User:ZachMousseau/sandbox

Wikipedia Tutorial Notes

Paragraph: Set the style of your text. For example, make a header or plain paragraph text. You can also use it to offset block quotes.

A : Highlight your text, then click here to format it with bold, italics, etc. The “More” options allows you to underline (U), cross-out text ( S ), add code snippets ( { } ), change language keyboards (Aあ), and clear all formatting ( ⃠ ).

Links: Highlight text and push this button to make it a link. The Visual Editor will automatically suggest related Wikipedia articles for that word or phrase. This is a great way to connect your article to more Wikipedia content. You only have to link important words once, usually during the first time they appear. If you want to link to pages outside of Wikipedia (for an “external links” section, for example) click on the “External link” tab.

Cite: The citation tool in the Visual Editor helps format your citations. You can simply paste a DOI or URL, and the Visual Editor will try to sort out all of the fields you need. Be sure to review it, however, and apply missing fields manually (if you know them). You can also add books, journals, news, and websites manually. That opens up a quick guide for inputting your citations. Once you've added a source, you can click the “re-use” tab to cite it again.

Bullets: To add bullet points or a numbered list, click here.

Insert: This tab lets you add media, images, or tables.

Ω: This tab allows you to add special characters, such as those found in non-English words, scientific notation, and a handful of language extensions.

Adding references and citations is an important part of improving an article. It lets other editors verify that the information you've added is accurate.

We'll go into more detail about how to add citations and what sources are good ones to cite later on in the Adding Citations training.

For now, take a look at this illustration of how to add a citation in the Visual Editor:

The gif shows the citation tool automatically creating a citation from a URL. You can also manually enter fields for a citation and one will be generated for you. Once you've created it, you can re-use it throughout the article.

To re-use an existing reference, place your cursor in the body of the text where you want to add the new reference for that citation. Then open the “Cite” menu and find the “Re-use” item.

The Visual Editor will also automatically generate a “Reference” section at the bottom of the page from the citations you've entered, keeping track of all the sources you've cited so far.

Once you're done making an edit, leave an edit summary about what you did. For example, if you added a citation, you would write “added citation,” followed by a reason. For smaller edits you copyedited or grammatical mistakes you fixed, you can write “copyedited”. These short descriptions help other editors make sense of your edits.

If you're editing using the Visual Editor, clicking the “Publish changes” button will bring up a box to write your edit summary.

If you're editing in source editing (or Wikicode) mode, type your edit summary before you hit publish. There's a space to do that beneath the text area.

The Wikicode for bold text is like this:

= bold

Creating a wikilink (that is, a link to another article on Wikipedia) looks like this:

= bold

That link to the article Bold will redirect you to Emphasis (typography). To link to an article with a different name than the text, put a  (a “pipe”, inserted with  shift +  on most keyboards) in between the code and the word you want to appear on the page. Like this:

= bold (with the link to Boldness)

If someone leaves a reply or tags you with a question, you should respond.

Open up the page just as you would open up an article to edit. Underneath the comment you're responding to, type a colon. Each : will indent your response deeper into the conversation. So if you respond to a response, use two colons, etc.

It is crucial that you sign your messages with four tildes to automatically mark it with your username and a timestamp.

To get a specific user's attention, you can “ping” them by writing  on a Talk page, which will send them a notification. Some Wikipedians have hundreds, or even thousands, of pages on their Watchlists so this is a good way to get their attention.

Editors (yourself included) can challenge unreferenced statements by adding a  tag in Wikicode, which adds a [citation needed] tag to the statement.

Article Evaluation- Mass Communication

People are saying the article is too vague and has unclear references.