User:Valfontis/Tips and tricks

A work in progress...

'''Writing your first article? Cool! Check out this WikiProject Oregon blog post about how to do it:'''


 * WikiProject Oregon: Writing your first Wikipedia article

How to be a better Wikipedia editor (make your articles look polished and professional and more helpful to Wikipedia readers):


 * The article history is your friend!
 * Before simply removing vandalism, check the page history. There may have been several vandal edits in a row and you will need to revert to an earlier version of the page.
 * If you're wondering why your edits:
 * Went away
 * Were tagged with various Wikipedia templates
 * Were altered
 * Check the page history and read the edit summaries.


 * Page diffs are your friends!


 * Spellcheck is your friend! If your browser has a spellchecker installed, use it before you save!


 * Check to see where your links are pointing
 * If you slap a couple brackets around a word or phrase and it turns blue, your work is not done. Click on all your blue links (I like to right or middle click to open several of them at a time in new tabs or new windows, depending on what browser I'm using, or else just mouse over them using the popups feature.) and make sure they haven't pointed to the wrong article, or to a disambiguation page. Think about your readers.


 * Learn how to pipe links. Leaving qualifiers hanging out for everyone to see is ugly and disturbs the flow of the text.


 * Deadlinks
 * Is that link really dead? Take a few seconds to Google the title of the article, maybe it was simply moved to a different url. Websites get rearranged all the time.
 * Link to a news story went dead? The citation is still good. Remove or the url, but keep the citation information. Google the title of the story--sometimes you can find the full or partial text of it in a commercial Internet archive (you sometimes have to pay to see the full text of the article). If you can't find it archived and don't trust the info, ask on the talk page to see if someone has access to the story via a library or other archive. See: User:Peteforsyth/O-vanish for more information about dead news links. The information is for Oregon, but could be applied to any region with online library access.
 * If all else fails, run the link through the Wayback Machine (as opposed to the WABAC machine, which is only something you would know about if you are old like me)


 * Please don't remove things if you don't know what they do
 * Developed articles are full of all sorts of little templates, Wikimarkup, Wikimagic and other bits and pieces that help with article formatting, categorization, external tools, etc. It may not be something that shows up in the article's text, but is integral to some internal Wikipedia process. If you don't know why something is there, don't remove it--it might not be the random or stray text you think it is. If you do know what you are doing, be sure to use your edit summary to explain why you are removing something. Always feel free to ask on the talk page if you don't understand why something is in the article.


 * How to use your watchlist
 * Coming soon!


 * Brush up on reading comprehension
 * Adding cited information to an article? Awesome! But does that article really say what you think it says?...to be continued...