User:Geoffhunt3/World Microbe Forum event

Wikipedia 101

 * Look for a few potential landing pages that folks could see a page that needs some help and use that as the basis for tutorial.
 * Add some links for the translation tools

Five tips to get you started:

Wikipedia has enormous (but limited) scope
Wikipedia has 6.3+ million articles, including articles on nearly everything you can think of! Yet while we serve an enormous scope, that scope is limited by both philosophical and practical boundaries. Basically we only host articles on topics that meet the two following criteria:
 * 1) The topic belongs in an encyclopedia (see What Wikipedia is not).
 * 2) Enough source material exists for us to write a quality article (see General notability guideline).
 * In short, the topic must receive significant coverage in multiple, reliable, independent sources.

Consider the following example topics, here at Wikipedia we'd have just articles on two:
 * - That belongs in a dictionary, we have a sister project Wiktionary with the relevant entry at obsequious
 * - What Wikipedia is not
 * - What Wikipedia is not
 * E. coli - Escherichia coli
 * - Not enough source material to support an article (yet)
 * E. coli strain BL21 - sure! Escherichia coli BL21 just hasn't been written yet.

In short: any organism, gene/protein, process (e.g. glycolysis), disease, et al. that is substantially written about could use an article here.

This is not a review article
Your paper "A cryptic pseudoprotease stabilizes the contractile ring during B. subtilis division at acidic pH" is a primary source.

If it's sufficiently interesting (sorry), someone may reference it in a review: "Cell division in gram-positive bacteria: evolving insights and structural perspectives". That's a secondary source.

An encyclopedia is a tertiary source: we do not seek to summarize the primary literature. Rather, we seek to summarize "accepted knowledge" by reviewing secondary sources. Think of it as the "10,000 foot view". So we would use the review as a reference for information in an article, perhaps at Bacillus subtilis or Gram-positive bacteria.

This is the thing I see most hold up established academics who are new to Wikipedia.

You have no credibility on Wikipedia
Wikipedia is written by an ever-changing horde of volunteers, mostly editing under pseudonyms. A textbook derives credibility from its author list and publisher. Wikipedia has no credible author! So our credibility comes entirely from references. As such, all information must clearly reference a reliable source !

For better or for worse, folks here may not respect your claimed credentials. You'll earn credibility by showing you can improve the encyclopedia. Each users' every edit is permanently and publicly logged. You can see yours at Special:MyContributions.

The encyclopedia desperately needs your help
Wikipedia is a huge operation, and it can be challenging to see your entry point. One convenient way to get started is the maintenance templates I mentioned above. Sometimes an editor will come across a problem that they're not equipped to solve on their own, and so they'll instead leave a maintenance template as a call for help. Perhaps you've seen maintenance banners at the top of pages (like this one, currently at Anti-sigma factors, et al.), or perhaps the more subtle undefined tags scattered across the site. These are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In truth, we have thousands of articles that need expansion, improved references, clarifying, et al. Of the nearly 14,000 articles tagged as microbiology-related (more on that later), almost 2,500 host some kind of maintenance template.

You can find a giant list of microbiology-related articles with a maintenance template here, sorted by the type of maintenance requested.

Community, community, community
Building and maintaining Wikipedia is a group project, the largest of its kind ever attempted. All rules here are decided by community consensus, and not by dicta from above. People who stick around do so because they believe in our goal: to build a gigantic free encyclopedia with excellent-quality articles. Connect with other editors, accept that your "perfect" paragraph will be rewritten, help folks with their weird pet projects, and they will return the favor.

You can find groups of editors with similar interests at the various WikiProjects. The relevant projects here are WP:WikiProject Microbiology, WP:WikiProject Viruses, WP:WikiProject Molecular Biology, and WP:WikiProject Medicine (by far the most active of the group). You can find some basic tutorials at Help:Introduction. But if you're lost, you can always ask for help at any of those projects, at WP:TEAHOUSE, at my talk page, or anywhere else you think someone is watching. Now roll up your sleeves and get editing!

Anatomy of a Wikipedia page
(Walkthrough while on call. Point out that each article has a talk page, logged history including every intermediate version, and the all-important edit button. Introduce the visual editor, but make aware of the source editor as well)

Visual editor and source editor tutorials at Help:Introduction

Fix something
Some launching points:
 * Search for all articles tagged as having zero sources and having the word "bacteria" in the text (feel free to change the word to one you're more interested in)
 * Same for Articles needing additional references
 * A list of articles organized by maintenance issue for: microbiology, viruses, medicine, molecular biology.
 * Backlog - a landing page for several maintenance backlogs
 * Pick some topics of interest, read the article(s) with Make technical articles understandable in mind (particularly WP:ONEDOWN). Would the target audience understand it? Are there major elements of the topic they'd be missing? You can clarify, update, and add content to fill in those blanks.