. Select the image and then click 'Use this image'. Before inserting it you'll be prompted to add a caption. Captions can include hyperlinks, but that's probably best left for another time. I hope this helps.

If you need advice on actually uploading your own image first, that requires a slightly different answer and a mention of copyright issues. Let us know if you need further help on that. Regards from the UK.

How to add a MAP to an INFOBOX

archive section: map

Nick Moyes/sandbox/textblocks
Today, our Teahouse is located in the wonderful Botanic Gardens in Guwahati! Click the coordinates below to see a detailed map.
Coordinates: 26.1527071°N 91.6611459°E / 26.1527071; 91.6611459

Maps should only go in articles about geographic places. Maps are best added to articles about places using the Infobox at the very top of the page.

I confess that I am no expert on the intricacies of Infoboxes but, basically, you will need to add three things to the appropriate Infobox:

• the coordinates of the place (in the right format, of course!)
• the name of an appropriate background map you want to use (Hint: look at an existing article of a nearby place and use the map name that that one uses!)
• a caption

If you edit the source for Guwahati, you will see that the very commonly used {{Infobox settlement}} is deployed. (There are alternatives at Wikipedia:List_of_infoboxes#Geography_and_place). It requires the following parameters:

| coordinates = 26°11′N 91°44′E

| pushpin_map = India Assam#India

| pushpin_map_caption = Location of Guwahati in Assam

Be aware: other Infoboxes may use parameters labelled: |map=   and |map_caption= -but the effect is the same.

There are various ways to get coordinates for the place you're writing about. One common method is to use Google maps and click on the relevant place and copy down the coordinates that appear on screen - or drop in a pushpin on Google maps and copy/paste the coordinates from the browser url box. If you notice the pair of two squiggly brackets in the coordinates parameter, this is actually calling up another special template to handle the coordinates. You can see the documentation for this at {{Coord}}. I'm afraid it's not the easiest thing to understand if you're not familiar with GPS coordinates, and the different formats they can come in. But, again, simply looking at how pages on nearby places have handled coordinates can assist. In the demo shown here I simply copy/pasted the url from the browser, replace the comma between the Lat/Long figures with a | character, and it worked perfectly. Our Teahouse is now in a lovely part of the city of Guwahati in India. I hope this may have been of some help - come back if you get stuck. (A new support page on Infoboxes has just been set up today. You might wish to ask at WP:IBASSIST if you feel you need further or better technical advice!)

For a list of map background areas available for reference, visit: Template:Location map/List.  

Starting out - THINGS TO DO

• for a complete beginnner:

Rather like driving a car, it's best to set off slowly because Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia controlled by quite a lot of 'rules of the road'. Providing you don't simply add "stuff that you happen to know", you might find looking at articles in or around your home town or favourite place might be worthy doing first. You'll get a feeling of how articles have been written, perhaps spotting typos or other small fixes which you can correct. Making sure the written English flows easily and is gramatically correct is almost as important as goof, factual content. You might find certain statement have written after them, which means we need to find a Reliable Source to insert to support that statement. In time, you might feel confident to add one via the 'Cite' button. You could visit Help:Introduction for further guidance, or come back here if you hit problems. Because it's easy to make mistakes, you might feel other road users appear abrupt with you if you do mess up. But rather than bite back, take a moment to work out what you might have done wrong and keep on the correct side of the road to avoid confrontation. We work by collaboration and consensus, so engaging with other editors is quite normal - as is following what other users advise you to do. That way you'll be helping to build the worlds greatest online encyclopaedia. Good luck, and enjoy the ride.

• originally drafted for a retired teacher just starting out

Hello, may I also add my welcome and thank you for introducing yourself here? I do appreciate the satisfaction that editing articles or sharing information to assist others can bring, and I wish you well on your new learning journey. It sounds like we've both spent a lifetime sharing knowledge with others, so Wikipedia is an absolutely perfect way for us to continue in that vein. It really can be immensely rewarding. It's certainly a very good idea to start slowly, making small edits at first, simply so you can 'get the feel' of the place. Just searching for and reading articles on topics that interest you and making any improvements you can find is one such approach. With over 5,000,000 articles, you could always consider it as a potentially very long exercise in homework-marking! Every article has its own 'Talk page' which in standard view is found via the tab at the top left, just next to the article tab. That's where you can discuss concerns related specifically to that article - a far better place to do it than to bring them here because other editors interested in that page will already be monitoring it, and will answer there.

Of course, with your research interests, should you find new content or sources that support something you want to add, it's important to cite these as inline references, and only to use what we call Reliable Sources. Thus, we ignore all self-published websites, blogs, social media and so forth. But citing published books is fine - they don't all have to be available online, and our editing tool contains a helpful 'cite' button which provides you with a selection of templates in which you can enter reference details, field by field, to make life easy. One of our two editing tools (called Visual Editor) makes editing more WYSIWYG, though many users - like me - prefer using our 'source editor'. It's a little bit more scary to use at first, but you soon get the hang of it.

Now, you asked about 'rules' - Boy, do we have tons of pages of rules and guidelines! But with such a vast encyclopaedia capable of being edited by anyone in the world, that's hardly surprising, is it? I'll simply give you one link which splits them all up into different areas, but please don't think you've got to wade through them all before you start contributing! Just be bold - but here's that link in case you're interested: Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines. You'll find many editors refer to our multitude of help and guidance pages using 'shortcuts', all of which start with WP: - so, by way of example, WP:PGLIST takes you to that self-same page.

I would certainly recommend trying The Wikipedia Adventure - it's an interactive tour in which you can collect 15 badges en route as you whizz round the galaxy, learning the basics of editing, referencing and so forth.

And you asked about your 'profile'. It's where you can say a little about yourself and yourd interests - ensuring you only reveal what information you're OK with. So avoid emails, addresses, phone numbers etc, or other personal information you wouldn't want published. We conduct all matters here openly, so only very rarely would one editor consider emailing another. Personally, I love seeing a short summary about an editor. Should they have made some mistake I need to deal with, I find that seeing a few words about them and their interests helps me appreciate where they're coming from and why they're editing. To create yours, look for the Tab entitled 'User page' in red text.(the red link tells me the page doesn't exist yet - it'll stay blue once you have. At the 'Create' or 'Create source' tab, simply type a few words to introduce yourself, then look for the huge blue button labelled 'Publish page' and this makes your userpage. Thereafter, the button is entitled 'Publish changes', but it's effectively just saving and publishing your latest edits online.

Your userpage is also a great place to compile lists of useful pages and other stuff you encounter and don't want to forget about. You'll also see a little empty star symbol in one of the tabs at the top of each article. If you find a page that interests you, you can click that star, which adds the page to your 'watchlist'. This alerts you to changes made to articles or even other editors userpages that really take your interest, or where you want to monitor what other editors add to the page. You probably don't need to add the Teahouse to that list as it gets modified far too frequently, but just hanging out here and reading questions from other new editors and the answers we supply them with can itself be a great way to learn how things are done. We like to think of ourselves as offering a friendly place to come and ask questions - and you'll certainly sense that you aren't editing alone. There are hundreds of new editors joining us every day. And we're here to help you whenever we can.

Whatever happens, don't be put off should you accidentally make the odd mistake en route. Nothing can be permanently damaged, and each edit is not only separately saved in each page's 'History', but each one can be reversed (reverted). So have no fear that you'll make an encyclopaedia article go up in smoke! Best regards and good luck from the UK, and when you post again on a talk page, please try and sign your edit. You do this by typing four keyboard tilde characters (like this: ~~~~) right at the very end. That automatically adds your username and timestamp when you hit the blue 'publish changes' button. Just like this: ADD SIGNATURE.

