User:Captain-tucker/Adoption Center/1

Congratulations, you are now adopted! What this means, in a nutshell, is that I should be your first point of call whenever you have a question or concern about something related to Wikipedia.

However, rather then just being an idle backbone of sorts, I’ve decided that the best way to introduce you to Wikipedia, and make you a better editor, is with a series of tasks, that will show you what different aspects of Wikipedia are like.

I’m about to give you your first task. It’s not hard (none of them will be). When you’ve done it, I’d like you to leave a message on your adoption page, along with any information I ask for you during the task. Just as preliminary information, I’m going to be asking you for something called a “diff” throughout all of the tasks. A diff is a page like this one (a totally random example). It basically shows the difference between two different versions of an article. You can learn more about diffs here.

Now, the first task: Contributing to an article.

First of all, if you haven’t already, find an article about something that you’re interested in. If you have trouble deciding, then you may want to check out the portal on your chosen subject, and pick an article from there. There are also lists of articles that do not have any references, see Category:Articles lacking sources from June 2008 for example. You might want to browse through the articles names and see if you can find something that interests you. Since these articles have no references it might be easier for you to find a specific fact to reference since there will be no references to start.
Once you have an article, we’re going to be making it better. There are many ways to improve an article, and I’m going to start with what I believe is the most simple, and one of the most important which is adding references.
Read through your chosen article, and find a statement that isn’t referenced - there is no citation at the end of the sentence. One of the main Wikipedia policies is that all statements must be verified.
When you’ve found an unverified, unsourced statement, your job is to add a reference to it. An easy way to do this is to search for the article’s subject using Google, especially some of their specialized search tools. When searching for references I usually start with Google Book Search and Google News. Using Google Books and Google News is good for another reason as you should not too many unreliable sources via these two search tools. Searching with the normal Google Search tool will provide you with many unreliable sources such as blogs, etc. Here are some tips for both of these services

Google Books - Some books within Google Books only provide a snippet view. Where you only get to see a very small portion of the page. You can exclude these search results by selecting Limited Preview and Full View in the Showing selector after your search results are displayed.
Google News - Know that your initial search on Google News only shows recent articles. After your search hits are displayed if there are additional articles further back in time you can view these by clicking on the All Dates link. This brings you to the Google News Archive Search. There is a separate URL for the Google News Archive search.

When you’ve found a reference, go back to the article (it helps to have multiple windows/tabs open in your web browser), and click the button that says “edit” either at the top of the page, or next to the section header.

Find the text you’re trying to reference. When you’ve found it, add a citation using one of the many referencing styles available. I prefer using citation templates, the most commonly used are {{Cite web}}, {{Cite book}} but all of the styles should contain decent usage manuals to help you add them to articles. Fill in as many of the fields within these citation templates as you can using the information from your reference. A list of all of the citation templates can be found here

When you have added a reference to the article, look down, below the edit box, and you’ll see a field for you to insert your edit summary. It’s a really good habit to insert one of these for every edit you make (and there’s an option in your preferences that can force you to do that). For this edit, add a summary that says something along the lines of “citing sources.”

If there were no previous references in the article check and see if there is a Notes or Reference section. If not add one by again clicking on edit and adding either one of the following at the bottom of the article prose and then save your changes adding an edit summary.
==Notes==
{{reflist}}
or
==References==
{{reflist}}

Find the diff for the edit you just made, and post a link to the diff on your adoption page. Remember to either add a comment in the current thread or in a new thread (by clicking the “+” at the top of the page).

Let me know if you have any questions or run into any problems during the above task. When you have left the diff on your adoption page, I’ll take a look at it. Good luck!

Further info: There is a very useful web site http://diberri.dyndns.org/cgi-bin/templatefiller/index.cgi? that make it easy to create many of the more common citation templates. When add citations to web sites I always take the extra minute to create an archive of the specific web page as many newspapers do not keep their content online permanently. This web site: http://www.webcitation.org/archive.php will attempt to archive any web page, you can then fill in the archiveurl= and archivedate= parameters of the {{cite web}} template. Then your reference will always be available even if that specific URL is no longer available. Note that not all web sites allow their pages to be archived so the archive service may occassionally fail.