Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women's History/Tips archive

Archives Table of Contents

This page is for archiving tips for new Wikipedia contributors which orginally appeared on the Women's History Project main talk page. Links to the pages for other archived discussions can be found in the Archives Table of Contents.

Tips for New Wikipedia Contributors
Are you new to Wikipedia? Got a tip to help other people out as they learn? Post it here. Step-by-step examples, like Skud's description of how to use our project's talkpage template (above, in "Template Created"), are especially helpful to many. ---Shane Landrum (cliotropic &#124; talk &#124; contribs) 06:21, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Watching pages you care about
You can keep track of what people are doing on the main WP:WMNHIST project page (or this talk page) by marking the "Watch this page" checkbox on any page you edit. Then, you can just check your personal watchlist to find out what's happened recently on the pages you care about. ---Shane Landrum (cliotropic &#124; talk &#124; contribs) 06:21, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Alphabetizing
I'm trying to alphabetize lists wherever possible, to avoid duplications. Penny Richards (talk) 18:27, 8 February 2011 (UTC)Penny Richards

Names
I'm finding that a lot of entries that turn up red on the epic list actually do exist, under a different version of the name. I suppose this is always an issue, but especially so for women's names. Just a heads up to check the usual variations before putting anyone under the list of entries that need to be started. Penny Richards (talk) 18:27, 8 February 2011 (UTC)Penny Richards
 * where there are name variants, creating redirects from the name variant to the page that does exist is really useful.Dsp13 (talk) 19:12, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Finding all the names for a woman and then choosing which one to use can take more time than writing an article!! Sometimes it is correct for the article name to be different from the name used on the first line of the article. The Wikipedia:Manual of style has a section on naming. And as Dsp13 says, making redirects from the various names can be very helpful to the reader. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 23:36, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I wish I could say I'm surprised that there's no specific policy in the section on proper names about using women's maiden-plus-married surnames as the "most complete form" they request for disambiguation in the lead. I note, for example, in the entry titled Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that she's then named more fully as "Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis (née Bouvier)". Most papers collections I see in women's history archival collections carry all the creator's surnames ("Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis"). For Anglo-style married names, it's important to include the unmarried surname somewhere in the entry, and/or to have redirects from the maiden name. For a different style of name referencing, see the entry and redirects for Ida B. Wells ("Ida Bell Wells-Barnett"), who AFAIK published under her unmarried surname after marriage. 12.107.86.135 (talk) 13:03, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed this is a tricky issue since many women publish under many different names (maiden and married (more than once sometimes) and may also be most notable for other accomplishment under a different one. Sometimes there is not a clear best one so the redirects are very much needed. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 14:37, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Have you considered using the Library of Congress name authorities, which can be found online at Library of Congress Authorities? You'll find that there is an established name for each person (as author, or subject) and then references from other versions of the name back to the established one. One benefit of going this route is that the names would match most research library catalogs. 140.147.236.194 (talk) 21:33, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Suggested reading
I suggest folks who have not worked on a Wikipedia project before read this Guide and these notes, especially the parts about common pitfalls. Slow and steady does it. - PKM (talk) 04:38, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Capitalization
Note that it's Wikipedia's convention to use lower case for all words after the first word in article titles, except for proper names. The same rule applies to headings within articles.

This makes sense because of the way wikilinks work: Wikipedia assumes the the first word of an article should be capitalized, so you can be writing a sentence that mentions "women in history" and just make the link women in history and it will correctly link to the article "Women in history", if there is one.

This one is a bit hard to get used to. If you create an article with the wrong capitalization, no worries; it's an easy fix. - PKM (talk) 03:01, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

How Wikipedia's peer review system works
Right now, we have a lot of articles that still need to be assessed, and we have lots of articles that need to be brought up to B-class or C-class. It's a good idea to tackle those if you're new. When you're editing, bringing anything up from Stub or Start class to something else is a great thing to do. If you think you've brought an article up in quality and want a second opinion, post a request for comments (RfC) to the article's talk page (and also at our Peer review section here) to let us know that you'd like our input.

Bringing any article up to GA or FA status requires a formal peer-review process by Wikipedia editors, and it can be surprisingly rigorous. If you're curious about what's involved, watch the article-alerts page for our project, which is autogenerated by a bot every day or so. If you look at that page, you can see which articles-we-care-about are currently going through defined stages in the Wikipedia editorial workflows. These stages include the general Wikipedia peer-review processes, including those for discussing Good Article (GA) and Featured Article (FA) nominees. Reading those discussions over time can teach you a lot about the general Wikipedia review process, its culture, and its standards.---Shane Landrum (cliotropic &#124; talk &#124; contribs) 04:42, 16 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Important Note: The process you want for this is Peer review not request for comments (RfC) The RfC process is for dispute resolution concerning problematic areas of the article over which two or more editors disagree. Voceditenore (talk) 10:53, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Finding all recently-edited entries in a category
If you want to see all the recent changes to a given category of articles, use the Special:RecentChangesLinked page together with a category name. Some examples: If you're more motivated to work on an article when someone else is working on it, this can help you figure out which articles those are. (Of course, not everyone who changes an article we've tagged is affiliated with us, but if you see someone working on multiple related articles, you might leave a note on their user page inviting them to this WikiProject.)---Shane Landrum (cliotropic &#124; talk &#124; contribs) 19:04, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:WikiProject_Women's_History_articles (all articles tagged with this project's talk page template)
 * 2) Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Medieval_women

Adding content and links to Wikisource, Wikiquote, or Commons
I want to make sure that everyone knows how to connect articles with other Wikimedia Foundation Projects. When I create an article when appropriate I will add related material to Wikisource, Wikiquote, or Commons.

For example, when I created the Josephine K. Henry article on Wikipedia, I also added several texts she wrote to Wikisource. To link the texts to Wikipedia to Wikisource you can add this type of template. Template:Wikisource author By adding you produce a template that looks like

Sometimes someone else will already have uploaded images or added texts to the sister projects so it is a good idea to look for them there if you don't have any to add yourself. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 19:10, 11 February 2011 (UTC)