HOMEPAGE tab

If you're interested, English Wikipedia is at this very moment rolling out a new 'Homepage' feature for new editors like you who are using desktops to edit (but not mobiles). Right now, only 25% of new accounts get the Homepage tab enabled by default - it's just to the left of your Userpage tab. (If you can't see it, just go to Special:Preferences and, right at the bottom of that page, tick Display newcomer homepage and save the setting.

You will now have a new Homepage tab in which you are offered a selection of articles to begin editing on, all of which have been tagged for some form of improvement being needed. You can select which main subject areas you are offered to work on, as well as Easy, Medium, or Hard tasks to perform. You even get randomly assigned a 'mentor' who has volunteered to answer any question you might have. Good luck with your very own Wikipedia Adventure!

WIKIPROJECTS

Q: Would it be helpful to use my time to improve established articles, or should I use my time on improving stubs instead?

Answer: Hello and welcome to the Teahouse. Yours is an incredibly sensible question, that goes right to the heart of why we all like to help build this encyclopaedia, and how we both use and value our time contribution.

... my gut reaction is to suggest that you work to improve the shorter articles deemed to be of greatest importance. You didn't say what your subject interests are, but there is an extremely good way to find articles that need improving on topics that you're interested in. Simply find a page on a subject of interest, then go to its talk pages and follow links to the relevant WikiProjects. Most of these Projects have Quality Assessment tables - multicoloured things that I ignored as too complicated for years, but then discovered they are a great way of finding important topics that need improving. Every article that has been tagged as falling under that topic is likely to have been given an 'Importance' rating and a 'Quality' rating from Stub to Featured Article. See a live example below: This one comes my pet area: WP:WikiProject Mountains of the Alps:

The Rimpfischhorn - an important 4,000metre high mountain in the Swiss Alps, but still only a 'Stub' Class article.

Mountains of the Alps articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
GA	1	1					2
B	7	3	3	1			14
C	12	24	26	41		2	105
Start	5	82	231	393		2	713
Stub		22	213	2,010		2	2,247
List		1	4			1	6
Category					50		50
File					6		6
Portal					2		2
Project					2		2
Template					5		5
NA	1			3	5		9
Assessed	26	133	477	2,448	70	7	3,161
Total	26	133	477	2,448	70	7	3,161
WikiWork factors (?)		ω = 17,513			Ω = 5.68

• The vertical columns show the assessed importance of the articles (Top, High, Mid, Low & Unassessed)
• The horizontal rows allow you to see how many articles of each Quality Assessment fall into each Importance grouping. By clicking on any number, you get a list of all those corresponding articles

So (assuming that you actually like snowy mountains!), either Stub or Start class articles that are of Top or High importance would be ideal targets for your attention. They are often the easiest to improve and, being assessed as highest priority, are likely to get the greatest traffic. Thus I see there are 5 articles currently deemed of Top importance that are 'Start' class, and 21 'Stub' articles of 'High' importance. I click the number and find these 5 articles that might interest me. Admittedly, the assessment is very subjective (see Wikipedia:Content assessment), but we have lots of WikiProjects who have these tables, and they can be a really great (but often overlooked) place to find ideas to work on.

The other side of the coin is that improving very heavily viewed articles means that any change you make will be seen by lots of people (see example for Covid-19 Pandemic), though probably the individual impact of your one single edit there might be a lot less. If you'd like to tell us a little more about what subjects interest you, we might be able to offer some additional pointers.

Once you have improved an article sufficiently that you think it no longer merits the label 'Stub', there are two things you should do. Edit the article itself and delete any stub templates present at the bottom of the page. Then edit the articles Talk page and update the WikiProject assessment of the article. This might move up from Stub to Start, or even to 'C' or beyond if you've added significant content. If checking multiple article's assessment grades, you might find the automated tool WP:RATER worth installing. For better understanding of how we grade content quality, see Wikipedia:Content assessment.

I hope this helps a bit. Let us know how you get on! Regards,

Spellchecking with Lupin

Lupin's spellcheker is one of a small suite of anti-vandal tools which must first be installed by the user into their x x x.js file. Details can befound at WP:LUPIN.

Lupins spellchecker samples a live feed of edits every 30 seconds and creates a new entry to a growing report, suggesting possible corrections. The default process runs for 200 samples before halting and saiting for a user prompt to continue.

I have modified the script so that it now runs for 1000 samples before prompting you to continue, and have added a clearer edit summary prior to stating the correction being made, which states: Randomly fixing recent typos with Lupins spellchecking tool: carribean->Caribbean

Anyone using Lupin must recognise that the program match misspellings in the entire page, including urls and filenames. It is essential that you look to see wherethe reported mispelling appears, as you must not change these.

Experience

How or when does one become an experienced editor?

I could reply by asking you how long is a piece of string? I genuinely don't know how to answer your question about experience. It almost depends who's asking! Even after six or seven years here, with some 30,000+ edits, and after a year of helping others at the Teahouse, I still feel I have much to learn about how Wikipedia works. Am I experienced? Personally, I've tried to gain experience of many different areas, and now I think I know the basics that keeps this amazing, wonderful encyclopaedia working, and I understand how I can best interact with, or maybe guide and support other editors. Perhaps I am experienced enough to know that I am not yet that experienced!

But almost every day I learn something new about how things work here, and I can look back to when I'd made just my first few, and then my first few hundred edits and can see how inexperienced I then was. But every one of us starts from that point, just as you are right now, and we welcome you. We need new editors like you to stick around, to learn and to do their best and to become the experienced editors of tomorrow. Take small steps at a time; don't rush. What brings experience is not time; it's not repeating the same old things; it's doing new things and learning from your mistakes, or from others who interact with you along the way, gradually realising that you can answer more questions than you find yourself asking. I can honestly say that watching, learning and occasionally helping others here at the Teahouse has taught me so much. It's been an honour to be able to help out. When I first started I didn't know there was The Wikipedia Adventure; nobody pointed me towards Referencing for Beginners or Your First Article, or even Articles for Creation or this Teahouse. (I wish they had!)

Of course, there are certain more stats-based indicators of 'experience' used as a base measure in determining whether an editor should be given certain roles and responsibilities such as WP:NPP, WP:ROLLBACK, or being a Teahouse host. But, maybe it'll come down to you being able to decide for yourself when and whether you feel you've become an experienced editor, and also how others come to judge the quality of your contributions and interactions. Listen and act on what others tell you. There'll come a time when you think you are there, and then along comes something that makes you realise there's still so much more to learn. If others here at the Teahouse can help you in that journey to becoming an experienced editor, we've done our bit to help Wikipedia, too.

Getting started (CAR METAPHOR)

A Wikipedia editor on her way to improve the encyclopaedia.

Hello, I am new to Wikipedia! Is there any suggestions you would make to help me get started having a positive impact on the Wikipedia community?

If you consider learning how to edit Wikipedia as equivalent to learning to drive a car, the first thing to do is to understand the way the vehicle and the road system works. To that end, I'd suggest you take our interactive tour called The Wikipedia Adventure, which introduces you to the basics, and lets you earn fifteen different badges along the way. There are other ways to find out about how this encyclopaedia operates, so Help:Getting started is also a good page to visit.

Local roads:New car users start on familiar roads, going slowly and carefully. Likewise, new editors are well-advised just to make very small but worthwhile edits to existing articles, and topics you are already interested in are probably the best to look at first. Looking for poor spelling, bad grammar or clumsy wording is one way to familiarise yourself with making and publishing changes. As you learn, you might find statements in articles that aren't supported by good references, so you might want to learn how to improve them by adding reliable sources. So, Help:Referencing for beginners is a good place to learn how to do that. We have two editing tools you can choose to use, and both have drop-down 'Cite' templates to help you insert citations at the end of a factual statement.

