Category tags should go at the very end of the article. There is a helpful summary at the Categories article.
If you want to compare the differences between two revisions of a page, click the history tab at the top of the page, then select two checkboxes to mark the revisions which you want to compare. Alternatively, click the (cur) link to see the differences between a revision and the current (most up-to-date) revision, or the (prev) link to see the differences between a revision and the previous one. You will see two columns of text next to each other, with any changes in red. You can also view the drafts on their own from that page, or change which versions you are comparing. Just be aware that changing templates and images are not recorded.
When uploading images or other media for use in Wikipedia articles, always remember to add the appropriate copyright tag to show what license the material is under, or if it is in the public domain. You can do this with the drop-down menu that lists common licenses, or leave the list on the default setting and add the template manually in the box above it.
There is also a list of more copyright tags.
Interlanguage links are links from a page in one Wikipedia language to an equivalent page in another language. These links can appear in two places:
- In the "Languages" list – a sidebar that appears on the left side (default position) of the current page. These links should go last of all.
- Inline, in the text of a page.
Both of these two types of links are created and handled differently.
When linking an article to a category, you can tell the category how to sort the article alphabetically by using a piped link. For example, [[Category:Baroque composers|Bach, Johann Sebastian]] will alphabetize Johann Sebastian Bach in Category:Baroque composers under B instead of J.
Before you write a new article from scratch, please do a search to make sure you are not creating a duplicate of an article that already exists. Following the naming conventions can help avoid this problem.
The easiest way to create a new article is to click on a link to a page that doesn't exist. Typically, these links show up as red links.
You also can use the Search box—on the top-right corner of your screen—to look for an article name. When you are told that the page does not exist, click the link provided. You can also use the Article Wizard.
Besides the Village pump and article-related talk pages, there are other ways to talk to Wikipedians. The English IRC channel is quite popular, regularly reaching up to 300 users. If you care about our policies and general Wikimedia-related matters, you may also want to consider subscribing to one of the mailing lists (high traffic!).
Regardless of how an image you have uploaded is licensed for use on Wikipedia, please include information on its source. This allows admins and other editors to verify the copyrights. This includes pictures you created yourself: if you took the photo, give yourself credit – you deserve it!
User page design can be onerous and time consuming. Especially when you don't have a clue where to begin.
The User page design guide provides advice on developing a user page, and sample design elements that you can copy and paste to speed up the process.
Each user account has its own watchlist. If you want to easily keep track of an article, you can see the most recent edits by adding it to your watchlist. To do this, simply click the star tab at the top of the page to turn the star blue, and the current page you are viewing will be added to your watchlist. You can add as many pages as you want to your watchlist. To remove it, click on the star again and the star will turn white again.
To see your watchlist click Watchlist at the top of any page of Wikipedia (you must be logged-in).
The Navigation popups gadget allows easier access to several Wikipedia features as "popups" which appear when you hover the mouse over links. With this useful tool, when you hover your mouse cursor over a wikilink you can see a preview of the article or image; plus you can activate convenient functions such as going directly to the talk, edit, or history pages.
To use the navigation popups gadget you must be logged in under your own user account and turn on the gadget in your Preferences, available at the top right of your screen. In your preferences you will find navigation popups under Gadgets, Browsing gadgets. Full instructions are on the Navigation popups page.
The syntax used for displaying an image is:
[[File:{name}|{type}|{location}|{size}|{alt=}|{caption}]]
- Only [[File:{name}]] parameter is required.
- Do not put spaces between parameters. The other parameters are optional and can be placed in any order. Some infoboxes do not require the brackets. Keep parameters in lower case. The other parameters are:
- Type
- 'thumb' / 'thumbnail' or 'frame'. This causes image to be displayed with specific formatting. "thumb" is normally preferred.
- Location
- 'right', 'left', 'center' or 'none'. Determines placement of the image on the page. "Left" or "right" is the norm, but large panoramas or timelines can be displayed in the center.
- Size
- {width}px or {width}x{height}px (e.g. 50x40px, would limit width to 50 pixels and height to 40 pixels). Normally only one variable is used. Use common sense when determining the sizes; you can use the "Show preview" button if you need to. If thumb or thumbnail is chosen, size should normally be left out, so that the size defaults to the size set in a user's preferences.
- alt=
- (keep it lower case). This is the "alternate image" parameter used to describe the image for screenreaders or for people with low-vision. It should be more descriptive than the caption alone. Do not use this for another copy of the caption or of the article title, as the reader will already be aware of these.
- Caption
- Any element which cannot be identified as one of the above is automatically treated as caption text. It is traditional to put this last. The caption should identify what the image is, and ideally be a complete sentence that adds to the article by pointing out something a casual reader would not have noticed otherwise, or add information the pertains to the image. Full sentence or multi fragment captions require full stop punctuation.
