User:Joegrohens/StudentGettingStarted

Create a user account on Wikipedia
To create a user account on Wikipedia, follow these steps.


 * 1) Go to http://en.wikipedia.org
 * 2) Click "Log in / create account" in the upper left corner.
 * 3) Fill out the form on the new accounts page and log in.

Once you are logged onto wikipedia, your user name appears in the wikipedia menu bar.

Click your user name in the menu bar to visit to your "User" page. Then click the "Start the User Page" link, add text to the blank page, and save it.

Create a link to a page in Wikipedia.
On your user page, create a link to an existing page in Wikipedia.

The link will now appear in your user page.
 * 1) Click the "Edit" tab at the top of your page.
 * 2) Paste the page name inside double brackets like this Pacu.
 * 3) Click Save Page at the bottom of the editing page.

Create a link to a page that is not in Wikipedia
Edit your user page


 * 1) Paste the full URL to a page from some other website. (Double-brackets are not needed.) Example: http://www.illinois.edu
 * 2) Click "Save"

The link will appear in your user page.

Create a new subpage under your user page.
To create a new page in Wikipedia, you just write the link, such as my new page. Then when you click the link you can edit the new page.

However, Wikipedia editors monitor all new pages, and very quickly delete any pages that are not worthy of being articles.

For this reason, I recommend that you develop all new pages under your user space. Later when they are ready to be published you can create the page in the main Wikipedia encyclopedia space.

To create pages for drafting and experimenting, prefix your page name with User:yourusername.
Example: User:Joegrohens/article_notes.


 * 1) Edit your user page.
 * 2) Type the name of a new subpage using your user prefix.
 * 3) Click Save.

The link to your subpage will appear in your user page.

Note: You can make the name of the link shorter (hiding the "User:username/" part), by adding an alias to the link code.

Example: My Article Notes This page link is now displayed as My Article Notes

Note: The vertical bar is called a "pipe" character (from Unix), and it is above the Enter/Return key on most keyboards.

Add contents to your new subpage.

 * 1) Click the link to your new subpage, and start editing it. Type some text, and save it.
 * 2) Referring to the  Wikipedia Cheatsheet, edit your new page trying out at least five (5) of the text formatting notations.  For example, make some headings, make some words boldface, try to make a numbered list, etc.
 * 3) Make another subpage called "User:yourusername/Notes" and paste notes about your article topic there.

Insert an image from Wikimedia Commons

 * 1) Go to Wikimedia Commons and find an image that has a license allowing it to be re-used.
 * 2) Read about re-using content from Wikimedia Commons.
 * 3) Insert the image you found into one of your user pages on Wikipedia.

You can use the wikipedia Help pages section in [| Images and Media] to learn how to work with images.

The basic syntax for inserting an image is this:

Replace the word "NameOfYourImage" with the real name of your image file. Take care to spell the file extension exactly. It might not be jpg, it might be jpeg, JPEG, or PNG, or GIF, or something else. I don't think BMP files will work.

Replace the text for "Caption" with a figure caption.

Note that the word "thumb" is short for "thumbnail". It reduces the size of your image, puts it in a frame, moves it to the left, and provides the caption box.