Car wash: Some editors get motivated by the idea of cleaning up the myriad of articles with minor issues, and we have a Wikipedia:Task Center to help them find ideas.

New car?:Others think the only way of contributing is by creating a new encyclopaedia article. Just as with a car, we never advise setting off straight away along the fastest motorways. The equivalent here is trying to create a new article from scratch without fully understanding what's involved. We see many car crashes here by new users who don't take the time to learn the basics, or who don't heed the advice of other road users. So, we offer them a wizard at Articles for Creation where we advise all editors to start drafting new articles, and then submitting them for review and feedback only when they're ready.

Highway patrol:Just as the highway patrol will pull an unroadworthy vehicle off the road and possibly scrap it, so our 'admins' will speedily delete any page on a non-notable topic that is put into the encyclopaedia, or which doesn't meet our standards in other ways. The most important thing to remember is that we never add our own personal opinions to any article; all statements must be sourced and Verifiable by anyone else. So citations (references) are an essential part of any article.

Avoid head on collisions: Two cars heading in opposite directions down a very narrow street are going to hit head on if they don't consider one another's presence and their equal right to be on that road. We work by consensus (agreement) between editors, so we expect everyone to discuss contentious edits, and agree on the best way to proceed. If someone undoes (reverts) an edit you've just made, don't add it straight back in. Instead, get out of the car and go have a polite chat with the other driver on their talk page and ask what their reasons were for reverting you (it'll often be shown in an 'edit summary' - so do check for one first). Those who continue driving without considering other road users will soon be forced off the road; here we call that 'being blocked'. But before that happens, an editor will have been approached by others on their talk page and advised what they're doing wrong. Only if they ignore that advice and act disruptively will there by any problems.

Each user has their own personal car park whey they can practice driving before heading out on the road. This is your 'Sandbox', and there's a link right at the top of every page to it. There you can make test edits or start to draft new content, if you wish.You also have a userpage, and it's a good idea to put a few lines about yourself and your interests there. Avoid revealing any personal information or promoting non-wikipedia-relevant content. You also have a talk page for discussing editing matters, and I'll pop by it in a moment and leave you a welcome message full of some more helpful links.

For some who step behind the wheel of a car it can be a scary experience, and one never to be repeated. For those who drive off slowly and take one stage at a time, it can be the beginning of a lifelong and fulfilling journey of sharing the world's knowledge with countless others on the information superhighway. Good luck on your own personal Wikipedia adventure. We're here at the Teahouse with our tools and tyre pump to fix any problems that you as a new road user encounter along the way! Nick Moyes (talk) 08:42, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Using Featured Article Nomination to 'game the system'

Under what circumstances is it OK to remove the 'former FA candidate' template on the grounds that its presence there is either accidentally or intentionally inflating an article's apparent importance?

The corollary of this question is to say that, assuming I wanted to make an average-quality article look far more important than it is, what is to stop me using the Featured Article nomination process to get me a nice-looking "a former Featured Article candidate" template at the top of my article, even if it stood a snowball's chance of getting even remotely near?

Although mine is a general question, I could cite Jonathan Mitchell (writer) as an example where one declared COI editor made three quite unmerited and rejected proposals for FAC. The first was in Dec 2015 (from a Stub to a Featured Article), then again in January and in February 2016 (from C-class to FA), whilst no editing suggested they were genuinely trying to working towards meeting even GA criteria.

The failure of an article ever to reach anywhere approaching A or B class in coverage, quality and referencing begs the question whether some editors on Wikipedia have in the past unfairly used FA nomination to 'game the system' by making articles permanently look to have had far more quality and coverage merit than has ever justified. If they have, how has this been dealt with?

I've never considered this before, but might look into it, and try to learn how the folks over at WP:FA dealt with such matters, and under what circumstances it is reasonable to delete former FA candidate template notices on the grounds of being nowhere near ready and/or simple POV-pushing to promote an article's apparent importance.

Adding basic reference details via either of our two editing tools

Although I and others at the Teahouse always point newcomers to Help:Referencing for beginners (Shortcut: WP:REFBEGIN), I actually think it's one of the worst help page we have here, as it's so long and off-putting for beginners. So here are some very basic instructions for inserting a new reference to any article that already has a section at its bottom headed "References":

Cite Book template window, awaiting data entry in Wikipedia's 'Source Editor'. (click image to enlarge)

Cite Book template - autofilled from a Google books url. (click image to enlarge)

Cite Book template - showing all available extra fields. Note the Preview at bottom of the window. (click image to enlarge)

The key point to be aware of is that inline citations are inserted into an article, immediately after each factual statement they support. But cleverly, the software then displays just a small citation number within the article (like this^[1]), but then displays the full citation against that number at the bottom of the page, in the 'References' section. You do not need to edit the References section at all - the work is done for you.

• Every editor will inevitably be using one of our two editing tools (either "Source Editor" or "Visual Editor") to add text. Both of these editing options have an obvious Tools menu at the top of the page, albeit in slightly different positions.
• When editing a page, just look for the button labelled "Cite".
• Then position your cursor in the article at the end of the factual statement that you want to add a new reference to. Now, simply click the "Cite" button to reveal a box (a simple template) into which you can enter all the author, title, date, publisher, url details, etc., of your reference.
• These two editing tools vary slightly in how they operate. In Source Editor (which you will have used for editing the Teahouse page) you first have to click "Cite" and then select a further Template button on the left hand side of the editing toolbar. This lets you select the best template into which you paste your reference details, according to whether you're citing a journal, a book, a newspaper or a website. There's also a Preview button to let you see what your details will look like before you decide to click the "'Insert" button to add your reference into the page.

• If you want to avoid having to manually enter all the reference fields in the 'Cite template' window, look for the tiny button beside some fields (e.g. URL, ISBN), which is a good way to quickly fill out some of the fields. This means that you can paste in a value (like a URL copied from your browser) in the field, click the button, and it will attempt to look up and fill in some of the fields for you (there may also be a few seconds delay in working these out). It often misses out date fields, and sometimes gets author name confused, but it still saves time. But you will need to check every field matches the source. For online sources, though not paper books, don't forget to add the 'Access date' which is usually today's date, when you last checked the availability of the reference.
• Click Preview to see the result before you click 'Insert to add the reference as an inline citation.

Alternatively, in the Visual Editor, if you click the "Cite" button, it starts by offering to let you paste in a url or ISBN number to a reference source, and then attempts to automatically look up the reference details for you. It's also not perfect, so manually checking and tweaking to get the best reference is advisable. Being aware that you can add reference details from within either editing tool is something that's not really made terribly obvious in the Help page, referred to above.

Although the detail of your reference is inserted right after the factual statement added to your article, be aware that the full reference text appears automatically at the bottom of the page in a sub-section marked "References". All that appears "inline" within the article is a small number in square brackets at the end of the relevant sentence. This corresponds with the number that appears in the References section. So please don't try to add your references into that section .. it won't work like that!

How do I organise lists of species?

What is the best way to both format/organise a list of species found in a geographical zone?

Eg, is the idea to organise the species into taxologic subgroups?

Is there a template for this anywhere? I've seen a lot of variation / inconsistency with this.

• List_of_species_on_Caroline_Island
• List_of_birds_of_Tasmania
• List_of_extinct_animals_of_Australia

Specifically, I'm trying to improve this: Smooth_Island_(Tasmania)#Biota

I'd be very grateful for your constructive assistance.

This is a great question, and some good examples there of how lists unfortunately vary considerably in their structure and content. I am not aware of any dictat which states how species lists should be structured, though all need to be based upon properly published checklists, floras or faunas if they aren't to be simply a random selection of 'stuff people have found' in a mishmash of sources.

