User:N00blibrarian/Cheat Sheet

See also Your first article and VisualEditor


 * 1) Wikistorm article editing cheat sheet:

Formatting settings like bold and italics use the standard Word-style shortcuts. You can also access them from the ‘Style Text’ button. The article’s title should be bolded the first time it appears in the text (generally it’s the first few words, e.g.  Lisa T. Librarian was a librarian who...)

Create links with the link button or using the shortcut Ctrl+K. There are two types of link: When it comes to citations, more is almost always better! We’re all librarians here (mostly), so I won’t bother you with a lecture about identifying authoritative sources, but the more we have, the better our article will do and the more likely it is to be appreciated and improved further. Creating citations in the visual editor is a magical thing, especially for online resources. Click the ‘Cite’ button. Create sections with the ‘Paragraph’ menu. Use ‘Heading’ first for top-level sections. You can create sub-sections using ‘Sub-heading 1’ and so forth. For example, in an article about an educator, the section ‘Academic career’ (‘Heading’) might have a sub-section ‘Tenure at University of Maryland’ (Sub-heading 1.)  Every article should have an introduction above the first section.
 * Internal Links are links to other Wikipedia articles.  This is the default type.  If you want to link to another article, just use the button or keyboard shortcut to open the menu and start typing: articles that match what you’re will appear as you type and you can select the one you want. Internal links are good and useful: in particular you should check for articles for other notable individuals you mention, library systems, universities, cities, states, countries and so on.  Also add links to any topic you think a reader might be interested in or confused about but that don’t need to be explained in detail  in the article text.
 * ‘External links’ are links to sites other than Wikipedia.  To create one of these, first type the text you want to appear when the link is clicked (e.g. “Women of Library History.”)  Select what you’ve typed, then open the link menu and go to the next tab.  Delete the text that you’ve just typed from the box and replace it with the URL.  Click save and it will appear properly formatted.  Slightly counter-intuitive, I know!
 * If you have a DOI or URL you can paste it in the box and Wikipedia will produce a formatted citation for you. (I can’t stress enough how amazingly easy this is compared to the early days.)  It does a particularly good job with links to Google Books.
 * If you’re using an offline resource, click the ‘Manual’ tab, select the type of resource you’re using, and fill in the forms.  Again, Wikipedia does all the formatting for you.  It’s wonderful.

Your article must have at least one section: the Reference section. To create one, click ‘Heading,’ Type the header ‘References.’ Hit enter, then go to the ‘Insert’ menu and select ‘References list’ (it’s at the bottom.)  Any citations you have added will appear all nicely formatted. Other sections should be added as needed but are not required!

Okay, that’s it. Go for it! Be ‘Bold!’ Every past revision is available in the history tab, so anything you change can be easily undone if it doesn’t go according to plan. Ask me if you have questions! Have fun!

Other ideas
Okay, not quite it. Some more hints and suggestions that couldn't fit on the one-sheet. If there are multiple people working together on one article, these might be good tasks to delegate to someone while you're all working. Otherwise, these are things you can do to improve your article (or any article!) once it's written.
 * Interlinking: Look for other places where you can add an internal link to the page. Start by searching for your subject's name to see if there are any unlinked references to her (existing 'red' links will automatically link to the page once it's created.)  Then follow your own internal links to related pages and see if there are logical places where you can expand those articles using your references and link them to your subject.
 * Categories: In all likelyhood some clever person using an automated tool will swing by your page within minutes of its creation in the article space and add some basic categories, but you can add more yourself, as well. See Categorization for more information on finding appropriate categories to add.
 * Infoboxes: These are the little boxes you often see to the right of the page on longer articles. They add a lot to the usefulness of the page as well as making it look more polished.  See Help:Infobox or just ask for help if you'd like to work on these.
 * Images: If you know a bit about licencing this may be a good option for you. Articles are always better with images!  Wikipedia allows fair use images under only very limited circumstances outlined here.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to search for images to add to our articles that meet Wikipedia's very strict image use policy, upload them and add them to articles.  This might be a good one to work on with a partner, with one person researching images and another getting them onto Wikipedia.