Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/The New School/Collaborations in Feminism and Technology (Fall 2014)

Hey all! I spent yesterday starting a new page, and thought I'd quickly share what I learned from that experience in the form of just a few tips.


 * 1) There are far more completely unwritten articles than I expected for things that I really thought would at least have stub pages.
 * 2) If you just want a quick list of pages that have already been proposed but need someone to author or help them, then look at WikiProject Feminism/Open tasks.
 * 3) Just writing the introductory content in a way that justifies the article's existence and meets community standards is an undertaking of its own, and it's best to think of it that way.
 * 4) I expected to get a few articles started during the time we usually reserve for class each week, but I ended at about 11:00 o'clock and didn't even finish one! (But admittedly, I also probably underestimated the demands of making a high quality list page.)
 * 5) Plan your time and set your expectations so that you write one high quality section at a time.
 * 6) It's worth it to look through your  user preference tabs to see what your options are, then go back and change them.
 * 7) The beta features are especially great, especially the hover cards and new VisualEditor.
 * 8) Under the gadgets tab, the wickEd editor and ProveIt both proved useful too.
 * 9) About the editors I mentioned...
 * 10) VisualEditor beta makes editing pages an intuitive, friendly experience. What you see really is what you get. Instead of having an edit box and a button to view a preview, you're just editing write in the preview itself. It is fully self-contained, too.
 * 11) wickEd is maintains the less ideal convention of having an edit box with preview button, but puts more right at your fingertips since it's just a bar of buttons that doesn't rely on dropdown menus. So, it's fewer clicks and lets you use anything else you enable in the gadget tab, but more overwhelming and uglier.
 * 12) Why not both? If you decide to enable both the VisualEditor beta and wickEd, then the former is accessed by clicking "Edit Beta" at the top of the page to the left of the search bar, and the latter is accessed by just clicking "Edit source" like normal.
 * 13) If you decide to craft your articles in your sandbox like I did, others can still find them and help write them.
 * 14) Almost immediately after I saved my article in progress to my sandbox, I got an encouraging comment and offer to help from a friendly stranger on its talk page. This happened before I even listed it on our course page!
 * 15) When you are replying to comments on talk pages, add a colon (":") to the beginning of a line to indent it. It's good to keep adding one more colon for each level of the conversation, so that every reply is indented one more than the comment before it.
 * 16) Also, don't forget to add your signature and timestamp at the end of each of your comments by typing four tildas (" ~ "). I learned that it's best to add them to the end of your comment's last line after a dash or two, instead of putting it on a new line. Somehow messed up my formatting when I did that before.

Hopefully this is helpful! Go team go! --RocketTestPilot (talk) 18:08, 11 November 2014 (UTC)