I'm probably a bit biased, but speaking as someone who spent 18 years collecting nearly a million plant records in order to publish a definitive Flora of the English county I live in (see here), I would always want to put the likely information needs of users to the fore. As far as I am concerned, an online list potentially offers something far, far better and more useful to the reader than any printed book or checklist list, and that's offering them the ability to sort listed information according to their individual needs. Assuming you want to create a really useful and complete list of an area (and not just a random selection of a handful of taxa, badly arranged but with a few pretty picture), then the best way is to give users the option to sort species along the following lines:

1. Sortable in Taxonomic order (this groups closely-related species together)
2. Sortable in Alphabetical order by scientific name (allows logical
3. Sortable in Alphabetical order by common name (pretty useless as sorting occurs
4. Sortable by IUCN Conservation status, or local status (takes more work, but might be relevant)

This can only be done if the list of species is created within one single, sortable table, and not split into multiple tables of separate groups (birds, mammals, insects, plants etc, albeit full of nice pictures). However, it is quite reasonable to keep these groups in separate tables if the lists really are complete and each quite long. Now, it's clear that, unless that table includes a numerical global species identifier to permit taxonomic sorting (which I've never seen deployed here), then the original display arrangement of that sortable list should always be in taxonomic order. This then permits subsequent alpha-sorting by common or by scientific name. To return to original taxonomic order, one simply reloads the page.

If it's a long species list, I would do all the preparation work off-wiki, in Excel, and all in one go, based upon the relevant checklist(s). Whilst there, I'd add the wikilinking double brackets to scientific name and then convert my list into wiki format and test it in my sandbox, and tweak the wikilinks. If it's a long list of or a long main article, I'd put the 'List of..' table into a separate page and link to it from that main article.

Of course, one can add extra confusion by discussing which particular taxonomic arrangement is best to use (preferred arrangements do vary over the decades, as you probably know), so I'd be tempted just to utilise whatever system(s) the various source checklists/floras/faunas you base the list upon use.

Summing up, I quite like the look of the list at Smooth Island (Tasmania), though it needs wikilinking to scientific name, capitalisation of common names tidying up. The one big thing that don't like is the source of the data. This seems to be a crowd-sourced website (inaturalist) which, I would ignore completely as wholly incomplete and equally unreliable unless it could be shown that some academic rigour had gone into the data collection and collation. If that is the only source of data available (and I would not conclude it to be anything approaching a 'survey' as such, I would ask myself what value adding such a random list serves to an article and whether I'd be wasting my time trying to follow the approach I outlined above. I would probably conclude that I'd be better off just simply adding the inaturalist source to the 'External links' section of the article!

Notwithstanding my last paragraph, I hope this reply is of some use or interest on the practicalities of making species lists. My impression is that my approach is in the minority here! But here's how I approached this problem in List of species and habitats of principal importance in England. In that particular instance I followed the arrangement used by the government body who prepared that selection of species which forms part of our nation's biodiversity protection legislation. Regards from the UK,

Training videos

There are a number of video resources you might like to check out. See here and here and here. Some were made some time back, so the interface will now be different (especialy any mention to 'Save changes' or 'Save edit' which is now renamed in the big blue button as 'Publish changes', which often confuses people, especially when editing a draft or a userpage. (Everything online - even userpages-is actually published, even if it isn't actually in the main encyclopaedia).

Edit-a-thons

Question: For a long time, I have been thinking of conducting Wikipedia: Edit-a-thon for a group of students (Age group:12-16 years). Finally, I got the time. Can anybody suggest me some Do's and Dont's for the same. Some Wikipedia Policies and Wikipedia Projects to be shared with them for constructive editing and collaboration. Thanks!

Answer:

Wikipedia Editathon at Newnham College, Cambridge University, March 2017. A introductory talk from User:RexxS.

Schoolgirls at Wikipedia Editathon, Cambridge University. Having enough helpers on hand to give practical advice is important.

Wikipedia Editathon - relax and enjoy.

Running a successful editathon can be really rewarding. We have a few general resources available that might help you plan an event, and I might be able to add a few suggestions of my own. Firstly, we have a basic introduction at Wikipedia:How to run an edit-a-thon, and we even have a training programme you can work through on this topic at https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/training/editathons. I have a few personal notes and planning list available for my own use at User:Nick Moyes/editathon, too. As for policies, guidelines and help - do keep these to a minimum (maybe just mention WP:N, WP:V and WP:RS) I did a printed handout (see User:Nick Moyes/editathon/handout1 which contains shortcuts they can use in order to find some of the really useful pages.

Would I be right in assuming you're a teacher and this is a school class, or is it an extra-curricular activity for people who might not know one another, or is there a shared interest? How much time will you be making available for the event? i.e. might it be a half-day drop-in, or a 45 minute classroom session? Knowing a little more about your intentions might assist me to offer you suggestions. Please ensure you ping me correctly, by signing your post with four keyboard tildes (like this: ~~~~), and including my username in your reply.

Here are a few random things for you to consider:

INITIAL THINGS/PRE-PLANNING

• What is the groups' current experience of Wikipedia? What do you want to achieve? (e.g. will you focus on using Wikipedia, or actually editing Wikipedia? How much time will they have? What key things do you want them to take away from the event?
• Getting attendees to create a free account each prior to the event is highly advisable. (Lots of time gets wasted trying to create accounts on the day.
• Suggest they try The Wikipedia Adventure beforehand. (Make sure you have actually done it and got all 15 badges, too!)
• Ensure you have enough equipment/wi-fi coverage/helpers on the day
• Might you need to get yourself 'event coordinator' rights so you can create more than the normal limit of six new user accounts per IP address, per day? See WP:EVC.
• Depending on your focus, do you need to prepare example text for students to work with? If so, you could copy a small part an existing article they are likely to be familiar with, and change it off-wiki so that it contains false information, typos, poor formatting and unsubstantiated facts that they need to find and fix. They should never work on real articles until ready - use the user sandboxes!
• Decide whether you're going to introduce them to editing via the normal editing tool, or with Visual Editor. Stick to one, though do mention that the other exists.

ON THE DAY

• Get students to bring their own devices for editing, but provide as many laptops as you can if unknown numbers might attend. (Make the wifi password clearly visible to everyone. Tell all mobile phone users to work in 'desktop' view, not mobile view, or there will be problems in understanding any instructions given.
• Ensure you record the usernames of everyone attending (signing-in book/blackboard?)- this helps you provide support, both during and especially after the event. You or one of your helpers could even post a welcome message to every attendee during the event, or perhaps afterwards.
• If there's not a fixed start time, and students can drop in at any point, consider running a short introductory talk at set times during the event.
• Sound travels - intro talks and individual working areas need to be some distance away from each other to avoid noise disturbance.
• Introduce what Wikipedia is and what Wikipedia is not. Find out who has used it, and for what purpose. Explain the principle of [[WP:V|Verifiability], and how it is essential only to add factual statements if other people can check these Reliable sources for themselves. Ask the group if anyone has anyone has ever edited Wikipedia themselves. (It's OK for them to admit they only did so out of mischief)
• Explain how valuable Wikipedia is to student and schoolchildren around the world, especially in places where books are scarce. Explain how unhelpful it is if articles get damaged through mischief, vandalism, or if wrong 'facts' are included. Explain how they can help to improve content and how cool it is to help others in that way.
• Tell them they can get help/support whilst editing by going to the Teahouse and asking us for assistance. And always listen to advice if another editor posts on their talk page.

