User:Kattusite/Intro to Wikipedia

What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a community-based encyclopedia. What sets it apart from a typical encyclopedia is that anyone can contribute -- even you!

Although anyone can write anything they want in a Wikipedia article, this doesn't mean Wikipedia articles are informal, or that they don't have to be academically rigorous. There's a stringent review process in place to ensure that pages are high-quality, and that they only report verifiable and cited claims. Additionally, all of the content on Wikipedia is license-free, which means anything you add must be in the public domain. You aren't allowed to include copyrighted images or diagrams on your pages, although you are allowed to use copyrighted sources as citations for facts, as long as you cite the source and avoid plagiarism.

This guide aims to teach you the basics of Wikipedia editing, so that you can get started writing or editing an article of your own!

For the purposes of this guide, I will assume that you've already read at least one Wikipedia article (if you haven't, find one to read now!) Specifically, I'll be assuming that you know what a Wikipedia article "looks like" in a general sense, and that you have a feel for the basic sorts of elements that an article should have. With that knowledge in mind, the rest of this guide will try to explain how to put all these pieces together yourself, and how to include certain features using Wikipedia's Visual Editor and Source Editor.

Getting Started
The simplest way to get started editing Wikipedia pages is to jump right in! It can be intimidating to start making changes to highly trafficked, popular pages right away, so the best idea is to make yourself a sandbox to store all of your edits.

Sandboxes
To start, what is a sandbox?

Every user who makes a Wikipedia account is provided with their own User page. (Yours is located here).

A sandbox is simply any page that is a subpage of your user page. The page you are reading now is a sandbox! This page is called User:Kattusite/Intro_to_Wikipedia, which is a subpage of my user page, User: Kattusite.

Sandboxes aren't part of the main Wikipedia namespace, which means changes you make here won't affect the main Wikipedia site or any existing articles. That said, sandboxes are still publicly visible to anyone on the internet, and every edit you make is logged and tied to your account, so be mindful of publishing personal information or making any inappropriate edits.

Creating subpages is quite easy - all you have to do is navigate to, either by searching for it on Wikipedia, or by typing in the URL directly. Make sure to replace the placeholders with your actual username and desired sandbox name.

For example, you could type in the URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kattusite/Goemai to create a sandbox named Goemai. To create the page, click on the button in the top right labeled Create, or the link in the page body labeled Start the User:Username/Pagename page.

Once this is done, type anything you like into the editor that appears, and click Publish page. Be sure to include a summary of the changes you've made (in this case, "Created page" will be just fine).

Editing a page
Now that you have a sandbox created, you're ready to move on and learn about editing pages.