User:EWikist/AdoptionArchive

 This page shows the records of my lessons with my first adoptee, User:Battleaxe9872. 

Lesson 1: Intro and Signatures
Alright, so... here we go. As you can see, I plan on dividing up this tutorship with lessons with specific topics. If you prefer a different method of learning, don't hesitate to tell me.

To start with, I'd like to welcome you to Wikipedia and thank you for your initiative to become a better editor! First of all, I'd like to ask a few questions:


 * What do you want to do most on Wikipedia (Add to articles, fix grammar, counter vandalism, patrol new pages, etc.).
 * What do you feel your current level of ability is?
 * What do you want to learn about the most?

Next, I'd like to tell you about the signature feature. Any time you leave a message on a talk page, type four tildes ( ~ ) after it. This will automatically insert your signature and a time stamp there. Also, you can customize your signature. If you click the "Preferences" link at the top of the page, you'll go to your preferences. Scroll down a bit, and you'll see the "Signature" area. Here, you can make a customized signature with text and Wiki markup (like links and stuff). Try making your own signature and signing your answers to this post with it!  EW  i kist Talk 23:43, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Lesson 2: Basic Markup
So far I can see that you are capable of adding text to articles. Another important aspect of editing Wikipedia is markup: Specific bits of text you put into normal text to make it do something. For example, if you put double brackets around a word, Link, it will generate an internal link to a Wikipedia article (if one exists): Link. If one doesn't exit, it will appear as a red link: Bad link. One thing you can do to help Wikipedia is to get rid of bad links when you come across them, either deleting the brackets or changing the word within them.

But what if you want to make a link to article with different text than the article's name? To do so, all you have to do is add a pipeline character (|) to the link after the article name and put in the text you want: This is a link → This is a link.

Judging from your new signature, I can see that you know how to make italic and bold text (' for bold,  for italic) .Another way to change font is to use tags:, , , and. To use them, simply put the tag around the word you want to affect: Text → Text,  Text → Text.

A couple other useful tags are: (new line) and (ignores all markup).

Section headers are found in most Wikipedia articles and talk pages. There are different levels of headers, each created using "=" signs. "= Header =" would create the biggest header, "== Header ==" would create the next level down (like talk subjects on a talk page), "=== Header ===" would be the next, and so on.

Finally, the colon character creates a tab. This is use mostly on talk pages when responding to somebody. For example:
 * This would be a response to the above text.
 * Multiple tabs can be use to create further indents.

Got all this so far? You can try out all of this new stuff over at my sandbox page. Remember, feel free to ask me any questions you might have about anything here or on my talk page. I'll talk to you tomorrow!  EW  i kist Talk 17:17, 27 June 2010 (UTC)