PRACTICAL EXERCISES

• If you have the resources, project a live webpage of Wikipedia on a screen and guide them through the basic layout. (Powerpoint screenshots are the next best thing)
• Show them how to log-in (or sign up, if they haven't already), then to add a few lines about their interests. But, ensure they never reveal personal information about themselves or their family - see WP:YOUNG. Demonstrate how to go to their personal sandbox where they can experiment with editing in relative safely.
• Get each student to work through The Wikipedia Adventure (but be aware of the limitations on both browser type, and especially of it not working well on mobile devices - see front page of WP:TWA for details), or:
• Guide them through working through and fixing mistakes in your previously created dummy article. (Get them to add one reference, if at all possible)
• If they're advanced enough by this stage, encourage students to look for articles about their local area/favourite subject and identify things that could be improved. Maybe discuss each suggestion as a group before taking action?

ENDING

• Make sure you reprise your key message(s) of the day
• Can you provide each person with a takeaway handout summarising what they should have covered, and what they can do next
• Do they know how to contact you as event coordinator, or to seek help from us here at the Teahouse.
• Ensure you reiterate the importance of not revealing personal details, or treating Wikipedia like social media.
• Will they leave your Editathon, appreciating that they themselves can now go on to actually contribute to the world's greatest free online encyclopaedia, and perhaps help someone on the other side of the world who needs information? Will they be empowered and have a sense of responsibility in what they can now do? If 'Yes', then you've done a great job!
• Follow up with each user a week or so later. Thank them for coming, ask if they need any assistance from you, and encourage them to continue. A second follow-up can be done a month later to see if they've continued editing.

I hope a few of these rough thoughts might be of some use. (I've had to guess at the type of audience you're aiming at) Feel free to follow up if you have any further specific questions. I did note that you haven't edited here for a couple of years, so it might be sensible to refresh your own editing practice before you dive in at the deep end. Very best of luck, and drop by my talk page with an update if you wish.

Further text to amalgamate:

Parts of this 2019 Teahouse reply could be inserted into the above:

Welcome to the Teahouse, IP editor. We don't have any guidelines on choosing topics for editathons. It's up to you and your expected audience. You don't even need to have a theme. But to have answered you most effectively, you really should have told us something about the intended audience. Schoolchildren, university students; general public, librarians, people with previous experience of editing, mixed drop-in etc etc?

But if all you want is simple advice to give anyone of to unilaterally choose a topic for themselves to edit upon, I'd simply encourage them to visit Wikipedia and to browse through for articles that interest them personally. Maybe pages about their local area, or hobby, or profession, and look for obvious gaps in content, spelling or grammatical errors, templates at the top of the page, or 'citation needed' messages after individual factual statements. You'd remind them that they can't simply add stuff from their own personal knowledge, but to find paper or online sources that that can insert as a reference to support existing or new content.

So, at that Projects's first section (Article quality assessment) I see there are currently 2,525 stub articles, of which 763 have been assessed for their 'importance' to that project. I then note there are 69 stub articles deemed as 'High Importance' which could be worked on first to greatest effect. Just click on the number to see a list of those articles ((example). Browsing through them reveals pages like the Ailefroide which have no inline sources, and just one external link. These are the things that some editors get real motivation from when they find topics that interest them and appreciate that they can easily improve the encyclopaedia. That's a really empowering feeling.

Finally, if you are organising an editathon, my general advice would be as follows:

• As the organiser, you really need to register for an account well beforehand, and ensure it's autoconfirmed. (I'm really surprised you're asking this as an IP user.)
• To help you in planning, you might like to work through: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/training/editathons
• Consider asking all attendees to register for an account BEFOREHAND (not on the day).
• Create a page here to promote the event, and add it to the editathon events calendar (which not everyone nowadays seems to do, sadly). Use this to explain the event, encourage people to sign up if they're attending, list suggested articles to work on , plus a section on otucomes and achievements.
• If you don't have a friendly admin to hand on the day to create new accounts, you may wish to seek temporary Wikipedia:Event coordinator rights. (At WP:PERM you'll should give details of the event, date, and a link to confirm the publicised event.)
• Get a nice big blackboard and get everyone to write down their usernames, or have a signing in book. This lets you do follow-ups afterwards to help and encourage those who might be struggling after your event. Use the blackboard to clearly display the WiFi password.
• If you have people running introductory talks on how to edit, make sure there's a quite space available for actual editing, or the sound overlap can be a bit distracting.
• Give every attendee a handout on the day (showing WiFi password!), containing some basic help and advice, and some contact details. See User:Nick Moyes/editathon/handout1 for one example.
• Give them free drinks and biscuits, assuming the UN event budget runs to that!
• Are there enough laptops/computers for editing? Does the wifi reach everywhere? Do you need wifi extenders?
• After the event, check all edits of the attendees and update your events page to summarise what was achieved. Send them a 'thank you message, pointing them to the WP:TH or elsewhere for further help.

I hope some of this helps. I have put some further suggestions down here. Let us know how you get on. Regards from the UK,

Re-using a REFERENCE; adding page numbers

To reuse a reference you first need to give the reference a name (called a 'refname'), then on subsequent uses you 'call it up' by that name, without having to re-enter all the details again. See WP:REFNAME for a full explanation. You can then use the {{rp}} template to add specific page numbers immediately afterwards, like this: First fact found on page 29 of a book. Second fact found on page 114 from the same book. Third fact found on page 117 from the same book. And so on... It appears in the references section as just one entry, with superscript letters indicating each use.

You'll find it easier to allocate a 'refname' to your citation if you use our WP:Source Editor for that task as the Cite template has a very visible refname field for you to pop in a memorable name. You might also wish to read our simple tutorial on adding references via the 'Cite' button. See this official guidance page or this alternative one that I produced. Hope this helps.

References

Monitoring Vandalism & Recent Changes

I often monitor for vandalism quite late at night. But once I see other editors (like the fantastic Shellwood and others) making immediate reverts, I either go to bed, or start looking lower down the Recent Changes list for the stuff these folks have missed. Boy, do they miss them! I use this setting to reveal the most likely bad faith edits. I've turned off the default Page Preview function, and have enabled 'Navigation Popups' in 'Preferences'. For vandal-fighters, this is brilliant! Simply by mousing-over, you see a preview of the recent edit. So it's easy to assess the changes. If they're bad, I use Twinkle to warn or to report repeat offenders. I focus on the most likely bad faith edits, watching especially for either no edit summary, or for summaries like 'fixed typo' - especially if there is a large change in byte content. I ignore popular topics I know little about (someone else will undoubtedly fix these); I focus on my own areas of interest in sciences, geography, or topics I'm personally aware of. I also check every school or college edit, as these are often vandalised. Nobody can do everything; do what you can, and do it well! Regards,

My tip for good Recent Change patrolling is not to lurk at the top of the list all the time (everyone does, it seems), but look much lower down the list for things like changes to school articles (they get lots of vandalism); edit summaries like "fixed it" or "fixed typo" are obvious flags to be checked (use Ctrl-F to search the list for these keywords).

Use the ORES colour indicators to spot the most likely issues, and check the contributions of all editors who you revert, as one bad edit can reveal a pattern of many others. Keep monitoring their contributions, and even consider temporarily adding an article to your watchlist for a week to keep any eye on subsequent edits they might come back and make there.

Here are my favourite Recent Changes settings which filter out the least troublesome edits and flag up only the most likely to be problematic.

I also strongly advise enabling 'Navigation Popups' in Preferences>Gadgets] as this lets you very quickly view diffs, hist, IP contributions and other information just by hovering over the relevant link on the Recent Changes page - something the default mouse hover function does not offer you. And finally, don't fall into the trap of assuming all IP editors make bad edits; they don't. Good luck!

Instructions for creating a new 'HOT ARTICLES' feed on a WikiProject page

• Go to your WikiProjects's main page (e.g. WP:WikiProject Derbyshire) and create a blank sub-page to receive your project's hot article feed. (a bot will populate it daily, once activated, at around 07:50 UTC) As it's unusual to create and save a blank page, you'll be prompted whether you really want to do this. You do!

