Editing FAQ
This FAQ answers the most common questions about editing Wikipedia.
For full documentation on editing articles, see the Help page, and the following articles:
[edit] How do I edit a page?
- To edit the whole page at once, click the "edit this page" tab at the top. To edit just one section, click the "edit" link to the right of the section heading. To edit on Wikipedia, you type in a special markup language called wikitext. See the cheat sheet for the most basic wikitext codes. See How to edit a page for more details and examples of making links, using bold and italics, linking to images, and many other things.
[edit] But I have problems editing with my browser!
- See Wikipedia:Browser notes.
[edit] How do I make links?
- A link is just the name of the page surrounded by double square brackets ([[ and ]]). It's also possible to make the link display text that is different from that of the link itself:
- [[page name]]
- [[page name]]s -- suffix text will display as part of the link
- [[page name|display name]] -- the piped link: hide the page name and display something else (but use this sparingly, and never "click here"!)
- [[page name (disambiguation)|]] or [[Page, name|]] -- the "pipe trick": the part in parentheses and the comma and words after it will not be displayed. Note that you don't need to put underscores ("_"), to act as space separators like you see in links. Spaces will work fine.
- Apostrophe: If an apostrophe is used in a page title, it must be of the vertical typewriter variety, or the page may not link.
[edit] How do I insert a new line?
- Normally, Wikipedia doesn't start a new line when you press the Enter key. If you press the Enter key twice, Wikipedia will start a new paragraph. To force a single new line (for instance, when you want to insert a poem) insert the HTML element
<br /> after the line.
[edit] How do I rename a page?
- Registered users with a little bit of editing history under their belts can move a page; this moves the page content and edit history to a new title, and creates a redirecting page at the old title. This method is better than just copying and pasting the content by hand, as it preserves the article's history, as required by our license. Use the "Move this page" link. Once you have moved a page, please click the "What links here" and fix the links to the old page (which will be labelled as a redirect in the "What links here" list). See How to rename (move) a page for more details.
- Images and other media files cannot be renamed. You may save a copy of the file to your computer, rename it there, and then upload it with the new name. Fix any links to the old file to point to the new one, then tag the old file with an "images for speedy deletion" tag: copy the template {{isd|New image name}} into the image's description page (filling in the new image name). This will add it to the Images for Deletion category, and an admin will delete it for you.
[edit] How do I delete a page?
- First off, please don't blank articles (remove all the text from them). Such changes will most likely get reverted soon afterwards, so they are pointless, too.
- The procedure for deletions is explained at Wikipedia:Deletion policy. Articles that should be deleted are most commonly nominated at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.
[edit] How do I edit a redirect page?
- The easiest way to edit the redirected page is to click on the link you see at the top of the page after being redirected: "redirected from ...". For example, if you try to go to the William Jefferson Clinton page, you are redirected to the Bill Clinton page. At the very top of that page, you will see a message: "(redirected from William Jefferson Clinton)", Click on the William Jefferson Clinton link, and you will edit the redirect page. See Redirect.
[edit] How long should the ideal article be?
- Since one can link from page to page to page, how long should the ideal Wikipedia article be? A good rule of thumb would be less than 5000 words, unless the subject really, really needs much exposition. However, for a subject that is that complex, one can link several shorter articles together, using a hub page to tie all articles together.
- For example:
- Foo
- History of Foo
- Physical Description of Foo
- Relationship with Bar
- Modern Cultural Icons and Foo
- Foo and You: Making it work in the long run
- Minimum Foo-Tree, the Gidsy-David Algorithm.
- If you write one long article, you will need new headlines anyway. If you write a long paragraph, then you need to add new linebreaks. The structure of Wikipedia is a web, instead of a text that you read linearly.
- See m:Wiki is not paper for further discussion.
[edit] How do I figure out how big an article is?
- Search results give the size, for example "Knot theory (3220 bytes)". If search is disabled, copy the content of the edit box into an editor, save it as a text file, and check the properties of the file. Some variation is possible depending on whether a new line takes one or two bytes.
- When the article size reaches 32 KB, a warning is displayed at the top of the edit screen, as that size gives some Web browsers problems. It will likely give readers and editors problems as well.
[edit] What do I do when an article is too long?
- See Wikipedia:Summary style.
[edit] How do I determine what other users have changed in an article?
- Wikipedia's software can produce a list of all the changes between two versions of an article (either between two consecutive versions, or between an old and the current version), laid out in two-columns side by side with changes highlighted (here's an example. From the Recent Changes page you can click the "diff" link; from an article page itself click "Page history", then "cur" or "last" to see changes.
- To see the differences between two arbitrary versions of an article, see Wikipedia:URLs.
[edit] How can I add pictures to pages?
- First, you need the right to publish the picture under the GNU Free Documentation License or another free license. This means that either you created the picture and therefore own the copyright, or it is in the public domain. If the picture is located on a server you control, you can refer to that image from your wiki page by simply including its URL, like this:
http://www.example.com/image.png- and it will be included. (Note it will only be linked like this: http://www.example.com/image.png, the image will not be displayed.) If instead you want to upload a picture to wikipedia.org, you can use special:upload as a logged-in user and once it is uploaded, you can refer to it in your wiki pages as above, by including its file name :
[[image:NameOfImage.png|Alternate Text]].
- See also Image use policy.
[edit] How can I delete uploaded items?
- Only Wikipedia:Administrators can delete uploads, but anyone can upload a new item with the same name, thereby replacing the old one.
- If you want to nominate an uploaded image for deletion, see Wikipedia:Images for deletion.
[edit] How do I describe images?
- Click on the image to get the description page. Also, when you upload the file everything you put in the upload summary is placed into the image description page. See Image:Boat.jpg for an example of what goes onto one of these pages.
[edit] Are there any tools to make editing easier / faster / more fun?
- See Wikipedia:Tools for a list of such tools. Among other things, you can find browser plugins for faster editing and searching, and tools for HTML importing, and editing enhancements for the blind.
[edit] How do I cite sources?
- See Wikipedia:How to cite sources and Wikipedia:Footnotes.
[edit] Is there any way to see how many people have viewed a particular page?
- Unfortunately, there is not. The servers that run the Internet store copies of Wikipedia in "web caches" to speed up access to the material. Since many viewings will be of the cached copies and not of Wikipedia directly, there is no way to count viewings, because Wikipedia does not have access to those servers (which are owned by many different companies). Also, Wikipedia is free for anyone to download and display, and therefore many websites, such as Answers.com, autonomously provide their users with Wikipedia articles (see mirrors).
[edit] Why does part of an article not appear, although it's there in the edit screen?
- This is normally due to a mistake in the markup for citing sources; look for a <ref> tag without a matching </ref> tag ('closing tag'), and add that closing tag in the appropriate place on the page. For more information, see Wikipedia:Footnotes.
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