By Michael Tavares 11N Gold INGOTs Unit 3

What is Wikipedia?  The very nature of a "wiki" is that it can be edited by anyone who has the proper permissions; and because Wikipedia is completely open, ANYONE can edit ANYTHING,within reason. This is both the strength and weakness of Wikipedia; strength, because an open system invites many qualified, intelligent individuals; and weakness, because that same open system is easy to corrupt with bad information. Like I mentioned earlier, anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. If you have expertise in a subject, than your contributions are welcomed. If you are interested in editing Wikipedia, I invite you to read the Wikipedia Tutorial; it should tell you everything you need to know. good knowledge and understanding of a subject

How do I become a “Wikipedia Contributor?” - Editing  Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited encyclopaedia to which you can contribute. To contribute, you need to login and therefore need an individual account. Once you have a registered account you are now free to edit pages across the whole site of Wikipedia. With the exception of a few protected pages, every page has a link that says "edit this page", which lets you edit the page you are looking at. It is Wikipedia's most basic feature, and allows you to make corrections and add facts to articles.

How do I become a “Wikipedia Contributor?” - Editing  One important feature to start using is the Show preview button. You must do this before saving your page, to make sure you have not made any mistakes. This allows you to see what the page will look like after your edit, before you actually save.

How do I become a “Wikipedia Contributor?” - Editing  Before you hit Save page, it is apprecited to enter a polite explanation of your changes in the Edit summary box. It can be quite short and can be brief. For example if you just enter "typo", people will know you made a spelling correction. Also, if the change you have made to the page is small, such as correcting a spelling or grammar error, be sure to check the box "This is a minor edit" (this is only available if you have logged in).

How do I become a “Wikipedia Contributor?” -Formatting  Formatting Wikipedia articles is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Wikipedia uses text codes to create particular elements of the page, for example headings. This "language" is known as Wikitext and is designed for to make editing easier.  The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing are done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes (').

How do I become a “Wikipedia Contributor?” -Formatting  Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organisation of an article. If you can see two or more specific topics being discussed, you can break up the article by inserting a heading for each section.  Also, HTML code can be used in pages to produce more advanced formatting such as colours, tables, and edit page layout. However, you do not need to know HTML to use Wikipedia and follow formatting conventions.

How do I become a “Wikipedia Contributor?” –Wikipedia Links  Adding links to an article makes it more useful, but too many links can be distracting. This is why you should only link the first instance of a word.  To make a link to another Wikipedia page called a wiki link, put it in double square brackets, like this:[[Sandbox]] = Sandbox If you want to link to an article, but display some other text for the link, you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards) followed by the alternative name.  For example:[[Target page|display text]] = display text  You can make a link to a specific section of a page like so:[[Target page#Target section|display text]] = display text If you want the display text of the link to appear in italics or bold, nest the double square brackets for the link within the multiple apostrophes that delimit the italicized or bold text, like this:''[[Olympic Games]]'' = Olympic Games.

How do I become a “Wikipedia Contributor?” –Wikipedia Links  You can also put the article in a category with others in a related topic. Just type [[Category:]], and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets.  For instance, you may want to categorise a page on Manchester United under “Sport:Football”.

Conclusion  I hope this presentation makes it clearer on how to contribute to the World’s most popular Open Source Software. Wikipedia is widely used across the world. I recommend to anyone who wants to take full advantage of Wikipedia to create a user account. Anyway once again I hope this user account has helped you understand how to edit Wikipedia.