User:Tom Morris/How to help

A lot of people ask me how they can get into helping Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The most obvious way is find an article you are interested in and find ways to improve it. But below are a list of other things you can do to help Wikipedia, the Wikimedia projects as a whole and the Wikimedia movement. The selection is based on my personal views of what I think is needed most by the community.

There are other very valuable things which you can't immediately jump into which I haven't listed: for instance, being an administrator and the volunteer response team are two things I do for the community, but you can't immediately jump into those, so I haven't listed them.

It might be an idea, before doing any of these, to register a user account on Wikipedia. Registering on Wikipedia sets up a unified login across all the Wikimedia sites.

This is just a short list of some things you can help with, there are many, many more. As David Gerard says: "On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs."

Copy editing
Wikipedia is huge, and written by amateurs. The quality of the writing varies enormously. Although featured articles and good articles tend to be well written, there are plenty of articles which need some help. If you are good at writing, please jump in and help. On Wikipedia, there's a Guild of Copy Editors who run copy editing drives.

Finding references
On WP:BACKLOG, we have a number of enormous backlogs of articles needing references—at least 250,000 at the time of writing. A lot of these just need someone to spend a few minutes with a general web search engine like Google finding reliable sources like newspaper articles, or looking in Google Books. If you have access to research databases like JSTOR, LexisNexis or Credo Reference, perhaps if you are a university student, you can really help. You'll probably want to read Citing sources, but don't worry too much if you can't quite get a handle on how to write reference templates. Even a lot of experienced users take shortcuts now and again on references: adding citations to unreferenced articles is far more important than ensuring that those citations are perfect.

New page patrolling
Wikipedia has a huge number of new pages that get created every day. We try and ensure that within a month, every page is looked over by an experienced editor and given a basic checkup for accuracy, sourcing and to make sure it isn't a hoax etc. The process of new page patrol is simple: you pull up a new page that someone has created, then check it against the checklist. If you are satisfied it passes the checklist, you click the link "Mark as patrolled" in the bottom right hand corner. (You have to be registered for this.)

Please be careful and think hard, it requires patience to do good new page patrolling. Administrators get slightly tired of seeing really bad speedy deletion requests. You might want to read WP:FIELD before you nominate something for speedy deletion. Generally, it is a good idea to turn on Twinkle as this makes it a lot easier to do common maintenance tasks like tagging articles with cleanup templates and marking for deletion.

To start new page patrolling, head on over to Special:NewPages. Start from the back of the queue, please.

Creating photos and videos
There is a whole hidden network "file community" on Wikipedia who spend their time maintaining and curating the extensive collection of images, videos and sounds on both Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's media hosting sister site. You can help in a number of ways...


 * Create and upload images and video to Commons that helps illustrate Wikipedia articles and other Wikimedia content.
 * Hunt down free images from other sources and upload those to Commons. See Commons:Flickr for details on how you can help copy CC licensed images from Flickr. Both Wikipedia and Wikinews really need images of news events.
 * Wikipedia has a category of articles—Category:Wikipedia requested images—that need images. You might want to trace down articles related to the area you live in, and go photograph them.
 * Alternatively, if you are good with SVG tools like Inkscape, there are plenty of articles that need diagrams and other drawn graphics.

Proofread, translate and assist on Wikisource
Wikisource is Wikipedia's sister site for hosting free texts. It's a bit like Project Gutenberg but on a wiki. It mostly keeps itself to itself, but it does need people who can spend a few minutes grabbing a page, going through and fixing all the issues. See the help pages for details on how to contribute to Wikisource.

Join your local chapter
Wikimedia has chapters which try and work in particular local areas to further Wikimedia's mission. How that operates in different areas is up to the chapters. In the United Kingdom, Wikimedia UK has done a lot of work with museums and other cultural institutions to help improve articles by getting high quality images released under copyleft licenses. In other areas like India and Africa, the focus may be on improving access to Wikimedia projects by distributing offline versions on CD to schools or helping ensure that participants can type in local languages. Wikimedia DE have supported the Toolserver, which provides hosting for lots of hacky scripts and tools used by the community, for a long time.

Many chapters allow you to become a member, which means you can vote on their activities and so on. For instance, Wikimedia UK only charge £5 a year to be a member. Supporting your local chapter, and helping volunteer for real-life events provides a platform for other Wikimedians to work together on things that require some real life, offline coordination. See Wikimedia chapters for a list of the chapters.

Edit other wikis
The world of wikis does not stop with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. Contributing to the free culture is something you can do on many different sites. If you know about Linux, see if your chosen Linux distribution has a wiki and contribute what you know to it. Same for other pieces of software. If you are an academic and aren't quite sold on editing Wikipedia, if there's a subject-specific wiki for your discipline, jump in and help it succeed, so the same kind of thing can be done for other disciplines. More collaboration and more free culture, documentation and knowledge makes the world a better place.

Two really great wikis I like are the EmacsWiki (even though I'm a Vim heretic) and the ArchWiki.

Questions
If you've got any questions, please feel free to ask me or ask at the help desk.