User:Voceditenore/Student tips



tips for students...

Staying in touch – it's important
Wikpedia is an interactive community. Editors leave messages for other editors or discuss article changes on article talk pages, in edit summaries, and on individual user talk pages. Articles can also be changed and edited quite quickly. Make sure you stay in touch with what's going on.

Logging in
There are several reasons why you should always log in when editing or even just checking Wikipedia. First of all, if you edit without logging in, your IP address will be known, which for privacy reasons you might want to avoid. Secondly, if you aren't logged in, you won't be able to access your watchlist.

Watching pages
Watching pages is essential for class projects. You should be watching Check your watchlist everyday until the project is over. Here's how to watch a page: To watch a page, you must be logged in. There are 6 tabs at the top of each page: Article Discussion Edit this page History Move Watch If you click on the Watch tab it will automatically add the page (and its associated talk page) to your Watchlist. (If you are already watching that page, the final tab will say Unwatch.) A link to your watchlist appears at the very top of each page when you are logged in.
 * your articles and their talk pages to monitor changes made to the article by other editors and any discussion on the article's talk page.
 * Your class project page and its talk page.
 * Your own talk page (see below)

Your user page
If you don't already have a user page, you are encouraged to make one by clicking on the red link for your user name in your contributions list or at the top of any page once you are logged in. Add   to your page and click save. You can add other information about yourself if you want, but think carefully about privacy issues. It's not a good idea to put your real name on the page or other personal details such as an email address, date of birth, etc.. You can also add useful links to other areas of Wikipedia, or you can add the finished draft of your article. For more about that see Backing up your article below.

Your talk page
This is where other editors in Wikipedia will contact you. Make sure you check your talk page frequently as there may be important messages for you about your article or any images you have uploaded. If you are logged in, an orange banner will appear telling you that you have new messages since the last time you visited the page. A link to your talk page will also appear at the top of each Wikipedia page when you are logged in. For more, see Talk page.

Backing up your article
Until your project has finished, you can and should keep a copy of your article in your user space, either on your user page or on a sub page. This allows you to work on an article before you actually publish it to the encyclopedia. It lets you get your article into good shape before publishing, without the pressure of other editors tagging it or making changes, and it allows you to ask for 'second opinions' from others before you publish. Another bonus is that it preserves your work in case the actual article gets deleted. But note that like all pages in Wikipedia, user pages must not contain copyright text or images. To create a user sub-page, add this:  User:Your user name/title  to your user page (substituting your actual user name for Your user name and the title you want to give the page for title. Save the page, then click on the link and start editing. It's also a good idea to place this banner userpage on the page. Here's an example of a sub-page for a draft for user Voceditenore: User:Voceditenore/SlyDraft.

Yikes! My article's gone!
If you find that your article is no longer where you expected it to be or doesn't look like your article anymore. This is because other editors have probably done one or more of the following:
 * redirected it to another article (without adding your content to the second article)
 * retitled it to a more suitable article name and moved it to that title
 * merged the content of your original article with another article and then redirected your title to the other article
 * userfied your article (moved the article to one of your user pages)
 * deleted your article

How to find your original version
Unless your article has been deleted, try checking your contributions list. If you are logged in, click on My contributions at the top of the page. If you are not logged in, use this url:
 *  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/your user name 

Substitute your user name with your actual one. For example the contributions for the user Voceditenore would be at:
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Voceditenore

Your contributions will display each edit you have made and the date and time it was made. For any of your contributions click on (diffs). This will show you the edit you made in the right hand column and the previous edit in the left hand column. Here's an example of diffs for a revision made on 24 March 2008 to Aureliano in Palmira. By clicking on Revision as of... in the right hand column, you will get the page showing what that article looked like when you made your edit. Here's an example. At the top of that old version you'll see this:
 * (diff) ← Previous revision | current version (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Clicking on the links will allow you to track the older and newer versions of the article.

If your article has been deleted
If your article has been deleted, it will not show in your contributions list and it will appear as a red link on other pages where there was a link to it. If you haven't got a back-up copy, you can contact the administrator who deleted the article and ask if they they could restore it to your user page or could direct you to another administrator who can do this. Here's an example: click on this deleted article Noelle Brooks You'll see something like:
 * 03:10, 2 April 2008 Philippe (Talk | contribs) deleted "Noelle Brooks" ‎ (AfD discussion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Noelle Brooks).

Philippe is the user name of the administrator who deleted that particular article. Clicking on Talk will take you to his talk page where you can leave him a message.