User:White Arabian Filly/Help for New Users

Frequently asked questions

When does my account get a page? Whenever you click on the redlink to create it.

Somebody just patrolled or reviewed my page, what does that mean? It just means that they looked it over and approved it as worthy of belonging in Wikipedia. For years, anybody could patrol articles, but in late 2016 it was made into a userright you have to ask for.

How can I help Wikipedia? One of the best ways is by joining a WikiProject that interests you. It will help you find articles to work on and introduce you to other editors with similar interests.

What is an admin? An admin is a user who has been given a special set of tools. Admins can view deleted pages, undelete pages and perform other cleanup tasks.

How can I find pages to edit? Most WikiProjects have some sort of cleanup listing. Also, you can click the random article button.

Help with Wiki markup

Wikimarkup is using text symbols to change the appearance of words in Wikipedia articles. It can get confusing, which is why I created this guide. If you want, you can copy-paste this and show it to anybody who's having trouble with markup, or just link them to this page.

Putting three apostrophes at either end of a word like '''this''' makes the word appear in bold.

Putting two apostrophes at either of a word like ''this'' makes the word appear in italics.

Putting two [[brackets]] at either end of a word creates a wikilink.

Putting an asterisk at the beginning of a sentence makes it appear as a bulleted list, like this sentence.

Signing four tildes ~~~~ at the end of a talk page post automatically generates your username and the date.

Putting a space in front puts your words in a box.

Putting a colon in front of your reply on a talk page indents it.

Putting two equal signs at either end of a word like ==this== creates a section header.

Putting three equal signs at either end of a ===word=== creates a sub-header.

Putting a number sign or hash tag in front of your sentence numbers it.

Typing {{tq|quote here}} produces a quote in green.

Learning DYK

Did you know? is a Wikipedia project designed to show off new content. You can only nominate an article for DYK if it's been created, moved to mainspace from a sandbox, become a Good Article, or expanded to 5 times it's previous size within the past 7 days. You can nominate articles created by yourself or others. If you have an article to nominate, you must come up with a hook.

The hook is the question that will appear on the main page. It should link to the article and include a weird fact:

[Did you know]...that Wilson's Allen was buried three times?

Hooks must be 200 characters or less in length; brackets, piped characters, and other markup are not counted, nor is the ellipsis that begins the hook.

Good articles

A good article is one that has been reviewed by an independent user (one who hasn't edited the article much, or at all) against the GA criteria.

The criteria for GA states that an article must be neutral, sourced from reliable publications that are third-party to the subject, broad in its coverage, well written, and factually accurate. If possible, it should be illustrated by images. (Whether it has pictures will probably not make or break the review, however.) Anybody can nominate an article for GA review, but it can only be reviewed by somebody who has not significantly edited or written it.

Special permissions

Once you have been on Wikipedia and editing reliably for a while, you may be ready to ask an admin to give you one or more special editing tools. These include:

Autopatrolled. This is for the editors who create lots of new articles: typically you must have written 25 or more to get it. The permission merely marks anything they create as patrolled from the moment it's released into Wikipedia.
New page reviewer. This one gives you the ability to review new pages as ok, or alternatively, to tag them for deletion or cleanup.
Rollback. Reverts multiple vandalism edits at one time.