Example 1: WP:WikiProject Derbyshire/Hot articles

Example 2: WP:WikiProject Mountains/Hot articles

• Go to User:HotArticlesBot and follow the link in the 'Subscription' section to then go to Wikipedia:WikiProject/Hot articles config.json
• That page shows you all actively subscribed WikiProjects with Hot Article feeds (latest at the bottom), but you cannot edit it yourself as it is a fully protected page. But note the six entries for each Project feed. You will need to modify these for your own Project. These entries are explained in the row labelled 'description' at the top of the table.
• Now go to the Talk page at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject/Hot articles config.json, click New Topic, and place an 'edit request', using the edit request template ({{edit fully-protected}}. The template should be completed so that it looks as follows: {{edit fully-protected|Wikipedia:WikiProject/Hot articles config.json|answered=no}}

Below the edit request, please your precise text you want adding to the page at Wikipedia:WikiProject/Hot articles config.json. You can use a previous edit request to help you. The text you add might look like this:

   "WikiProject Derbyshire": {
       "Category": "WikiProject Derbyshire articles",
       "Page": "Wikipedia:WikiProject Derbyshire/Hot articles",
       "Articles": 10,
       "Days": 7,
       "Orange": 5,
       "Red": 10
   },

These settings will give you a table showing 10 articles, the number of days to survey (max 7) for edits made to those articles in that WikiProject's category over the last seven days, and the cut-off point between orange and red background text for the number of edits to include. A popular topic would probably choose a much higher number than a fairly obscure one. You will probably also need to create a new WP:Category for your articles to be put into Category:WikiProject xxxxxxxxx articles where xxxxxxxxx is the name of the relevant Project.

Example 1: Category:WikiProject Derbyshire articles -had to be newly created

Example 2: Category:WikiProject Mountains articles -note that this category previously existed for this Project, yet as at the time of this post, is empty.

It may take a few days for your edit request to be implemented, then a further 24 hours for the bot to populate the 'hot article' page you created.

• To insert that feed on the relevant Wikiproject page, just add the template in an appropriate section, either using its full WP: address or, if it is a sub-page directly under the Project page, use {{/Hot articles}} to insert it. Example 1:

7 edits	Peak District
4 edits	E. M. Hull
4 edits	Chinley railway station
4 edits	Hilary Mantel
3 edits	Jo Guest
3 edits	Kinder Scout
3 edits	Matthew Parris
3 edits	Mam Tor
3 edits	David Dixon (actor)
3 edits	Spondon railway station

These are the articles that have been edited the most within the last seven days. Last updated 26 November 2024 by HotArticlesBot.

Note that I can't advise on setting up a Hot article feed where one WikiProject is a dependant of another with a shared template - that's beyond me at the present time. But see this thread for some additional information on that]

Suckering in helpful editors

A recent scam has been identified, whereby by a sockpuppet gets Help Forum volunteers to make changes to the article on Shamsheer Vayalil by posing as naive new editors. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Shamsheer_Vayalil#Have_you_been_asked_for_help_here? See here).

This label has been created for addition to that Talk page, which might be useful elsewhere:

Are you here because some editor you don't know has asked you for your expert/experienced help with the article? Before you spend time satisfying the request, see this (below).

This WP:editnotice is under consideration for posting at that specific page. Again, it may have uses elsewhere:

If you have been invited by an IP editor or newly-registered account to edit this page, please note that the editor may be evading a block. Edits made on behalf of blocked or banned editors may be reverted and the account making the edit may be blocked. Please report all incidents on the article's talk page or the administrators' noticeboard.

Creating a 'Company Profile' page

You would need to find at least three good resources that are totally independent of your employer which talk about your company in detail and in depth.

• Ignore all press releases, own websites, social media outlets and the like, but look only for evidence that shows the world at large has taken note of your company and has talked about it in books, magazines or news outlets. Brief mentions are not counted.
• Having found those, compare them against Wikipedia's criteria for business notability to assess whether the business meets - or fails to meet - our bar. If it fails, then company is not notable in our eyes, so you'd be flogging a dead horse to keep trying'.
• To avoid a non-notable page being speedily deleted, we advise all new editors - especially those trying to push their company's interests here, to submit their article for review by experienced volunteers via our process called Articles for Creation. There's even an easy "Article Wizard" there to help you create a draft article to start work on.
• There is no advantage in adding a new page immediately if its notability is borderline - it'll simply be deleted one way or another, or, if you're lucky, someone might turn it back into a draft article. The downside of going though our AFC process is that there is a long backlog. Remember, we volunteers, and Wikipedia itself, are not here to help your company promote itself.
• Even if it were deemed 'notable', it would still not be a "company profile", as you called it. It would be an encyclopaedia entry over which your company has absolutely no control of its contents whatsoever. Consider that carefully - it can backfire.

Hope this additional comment also helps - but before you do anything else you must follow our obligatory policy on declaring your connection with the company yuou are hoping to add to Wikipedia. Please carefully read and follow this guidance on 'Conflicts of Interest' and this requirement for declaring 'Paid Editing'. Remember, if you are an employee, CEO, contractor or PR firm you ARE being paid. Editors do get permanently blocked for failing to declare paid editing. (Please remember to sign your posts on talk pages by typing four keyboard tildes like this: ~~~~. Or, you can use the [ reply ] button, which automatically signs posts.)

Can I use UNPUBLISHED ARCHIVES?

I am terribly sorry to disappoint you, but Wikipedia cannot base articles on unpublished documents, nor would it want to base them on links to a blog or other online site. Because we work on a principle of Verifiability (q.v.) we need to cite independent and properly published books, journals or online sources that have had editorial scrutiny. Not doing so would leave us open to all sorts of mischievous links to fake websites, POV-pushing sites and false information. So we have a principle of not accepting them at all. That said, there could be times when an External Link to a resource page might be included, but none of the article's contents should actually be based upon it. The way around the problem could be to encourage an organisation with some credibility (museum, historical society, university or local newspaper, for example) to publish archival-type documents and accounts. We would probably regard that as more reliable than a homespun website, and thus be happier to link to it. Does that make sense?

I want to find a MENTOR to ADOPT me

Hello and welcome to the Teahouse. You are actually at the best place for any newcomers to ask their first question. We're open 24/7 365 days a year, including religious holidays. We can point you to the right page of guidance you need to read in order to understand something. Or, if you're still confused, we can try to guide you further. I said the same thing to another new editor in a post above see here, explaining to them that a mentor is a one-to-one commitment which works best for new editors who have already got to grips with basic editing, but then want to delve into more detailed areas and ind depth. The reason this doesn't work for completely novice editors is that too many newcomers have sought help just to achieve one single thing (such as making an article about their pet subject) then disappear, never to edit again. This has not been an effective use of mentor time, though our Adopt a User scheme works best when a mentor can see that the editor is committed and really wants to spend time here. This is no reflection on you personally - just the reality of the situation. And here at the Teahouse you're bound to get a quicker reply, than with one single mentor. And I say that as someone who helps out in both areas. I've left some useful links on your talk page, and suggest you try our interactive tour called The Wikipedia Adventurer. Just pop back any time you have a particular problem, or want to know the best help pages to read. Regards,

• ALTERNATIVE:

Because you only joined Wikipedia today, you are far better off asking here at the Teahouse for help with specific questions. You will get help much quicker, too. The Adopt-a-user process requires a lot of commitment from both parties, and nowadays adoption better suits relatively inexperienced users who have already learned some of the basics but can show dedication to wanting to go on to understand things in greater depth. I'm afraid you are most unlikely to get an adopter looking at your contributions and thinking, "yes, this person is committed. I'd be happy to give lots of my time to help them." Later on, they might well be willing to do that, once they've seen what kind of edits you're making and the range of your interest and commitment here. But right now it would not work for you, sorry. Equally, no Adopter really looks out for the 'adopt-me' templates or responds to them - it requires the new user to go and make that initial approach once they feel they're ready to be 'adopted'. So stick with asking for help here, for now, then see how you go. You might pick things up dead easily, especially if you take the time to read any guidance or policy pages you encounter! Do have a go at our interactive tour: The Wikipedia Adventure - there are 15 different badges you can collect as you progress. All the best, and come back soon! Regards,

I want to BECOME an ADMINISTRATOR. How?

