Wikipedia talk:Tip of the day/Header

This is the coordination page for the Tip of the day department.

See Tip of the day scheduling queue for the complete schedule of tips.

See Tips for the complete library of tips arranged by subject.

Welcome!

The tip of the day (or TOTD) is a helpful tip on how to use or edit Wikipedia. It is displayed by template on prominent help and community pages (and many user pages), presenting a different tip each day. The template displays the tip page named for the current date. The year is left off of the page titles, so that the same collection of tips redisplays automatically year after year.

Our purpose here is to keep the tips relevant. This means keeping tip pages up-to-date, and replacing tips with new ones when they become obsolete. In addition to this, we are constantly on the lookout for better tips to improve the overall collection, replacing not-as-useful tips with more useful ones.

As you probably guessed, that means there are 366 tip pages that need to be maintained. We welcome your help in maintaining and adding tips.

How you can help
To suggest a new tip or report a problem with a tip, create a [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Tip_of_the_day&action=edit&section=new new section] at the very bottom of this Talk page to let us know. Feel free to make corrections directly to tip pages, and please let us know at the bottom of this page when you do. Other ideas and comments are also welcome.

To view and check the TOTD a day before it goes live, place totd-tomorrow on your user Talk page (including the four curly braces).

If you would like to join this department, please add yourself to the participants list below.

How to invite
To invite another editor to contribute to Tip of the day, copy and paste into a new section on their talk page. Feel free to include your own personal message as well. Cheers!

Participants
There is a bot automatically generated list of active editors.

If you'd like to be kept up-to-date on what is going on with TOTD, and receive task assignments, please add your name below:
 * JoeHebda (talk)
 * The Transhumanist
 * Sachinmtk Hope for life. 09:35, 19 November 2013 (UTC) (inactive on WP since May 2015)
 * Learnerktm
 * blackhat999
 * Ⓩⓟⓟⓘⓧ (talk)
 * Eddie Blick 10:57, 2 May 2017‎
 * Ammarpad (talk) 16:01, 18 October 2017‎
 * Thinker78 (talk) 05:32, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Nick Moyes (talk) 20:06, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
 * ThatOneWolf (talk 21:42, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
 * ThatOneWolf (talk 21:42, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Welcome message
Here is a plain Welcome message for posting to new participant's talk page. To post the message copy and paste this: (including the four curly braces).

Remember to sign the message with your four tilde signature: ~~~~

Instructions

 * New tips (or major rewrites) should be proposed via a [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Tip_of_the_day&action=edit&section=new New section] at the very bottom of this Talk page. Ping other editors if possible. Wait for comments and consensus.
 * Minor updates and copy-edits to existing tips can be done directly at that tip's RAW template found via the Tip of the day scheduling queue.
 * The 366 slots (one for each day of the yearless calendar, including February 29 for leap year) are set up on Tip of the day so whenever any new tip is added, or an obsolete tip is removed, one of the 366 days needs to be chosen. Put the new tip in a slot that is already duplicated in another slot (e.g.- the same tip is repeated for January 17 and July 17). Replace the duplicate slot that is coming up the soonest using the general workflow checklist below.

General workflow checklist to add a new tip to replace an existing tip

 * 1) Directly place the updated (Done) tip into the Tip of the day scheduling queue at one of the 366 subpages by editing the tip.
 * 2) Update the tip's description at:
 * 3) Tip of the day.
 * 4) WP:ALPHATIP – Alphabetical list of tips page.
 * 5) Tips, the complete library of tips arranged by subject (pipe the description, link the date to the piped description per the other listings).
 * 6) If you add a tip you may need to remove a tip too. Check for duplicates.
 * 7) Update Wikipedia talk:Tip of the day below. You will also need to remove the added date from other months where it is duplicated- e.g.- if you add a tip in place of one in January and it is duplicated in July you will need to remove the January reference in the July maintenance listing.

How to prevent new tip archiving
Use Bump which is a wrapper for the invisible template do not archive until that is used to prevent bots archiving a discussion thread.

It produces a visible message that the thread has been bumped, and how long for (defaults to 30 days), if a value of days has been specified. It will auto-sign the notification.

produces:


 * Pictogram voting wait.svg Bumping thread. Example (talk) 09:45, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

30 produces:


 * Pictogram voting wait.svg Bumping thread. Example (talk) 09:45, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Always use the subst prefix, and place under the section title.

Tip library maintenance
As of August 1, 2016, the count of tips (from the scheduling queue) contained within the Tip library:


 * January – 31 tips ✅
 * February – 29 tips ✅
 * March – 29 tips
 * April – 28 tips
 * May – 30 tips
 * June – 28 tips
 * July – 31 tips ✅
 * August – 31 tips ✅
 * September – 30 tips ✅
 * October – 29 tips
 * November – 30 tips ✅
 * December – 31 tips ✅

From the above list, it appears that there are not 366 unique individual tips, which opens the door for new tips to be added to the schedule as well as removal of duplicate tips.

To keep the Tip library in step with the scheduling queue, additional editors may help by reviewing the Tip library and performing cleanup. When each month is completed, please add the ✅ template to that month's line in the list above.

Until we reach 366 tips, new tips can be placed into the TOTD Schedule Queue by replacing a duplicate entry from the monthly maintenance lists below.

Tip Suggestion
Advice For New Editors Don't be nervous about editing Wikipedia. Wikipedia was founded so that everyone can edit and contribute. As long as you're making good-faith edits, you'll be fine. Just be yourself!