User:Looie496/Tutorial/Basics

You can edit any Wikipedia article, except for a few that are "protected" to prevent abuse.

To edit the page you are currently reading, click on the tab at the top that says "edit this page". Go ahead and do that now!

If you have clicked on the "edit this page" tab, you are now looking at the editor window. You can edit the text here. Go ahead and experiment. Click the mouse somewhere and type some stuff. Don't worry, you can't do any lasting damage.

To see the results of your editing, click the button underneath the editor window that says "Show preview". Doing so will show you what your modified text looks like in a browser, but will leave the editor window in place at the bottom, so you can continue editing. Go ahead and try that now.

Feel free to experiment with typing text in the editor window and clicking the preview button until you are comfortable with the process.

When you are satisfied with the changes you have made, you can click the "Save page" button underneath the editor window. If you do, your modified version will become a permanent part of Wikipedia, and the editor window will disappear, showing you the article in its new form.

Before you save the page, though, take note of the line underneath the editor window that says "Edit summary". The purpose of that is to allow you to give a brief explanation of the reason for your edit, which will appear in the article's history. You should always add an edit summary for every edit you make, even if it is something simple like "fix typo". Please type an edit summary now—you can use something like "experimenting", or whatever you feel like. (No obscenities, please—if you save it, your edit summary will stay in the history of this tutorial page.)

Now that you have made some changes and added an edit summary, you can click "Save page" if you like. But if you start editing and then change your mind and decide you don't want to save the result, you can always bail out either by using the "back" button on your browser, or by clicking the tab at the top that says "Article", or by closing the browser window. Any of these will cause the edit to be abandoned.

If you abandon an edit without saving it, no trace of it will ever appear in Wikipedia, and nobody will ever know you did it. Once you have saved an edit, though, it becomes a permanent part of the article's history, and cannot be removed except by an administrator. As the message underneath the editor window says, when you press the "Save page" button, you are officially licensing Wikipedia to freely use the material you have added, and you are giving up any legal right to remove the material or to prevent other editors from modifying it. If you are unwilling to do that, don't save your edit!

If you save an edit and then notice that you made a mistake somewhere, don't worry, you can fix it. Just press the "Edit" tab again, and you can edit the modified version. It is also possible to "undo" an edit—we'll explain how that works later in this tutorial.

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