Hello User: Please understand that having the administrator tools does not necessarily make you a better editor. Administrators have no higher status than any other editor, it's just extra buttons that would be irresponsible to give to the entire community (like deleting pages). You can do 95% of tasks here without having the administrator tools. Admin candidates generally need to show a need for the tools, such as if you currently participate in a lot of AFD discussions and want to take the next step of actually assessing and closing the deletion discussions. You may find more information at about the process at WP:RFA, and you may also find it helpful to read Wikipedia:Guide to requests for adminship, and also the Wikipedia:Advice for RfA candidates page.

You have been given two useful links which you should read through to start with! May I suggest that you don't set "becoming an administrator" as your goal, but simply to make it "an all-round understanding of how to keep Wikipedia running". Once you understand some of those elements (and assuming that you enjoy it), then someone might suggest you seek the additional administrator controls. But you certainly won't need them to start with. Ask yourself what do I care about and enjoy doing here?

• Does it annoy you when other people vandalise articles? If so, consider monitoring Special:RecentChanges. Here are my favourite settings to only show the most likely troublesome edits. You could revert bad faith edits and gain experience of the different levels of warning other users, or reporting them to WP:UAA. Consider using WP:TWINKLE to make these tasks easier.
• Does it annoy you when people put up articles for deletion unnecessarily? Visit some of the articles listed at WP:AFD and find things that you might be able to research and improve, rather than simply piling in to say delete - which is the easy way out. You will gain a lot of experience of our notability policies by doing that.
• You could lurk at the Teahouse a lot more, perhaps answering the odd question you know the answer to. Simply by reading what other users ask and seeing the replies to them you will find you learn an awful lot. Then you might feel ready to sign up as a 'host' here and help out even more. Engaging with other users in a friendly, helpful manner is especially important for Teahouse hosts and for administrators like myself.
• Maybe if you like writing articles, you could find an existing page that interests you which is only a short stub or start class article. Set yourself the task of bringing it up to Good Article status. Doing that with just one article could take weeks or months, but you will gain detailed knowledge of the content and the formatting ((see WP:MOS) that makes an article of that quality.
• It took me about 3 to 4 years for me to feel ready to be an admin after someone first suggested it to me as a possibility. So don't rush it. You might do it faster - who knows? I then set about ensuring I had the skills and understanding of our main policies and procedures to do the basic admin tasks here - and I'm still learning today, and there are many things I do not yet know how to do.
• Once you've gained that understanding, you could perhaps assist at WP:PEER REVIEW, WP:AFC or WP:NPP.

It's all about depth of knowledge and understanding of how things work. That doesn't happen overnight, but the more active you are here, the more skills you will obtain. It's not about leadership, but it is about learning, following policy and setting a good example to others. When you feel confident in that, you will probably then go back to the Wikipedia:Guide to requests for adminship, and also the Wikipedia:Advice for RfA candidates and you will re-assess your new skills against those admin requirements and decide you now have enough abilities to help out in an admin role. But you will find yourself doing less work in mainspace, and more time keeping the place "ship-shape". That itself is a satisfying reward, though it may not be for everyone. I would not want to put off anyone like you who wants to be an administrator, but you'll know when you're ready because you'll then be able to give answers like this one to other less-experienced users and be content that it was probably time well-spent. Good luck.

How to SEARCH in Draftspace or Userspace for draft articles

I had to do precisely that the other day when creating a page for wartime heroine, Monique Hanotte, based on a very recent Daily Telegraph newspaper article. I used our search function not only to look for that person in the main article space, but also in other likely places (called 'namespaces') which are not included in searches by default. Namely the Draft namespace and the User namespace, plus their associated Talk pages. I added those namespaces to my search and found no returns, so felt able to continue without conflicting with someone else.

So, lets work through an example, shall we? The trick is to find unique(ish) keywords that would undoubtedly appear an another person's draft or sandbox page on that subject. That would normally be the subject's name or similar. Let's pretend you want to draft an article about the 19th century alpine mountaineer and scientist, Joseph Vallot. (I'm using that example as I am currently drafting an article about him.)

• Type that name into the "Search Wikipedia" box at the top of any page. You'll get this result. He's mentioned in various articles, but his name is clearly redlinked, and a mainspace article doesn't exist right now. You could check those articles in which his name appears and see if it's been used in any way that has been linked, such as a redirect to a related page. Having done that, and found a few redlinks from his name, you're confident a page doesn't yet exist.

• So let's now look in those other namespaces elsewhere for any mentions. Look at the third line down in the search box, where it says "Search in:"
• The default search places are "Main" and "Help". Clear those by clicking the 'x' against each one, then click the drop down arrow. Click the hamburger icon next to "Add Namespaces"
• Select "User" and "User talk", plus "Draft" and "Draft talk" and click 'Search' to look just in those areas. This gives you these 11 results. Browse through them all, looking for the emboldened words Joseph Vallot and you'll find my 'work-in-progress' page at [[1]]

Advice to incompetent PAID EDITORS

To be perfectly blunt: anyone expecting to receive payment for creating an article for someone needs to have actually spent some time in advance learning how we operate here, rather than wasting our volunteers' time sorting out their own mess-ups. We're perfectly happy and willing to help other volunteer editors who make mistakes when they start out, but paid editors with clients should already be competent enough to work things most out for themselves, in my view, and only seek support when it's genuinely needed. Sorry this sounds grumpy, but the rest of us are not here to help you set up a business, or earn money on the side. Please start from Help:Introduction and take the time to learn how things work before setting yourself up to work for other people. Regards from the UK

How do I CORRECT MY BIOGRAPHY?

Hello, and welcome to the Teahouse. I'm really sorry to learn you've been frustrated by what you've seen written about you on Wikipedia. I know it can be confusing when you try to make changes, only to have them reverted. I'll try and point out a few key things which might help. Perhaps the most important thing to say is that everything in an article about a living person should have an inline citation to a Reliable Source which allows anyone to confirm it is correct. (But by 'correct' I mean that it has been properly published somewhere, such as in a newspaper, book or reliable news outlet, and not that it is necessarily 'true'.) Try to see Wikipedia as an aggregation of what has been already written and published about you by independent sources, and forget what you know to be true about yourself, but can't demonstrate to be true via published sources. Nothing in your article should be so 'false' and uncited as to cause you offence - you are entitled to remove that immediately. But it is better to let a non-involved person make the edits to the article about you.

So, how to do that? First, would you kindly declare on your userpage that you are the person named in your account, following the advice here: WP:COI? Then, on the article's talk page, could you list in separate sentences each of the things you find are wrong, and would like corrected, but ensure you include a hyperlink or a reference to the relevant published source (not your own website or social media posts as we don't accept those, apart from for a few trivial bits of information. If you would kindly suggest the precise form of words you think should be used, then an editor can assess how best to incorporate that information (having confirmed in the sources you've given that is can be verified)

If there are things that are stated, but unsupported with a reference, please list each sentence separately and say it's untrue and seek their removal from the article.

