User:Cayde-7/sandbox

Cayde-7 User sandbox

This is my user sandbox. It is the place where I can practice creating and editing Wikipedia pages. Below and above, you will find examples of this with an article name, information and personal notes on Wikipedia editing and tools, how to enter citations (citing sources) and other things. Attributions are another thing to learn how to do. To enter a pipe | you hold down shift and then enter the back slash. So far, this is the first page on Wikipedia that I have edited.

There is a useful YouTube channel from the Wikimedia foundation that has informative videos. There are videos featuring people who edit Wikipedia articles around the world in different countries as well as Wikipedia events and other interesting background stories about the website. The first YouTube video I watched was the one on citing sources part 1, which I entered here: (Citing Sources Part 1). This was easy to do. I simply typed "Citing Sources Part 1, highlighted it and then clicked on the link symbol on the toolbar at the top of the page (the one that looks like a chain link) and then selected the "external link" tab and entered the URL into the pre-highlighted (with the same name) field and then hit "Done". I did the same with the Citing Sources Part 2 video. The second one didn't disappear though, I just had to click off the link field in the body of this article and then it disappeared. I have also bookmarked dozens of educational articles on Wikipedia editing for later use that I thought would come in handy in the future.

So far, learning how to edit on Wikipedia has been interesting and I've learned that it is not a simple process like just typing. The most challenging aspects of this has been learning the platform (Wiki Markup), learning how to enter citations, entering links, learning about creative commons and copyrights, and learning what Wikimedia is for uploading pictures, which is another thing to learn. There is more to it than simply creating an account and typing information onto a page.

For instance, articles are highly iterative and rarely contain incorrect information like some people believe. Wikipedia has many stop gaps built in that help ensure that articles are impartial, accurate and are consistent and high quality. Anybody can learn and edit Wikipedia pages, but not anybody does and the community filters out bad articles or poor quality of writing. There are talk pages and other forms of support for new users to discuss certain topics and to ask questions from other more experienced editors which is good support to have.

I will now preview this sandbox article and save the page, then try to enter a citation using the Wikimedia YouTube video that showed me how to do this. First, it says to enter some text, then below click on the "show preview" button to see what the article will look like. Then, you enter an edit summary in the field beneath the edit window to describe what you've done and press "save page" and you've started your sandbox article! The only problem is, I don't see a "show preview" button so I'll have to find out why and see if something has changed since that Sandboxes YouTube video was made. So after referencing a Wikipedia video on this, I figured out that you don't have to enter then / then name, then. You just have to click on "edit", then make changes which allows you to click on the blue "publish changes" button on the top right which then prompts you to enter an edit summary, then there's no save button, just the "Publish changes" button.

To enter the citation, I simply put the curser at the end of the sentence before the period and clicked on the "Cite" button at the top and a URL field popped up where I entered the YouTube link. Then I clicked on "Generate" and then "Insert" and clicked off the field and the citation was done! Clicking on the citation doesn't direct you to a webpage, it just shows the citation information in a box with an edit button. The "edit" link already has the equivalent of using the source editing /abc brackets.

Instructions:

Wikipedia help pages have a format you can use within the search field. Just enter "Wikipedia:" then the name of the page with no space.

For help articles, just type in "Help:" then the name of the page you're looking for.

To create a page, enter /name

Citations:

On Wikipedia, an inline citation refers to a citation in a page's text placed by any method that allows the reader to associate a given bit of material with specific reliable source(s) that support it. The most common methods are numbered footnotes and parenthetical citations within the text, but other forms are also used on occasion.

Inline citations are often placed at the end of a sentence or paragraph. Inline citations may refer to electronic and print references such as books, magazines, encyclopedias, dictionaries and Internet pages. Regardless of what types of sources are used, they should be reliable; that is, credible published materials with a reliable publication process whose authors are generally regarded as trustworthy or authoritative in relation to the subject at hand. Verifiable source citations render the information in an article credible to researchers.

The opposite of an inline citation is what the English Wikipedia calls a general reference. This is a bibliographic citation, often placed at or near the end of an article, that is unconnected to any particular bit of material in an article, but which might support some or all of it. It is called a "general reference" because it supports the article "in general", rather than supporting specific sentences or paragraphs.

Just below, the number one is a numbered footnote made from clicking on the "cite" button at the top and entering a url in the field. Still not sure how the 2, 3, 4 etc. works.

This is the start of a new paragraph from clicking on the prompt on the page.