User:ICTMontreal/Bootstrapping to be an editor

This subpage is my way of sharing notes I made to myself in the early days of my learning the basics of how to get started as an Editor on Wikipedia. At best it may help others who are starting as I did. At least it reveals stuff that really helped me get ahead.


 * 1) You are cautioned to think carefully before adding non-public information to your user page because you are unlikely to be able to retract it later, even if you change your mind.
 * 2) You can create as many subpages of your User page and your Talk page as you need. A subpage is a page that is stored "under" another page, and includes the parent page's name in its title, followed by "/" and the subpage's name. For example, User:Eloquence/Favorite Wikipedia quotes. When you visit a subpage, you will see a backlink (aka breadcrumb) near the top of the page back to the parent page. Subpages can be useful for organizing and archiving project content, and for creating workspace under a user account. On a parent page, you can create a link to one of its subpages by typing  . If you end the link with a slash, e.g., /Name/, the slashes are hidden in the output.
 * 3) You can freely blank any pages in your user space yourself (other than the few items that must not be removed) and request the deletion of your user page or subpages, by adding  to the top of the page. Alternatively, you might consider simply making the page redirect to your user page. This is normally sufficient for most people's needs. Subpages tagged for deletion will be deleted if there is no overriding reason the page must be kept.
 * 4) Transclusion serves to import exactly from elsewhere with no changes by me. Whenever the source changes, my imported material will reflect that change.
 * 5) Substitution is similar to Transclusion but without my import ever being updated by future changes to the source.
 * 6) Simple cut and past from any source, followed by my editing,  is much more useful than transclusion unless I need to track changes in the source. It is much more useful than substitution unless I really want to populate and prune a virgin template rather than replace data values in my copy of the source with my own data values.
 * 7) You can upload someone else’s work if it is in the public domain (usually very old works). You can upload your photographs of public domain works, such as old buildings, statues, and art.
 * 8) Satellite pictures and derived maps from commercial projects like Google Earth, Google Maps, bing.com, and others are based on a combination of free and copyrighted satellite imagery and are, therefore, not acceptable on Commons. Maps from OpenStreetMap may be used, but usage must fulfil OpenStreetMap's attribution requirements
 * 9) Do not leave unsourced or poorly sourced material in an article if it might damage the reputation of living people or existing groups, and do not move it to the talk page.
 * 10) Editors are encouraged to add an archive link as a part of each citation, or at least submit the referenced URL for archiving, at the same time that each citation is created or updated. New URLs added to Wikipedia articles (but not other pages) are usually automatically archived by a bot.
 * 11) References can be labeled when full details are provided. The label only can then be used wherever mention of the reference is required. The full details can appear once anywhere in the text so you may see the label used often before you see the full details associated with that label later in the text.