User:Mmddyy28/Adoption Course/Lesson 2 -Important Behaviors

The following is Lesson: Two of Mmddyy28's adoption course. Please DO NOT edit the contents of this page without the consent of Mmddyy28. Thank you.

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Congratulations on completing the first lesson! Let's move on to lesson 2.

The etiquette of Wikipedia is something that you may already be familiar with, depending how much reading around the different wikipedia pages you've made. In this lesson, I am going to highlight some important Wikipedia behaviors that will help you out, make some friends, and help you keep your editing privileges all at the same time.

  • Assume good faith - This is fundamental and I'll be going over it again deeper later on. Editors here are trying to improve the encyclopedia. Every single member of the community. EVERY ONE. If you read a comment or look at an edit and it seems wrong in some way, don't just jump straight in. Try and see it from the other editors point of view, remembering that they are trying to improve the encyclopedia. To reiterate, until proven otherwise, all editors are acting in good faith.
  • Sign your talk posts with four tildes ~~~~. The software will stick your signature and timestamp in, allowing the correct attribution to your comment. If you don't do this, then 70% of the time Signbot will do it for you.
  • Try and keep to threading, replying to comments by adding an additional indentation, represented by a colon, :. I will go into this deeper in a later lesson.
  • There are a lot of policies and guidelines, which Wikipedians helpfully send you to with wikilinks. Their comments may seem brusque at first, but the linked document will explain their point much better than they may be able to.
  • Be polite, and treat others as you would want to be treated. For example, if someone nominated one of the articles you created for deletion, I'm sure you'd want to know about it, so if you are doing the nominating make sure you leave the article creator a notification.
  • Watch out for common mistakes.

Assuming good faith is one of the most important points of Wikipedia. We will revisit this later on.