Having done all that, you should add one of our 'edit requests' to the page and this will flag it up for attention in due course by another editor. You could either come back here and ask for help with that step, or see WP:EDITREQUEST for help on placing the edit request on that page. I hope this quick breakdown is helpful, but please understand that we ask editors not to try to make changes to articles about themselves as this is often seen as a 'conflict of interest', which we try to avoid whenever we can.

Finally, it's worth me saying that Wikipedia accounts named after real, notable people often get blocked to prevent impersonation by malicious individuals. (This is done to protect that person, not to annoy them, so please don't get alarmed or upset if this should happen.) So, if this applies to your account and username, the advice is for you first to email info-en@wikimedia.org, using an email account that can be clearly proven to be the person your account name says it is, and explain that you want to establish the veracity of your account. You should do this even if someone has already blocked your account; it can be easily unblocked again once we know it is really you we are talking to. Them, once satisfactory proof of your identity has been received, you might also wish to go through the guide entitled Problems in an article about you. One way or another, we should be able to ensure the article about you mentions only facts that have been published in reliable sources and which are relevant to the topic. I hope this helps,

How do I create a page about MY COMPANY?

Before making any edits, you need to appreciate that we are not here to help you promote your company. We do therefore expect paid editors like you to already have learned a litle about editing and understand how Wikipedia works and to edit competently. I have placed some key links on your talk page in a welcome message for you. (You might wish to do that before thinking of diving straight in with the ost challenging of tasks here - creating a page about your employer) You must first make an obligatory declartion on your userpage of your PAID editing, per the guidance in the link I've just given you. (Being an employee or representative, you are very definitely paid). Having then read this essential page on our notabilty criteria, you would ned to find at least three independent, detailed and in-depth sources which talk about your company. They may not be insider newspapers, own websites, social media or PR material. Having assembled those together, you would write your article based solely upon what those sources say about your company, and not what you want to say about it. This is critical. You would create and submit a draft article through this articles for creation page, and await feedback from one of our volunteer reviewers. You are paid; we are not, so you would have to await your turn in the review process. Normally, staff members rushing to create an article fail abysmally, as they cannot see past their Conflict of Interest. If we point you towards guidanace or policy pages, we expect you to take the time and trouble to read and follow them carefully before returning here with further questions. If you want a quicker idea of your chances, just tell us the company name and we can take a quick look and save everyone some trouble if its one of the millions out there that are 'not notable' and stand no chance here. See WP:PROMOTION to understand that we are not here to help anyone publicise the company or their products. I hope this helps.

PINGS and REPLIES

The information you probably need is at this shortcut about Notifications: WP:PING. In essence, to create a Notification that the other editor will see, you need to mention the other persons user name (in one of a few standard formats), then sign your post with four keyboard tildes and then Publish/Save your edit. These must be done in one and the same editing action - you can't come back and fix one of them and hope it will notify them. Learning to send a notification is really important if you do reply, as it might then only be by chance that the other editor might see your reply. If still unsure, you could always go directly to their talk page and click 'Add Topic' to start a new discussion. They will automatically be alerted if someone has edited their onw userpage. But it is best to respond to discussions in the same place as it began. If you click 'edit source' for this thread, you will see how I replied to you. Other valid ways of replying would be to write Name, @Name: or simply User:Name (but you must edit this reply to see the exact code I used) - notice when editing the difference between the curly brackets and the straight ones. Go on, give it a try by replying to me here. I will reply to you if it works. Regards,

DONATING to Wikimedia Foundation

Q:

How can you ask for a donation to a site that is full of inaccurate , incomplete, and blatantly propagandizing disinformation and incomplete facts?

Please direct your concerns to donate@wikimedia.org.

Hello IP Editor: There are currently 6,206,211 articles on English Wikipedia - and there are hundreds of different language Wikipedias, plus many other big Projects such as image hosting on Wikimedia Commons, WikiData, etc. Each one is a 'work in progrees', and across these projects we have seen 4.5 Billion (not million) edits to date since 2001. The five worlwide Wikipedia servers that provide you with content consume 5 Gigawatt/hours of electricity per annum. Someone has to pay the fuel bill for these, and maintain and develop the software we use. Wikipedia is in the world's top ten most visited websites, and the Wikimedia Foundation employs c.300 staff worldwide. But the editors themselves are all unpaid volunteers. If you would care to name which article you have found errors in (and supply a Reliable Source to help fix it), you are most welcome to post your concerns on the relevant article's talk page so that someone might be able to improve it if you are not confident to do so yourself.

If all sources are COPYRIGHT, how can I use any source?

Knowledge and information is not copyrighted. But the form of words used by any publisher to express that knowledge is a product of their skills at using the English language. Unless explicitly released, that form of words is their copyright. Wikipedia requires every editor to put knowledge obtained from published sources into their own words. It takes time and effort to put stuff into your own words, and it requires you reading and understanding the sources. Having done that, you could even put the source to one side an imagine speaking that information out loud to a nearby friend. Those would be your words. Imagine if the Bible were copyrighted. You might want to explain what was reported in the Bible in your own words. Here's a quick attempt to put the first 5 verses of the Bible into my own form of words:

BIBLE TEXT: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

MY WORDS: The earth and heaven were both made by God at the very start of things. The earth had no structure, and there was nothing there. The Spirit of God moved above the surface of the deep oceans, which were completely dark at that time. He then said: “Let there be light”. The world suddenly became bright, which God liked, and he gave the name "night" to the darkness and he gave the name "day" to the light. That was the first day, and between the day and the night there was a morning and an evening.

Now, I have still been guilty of a degree of WP:PARAPHRASE by following the chronological events described, but I think in that context it would not be seen as too bad. Changing the order of information presented is often important to do, but at times like this there is a risk of confusing the story too much. Does that help?

Christmas message

Thanks for your message...

St Jimbo

...and a Happy Christmas from me too.

See Wikipedia:The Night Before Wikimas

WP:NOTHERE - formal warning

Dear XXXXX After xxx weeks of playing around - primarily with your userpage - it is now time for you to decide whether you actually want to contribute to this encyclopedia. None of your XXXX edits thus far have added one single thing to any existing article, and you have had access to all 6.7 million of them!

If you don't want to help improve the encyclopaedia, or simply can't be bothered to read the links to the help and advice you have already been offered in various places, I would respectfully suggest it is time for you to leave Wikipedia and go and play somewhere else. If you continue as you have been doing, I will feel obliged to remove your editing rights, per WP:NOTHERE, as I am now of the opinion that you are not here to help build an encyclopaedia. This is a serious project, so it's time to decide if you want to contribute to it, or just play around on the sidelines. You choose.

Whilst we are happy to help new users who genuinely encounter difficulty understanding how to get started (and are pleased to answer specific questions) we do expect you to follow the links to advice pages and read and understand them for yourself. We also need to see evidence that you have actually attempted to contribute to an encyclopaedia article. You have not yet done that.

If you are too young, or simply don't know what worthwhile contribution you can make to this encyclopaedia, then Wikipedia is evidently not the place for you. The editing you've already done on your userpage, making userboxes and in joining WikiProjects suggests you know full well how to use our editing tools.

So, I have to ask: Have you had a previous account which has been blocked in the past? Your actions correspond pretty closely with people I have encountered who create WP:SOCKPUPPET accounts so they can return and continue messing about here whilst their primary account remains blocked. When I see such behaviour I usually ask a WP:CHECKUSER to investigate.

TLDR: You must now decide what actions you are going to take. Continue messing around in Userspace, and your editing career here will be a short one. Show evidence that you want to contribute to improve and help build this encyclopaedia, and you are welcome to remain and we will support you when you encounter specific difficulties. You choose.