If you have created a picture that is not already in Wikipedia's image collection on the Commons that you want to include in an article, you will need to upload it first. Bonus tip: Similar formatting is used to insert basic audio or basic video clips into articles.
In Firefox, the search box has a little pull down menu to allow you to choose which search engine it uses. Several popular search engines come included, but not Wikipedia. However, Firefox provides a page on their website listing more search engines you can add to that menu, including Wikipedia's search. To add Wikipedia, simply go here and click on Wikipedia in the list provided, and you are done. To activate it, pull-down the menu at the search box and click on Wikipedia there. Now you have a second Wikipedia search box. Unlike the search box in Wikipedia's sidebar, which disappears off the screen when you scroll down to read a long page, the Firefox search box always remains on the screen, ready to assist. (Keep in mind, typing Alt+F also places the cursor in the Wikipedia search box.)
At the top of each section of an article (if it has sections, that is), located on the far right of the screen, is an [edit] button. The button is offset slightly above the section, and sometimes new users get confused and think it belongs to the section above it. When you click on the edit button, the edit window opens up, displaying the source text from the section immediately below the edit button. Please use these whenever you can. You can set your preferences to have the section headers themselves to act like the [edit] links.
When asking a question at the Help desk, Teahouse or the Reference desk, please include all the facts needed to answer the question. Give a link to the page you are asking about, or provide context to your question. For example, do not ask "who was president in 1900?" without mentioning the country you are interested in. This prevents volunteers having to ask follow-up questions before providing answers.
Friendly reminder: the Help desk and Teahouse are for questions on how to use and edit Wikipedia, while the Reference desk is for questions about anything else (real world questions).
Also called instructionitis, instruction creep is the tendency of instructions to grow and grow, until they become so long and complex that nobody wants to read them. When editing help pages, or instructions for Wikipedia's departments, please make them clear and concise, reducing them whenever possible.
A redirect is a special page that automatically causes the text of another page to be displayed in its place. A redirect that points to another redirect is called a double redirect. These pages are undesirable, because Wikipedia's MediaWiki software will not follow the second redirect, in order to prevent infinite loops. A self-redirect is an article that redirects to itself. These situations create slow, unpleasant experiences for the reader, waste server resources, and make the navigational structure of the site confusing.
Sometimes, it might be useful to look up a subject in the same way you would do so in a book—in the index. Wikipedia has an index. To use it..
- click on the Special pages line of the Tools menu
- from the Lists of pages section, click on the All pages with prefix link
- at Display pages with prefix: type the beginning of the article's name into the box and press Go.
You will see a list of all pages that begin with what you typed.
You can reduce the number of articles displayed in this list by typing more of the name and pressing Go again. You can also find Wikipedia users in a similar way by changing the entry in the drop-down box labelled Namespace, from (Article) to User.
If you need to illustrate an article about software or a website, a good tip is to take screenshots.
In Microsoft Windows, a screenshot of the entire monitor, complete with taskbar, can be copied to the system clipboard by pressing the Prt Sc key. Alternatively, pressing Alt+Prt Sc will copy just the active window to the clipboard. You can then paste the clipboard into a program like MS Paint or Paint.NET using Ctrl+V, and then save it as an image file (for uploading to Wikipedia, for instance).
In Mac OS X, simply prepare your screen to how you want it to look, then hit ⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+3 (not the number pad 3) simultaneously. The new image will appear as a PNG on your desktop. Additionally, if you only want to capture part of the screen, you can hit ⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+4, click and drag over the part of the screen you would like to capture and release, also saving it as a PNG on your desktop.
When uploading, be sure to use an appropriate copyright tag, such as web-screenshot.
Some pages are active departments with their own set of instructions. It may be tempting to skip reading them and go straight to making edits or leaving messages. But this just clutters those pages and creates unnecessary steps for the volunteers of those departments. This happens a lot at the Help desk, the Wikipedia:Reference desk, and at Articles for creation. For example, many users ask general knowledge questions at the Help Desk rather than at the Reference Desk, because they didn't read the instructions at the top of the page. If you visit those pages, please take the time and read the instructions before making use of those helpful departments.
It is possible to create links to every word in an article. But providing too many defeats their purpose by obscuring the most relevant links. Here's an example of overlinking:
- Wikipedia's greatness stems from being able to link articles together easily, but don't overdo it. It can get really annoying and does not help the reader.
The above passage hides the relevant link. Compare that with this:
- Wikipedia's greatness stems from being able to link articles together easily, but don't overdo it. It can get really annoying and does not help the reader.
Whether you are a new or advanced user, you can edit pages with ease by installing wikEd.
To install, simply select wikEd on the Gadgets panel of your Preferences:
Preferences → Gadgets → Editing → 
wikEd: a full-featured integrated text editor for Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome (documentation)
wikEd provides many abilities, including a multifunctional search-and-replace feature for regular expressions (regex).
wikEd works in the following web browsers: Firefox, Pale Moon, SeaMonkey, Safari, WebKit, Google Chrome, and Opera (version 15 and higher). Currently, wikEd is not compatible with Internet Explorer or versions of Opera below 15.
