User:Bearsona/Guide

Newbie guide:

What gets an article?

 * The primary guide for this is WP:NOTE. Basically, to have an article, something must demonstrate notability by having multiple references from multiple, widely circulated, reliable sources.

Talk page editing

 * To start a new heading on a talk page, type ==Title of heading==


 * Sign all comments with four tildes: ~


 * Indent with a colon before your comment. Do this underneath the message before yours so that it is easy to distinguish between two comments.
 * This can be done multiple times,
 * as much
 * as needed

Opening

 * An article begins with a lead (see WP:LEAD); this summarizes the article and, unless it contains contentious material, does not need references, since theoretically everything in it should come from the well-referenced article body.


 * Generally, an article begins with its name bolded. To bold, write TEXT (those are apostrophes, not quotation marks). To italicize, simply drop one set and write TEXT


 * Many articles have an infobox. Infoboxes are a form of WP:TEMPLATE. Templates are inserted through a process called WP:TRANSCLUSION. Templates are found under pages with a "Template:" prefix. To transclude a page, remove the "template" prefix and place it inside curly brackets. For example, if one wants the template for the Watchmen series transcluded, the following would occur: the page is located at Template:Watchmen, so to transclude, type ; this will cause the template to come out like this:


 * Not that transcluding is explained, infoboxes are a little different. Let's do an infobox for an article on a philosopher. If one goes to Template:Infobox philosopher, there is a box with the code for the infobox in it. It looks like this:

'''If those fields are filled in, it will fill out the infobox. So if one writes this:'''

renders as

Article Body

 * An article is divided into logical sections; to make a section, mark ==SECTION TITLE== Additionally, to make subheadings that look like this:

Ta-Da!
Use one more set, thus: ===LIKE SO===

Writing

 * You're good at writing, so just be encyclopedic and junk. If you feel like it, check out the Manual of Style at WP:MOS.

Referencing

 * Just a rule: reference everything. Referencing is what makes this encyclopedia reliable, since it is mostly written by amateurs. References are placed after punctuation if applicable. So, say you are referencing this sentence: Chipmunks rock my world.


 * To do this, simply follow this format: WHATEVER THE STATEMENT IS.


 * MLA and such are acceptable styles, but there are also specific Wikipedia citation styles. Templates are used for this too. For an example, see Template:Cite book. To make referencing easier, you can click "My Preferences" in the upper right of the screen; from there, go to the "Gadgets" tab. Under "Editing Gadgets", check the box next to "refTools", then click Save at the bottom of the page. With this enabled, everytime an edit box is opened, there is a line of gray boxes. The last one in the line will say "CITE"; if you click it, you can fill out the most common reference templates very easily.


 * If you want to use the same reference more than once, then write it this way the first time:, then, every time after this instance, if you are using the same reference twice, simply write to use it again.

Wikilinking

 * The blue links to other articles are called WP:WIKILINKS. To make a wikilink to a relevant article, type in brackets like so: NAME OF THE ARTICLE TO LINK TO
 * Adding letters outside the brackets but still touching them will add them to the link so that different transformations of the word are possible. For example, there is an article on Squirrels, but to links "Squirrels" simply write Squirrels, or American to get American.
 * Links can be "piped" as well. This makes it so that the original article is linked to, but the display text is different from the title. This is very useful for many situations. For example, if you want to link to the article Awesome (video game), you don't want it to say in text: "I played the video game Awesome (video game)". So you pipe. To do this, write Awesome to get "I played the video game Awesome".

References section

 * IMPORTANT: To get references to display at the end of an article, make a "References" section and put directly beneath it.


 * Like this:

Categories

 * Articles are categorized. For people, some easy ones are birth year and death. For example, a person born in 1987 should be in Category:1987 births. To do this, add Categories are like a directory, for example, all Presidents belong to the category Category:Presidents of the United States.