I just made my first edit on Wikipedia (my user account is FlowerPower55555), but I’m not getting this. Any tips on the tags and everything? It seems hard to navigate compared to wikiHow…
My advice: Don’t. We’re cooler.
Jokes aside, there’s a ton of policies and guidelines. If you want to edit there and not get snapped at, you’re going to have to learn most of them. It’s also a good deal less friendly - be prepared for the possibility that your edits will be reverted with no comment even when you ask for one. I barely contribute to Wikipedia beyond typo or grammar fixing, because it’s too complicated to keep up with all the policies and format differences, and it’s nowhere near as friendly.
I was thinking of signing up for it once, but I’ve heard that there’s tons of policies and thing like that as mentioned above, so I kinda decided against it. Plus, I wouldn’t want to show up as a HelperOnWikihow when on Wikipedia XD But there’s an article on how to contribute - https://www.wikihow.com/Contribute-to-Wikipedia
.
Aren’t they similar? WikiHow and Wikipedia? I only have one contribution, but I’ve been looking around and I’m seeing similar things, such as stub tabs and copyedit tags.
I edit Wikipedia. WP has much more policies than wikiHow (and you should learn them to reduce the odds of getting into drama with an admin/editor), but I noticed that if you make simple changes, it’s less likely to be reverted than here on wikiHow.
There are some pages that require your account to be one month old with 500 contributions; my account is both.
The thing I do the most is revert vandalism and some copyediting.
I know. Wikipedia is one of the BIGGEST sites on the internet! (Either that or google!) I also made an account on Wikipedia, it’s so confusing though. I went on my ‘talk page’ and I couldn’t see how it works. Every contribution was a new page on Wikipedia. Good luck though FlowerPower55555! From, your Wikipedia friend, DCat67!
My favourite thing on Wikipedia is the Wikipedia:Community portal
It is like wikHow’s community dashboard. I think you’ll like it!
Yeah, there’s no post message thing on the wikipedia “talk page”…
I’ll pass.
I have been on Wikipedia for about a few years.
While there are a bunch of policies and guidelines, I think what is most important per Wikipedia’s five pillars
is the spirit or general idea of these policies. That said, there are a few policies that I think everyone needs to know: verifiability
, neutral point of view
, and no original research
policies are a couple of policies that every editor should know because they are core values of Wikipedia. I kind of disagree with @Galactic-Radiance
about not editing Wikipedia.
A few rules are there to prevent disruption caused by activities such as content disputes. For example, it would not be a good idea to revert someone repeatedly on a page (known as “edit warring”).
From my personal experience with Wikipedia, there are also a lot of unwritten rules that are just common sense. You do not need to know every policy to contribute. Policy are there for the purpose of explaining scenarios where the policy may apply. For example, the deletion policy discusses the deletion process; the process where an article is nominated for deletion and then people vote to delete or keep articles.
Still, it takes time to get integrated into any wiki community. And WRT there being no “post” button, I think it is kind of a good thing, because on wikiHow talk page discussions are very unstructured. If I click on “Reply” I would rather have the comment be indented and the user @mentioned
on the talk page than be taken to the other user’s talk page to reply. But Wikipedia makes it a little tricky to comment on talk pages as well at the moment. WMF is working on developing a “reply” tool where you can reply in one-click.
And I guess you have figured out you can click on the eye to switch between visual editing and source editing.