If you have a scroll wheel mouse, hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard while you roll the scroll wheel—it makes the text larger or smaller instantly!
Bonus tip: This tip works in many other applications too! For example, it is generally used for zooming in Microsoft Windows.
What are portals? "Doorways to knowledge." Wikipedia's coverage of subjects can be extensive (mathematics, for example, is covered by tens of thousands of articles on Wikipedia). Portals are an alternative entry to a subject (besides its main article), and to that subject's coverage in the encyclopedia, in a way similar to how the Main Page provides sample fare from Wikipedia as a whole.
Portals may include features such as Selected article sections, Selected image, news, points of interest (Did you know?, Anniversaries), and links to related Wikimedia. Portals are more diverse than the Main page, and may include features such as panoramic banners, slide shows, category trees, topics lists, and whatever else portal designers can come up with.
A secondary purpose of portals is to provide bridges between reading and editing, and between the encyclopedia and the Wikipedia community. They may provide links to the related WikiProjects, Wikipedia's Reference desk, and so on. Portals are a hybrid between encyclopedia pages and project pages, and occupy their own special namespace, the Portal namespace. Therefore, all portal titles are preceded by the prefix "Portal:"
The list of all completed portals is Portal:Contents/Portals. A list of all portals, including those under construction, can be found at Category:All portals. The Portals WikiProject is dedicated to collaboratively building and maintaining portals, and further expanding on the Portal concept, such as with automated features, and is always looking for new participants.
Templates are pages that you can include on another page. They are usually used to insert boilerplate messages that need to be displayed on more than one page. Templates are quite versatile and can be used to accomplish many things. For example, some specialized uses for templates are:
- Displaying a different page each day (like the Tip of the day, Pic of the day, etc.)
- Infoboxes (e.g., Template:Infobox philosopher). To see Socrates in this infobox, click here.
- Displaying a random page (see this implemented at Wikipedia:Featured content).
- Navigation bars (e.g., Template:Portals browsebar).
- Navigation boxes (e.g., Template:Greek myth).
- WikiProject task boxes (e.g., Template:PhilosophyTasksBox).
- Page headers, like the header at the top of the Help Desk
To include a template on a page, enclose it in double curly brackets, leaving out the prefix "Template:", like this: {{In the news}}
When using tables in articles, consider using class="wikitable" at the top of the table, like so: {| class="wikitable". This puts a grey border around all the cells, gives heading cells a grey tint, and uses many other common formatting settings without having to spell them all out.
Here are additional resources suitable for new as well as expert contributors:
- Introduction to tables – a four part quick introduction
- How to use tables – when and how tables should be used on Wikipedia
- Table accessibility – Manual of Style guidelines
- Table customising and styles – Styles and tricks to customise tables
When asking a question at the Help desk or the Reference desk, please include all the facts needed to answer the question. For example, do not ask "who was president in 1900?" without mentioning the country you are interested in. This prevents the volunteers of those departments from having to ask follow-up questions before providing answers. Friendly reminder: the Help desk is for questions on how to use Wikipedia, while the Reference desk is for questions about anything else (real world questions).
Got a mobile device with a small screen, but still wish to read Wikipedia? Here is a list of webpages to go for Wikipedia apps:
- Wikipedia for Android on Google Play
- Wikipedia for Android Android package at the F-Droid repository
- Wikipedia for iOS on the App Store
- Wikipedia for Windows Phone in the Windows Phone Store
- Wikipedia for Windows 8 at the Windows Store
- Wikipedia for Firefox OS at the Firefox Marketplace
- Wikipedia Mobile Support and Development at GitHub
- Unsupported official builds of Wikimedia apps
Signatures in Wikipedia are identifying information that you put after writing a comment on a talk page. They tell other editors who wrote the comment and when. This can be done by writing ~~~~.
Signatures can optionally be spruced up with colors. To add color to your signature, go to the Preferences link at the top of the page. In the nickname box, enter [[User:MYUSERNAME|<font color="MYCOLOR">MYUSERNAME</font>]]. Replace "MYCOLOR" with a color you like, such as "red" or "green". Replace MYUSERNAME with your username. Finally, check the "raw signature" box, and save your preferences. Now, when you type four tildes ~~~~ in a talk page, your new signature will appear.
The color names that can be used in standard HTML are given in the standards document here. Using the hexadecimal RGB-style colors (such as #008000) you can choose any color you like from about sixteen million, not just the 140 colors that have names in standard HTML.
More complex signatures are possible; however, your signature as typed into the box above should not be unnecessarily long. Long signatures make pages larger and harder to edit, and are discouraged.