Editing FAQ

This FAQ answers the most common questions about editing Wikipedia.

For full documentation on editing articles, see the Help page, and the following articles:

• How to edit a page
• How to start a new page.
• How to use talk pages, which are used to discuss how to improve articles.
• How to rename (move) a page.
• How to use redirect pages.
• How to revert a page to an earlier version.
• How to create page(s) for topics with several different definitions.
• How to link together Wikipedia articles in different languages.
• How to delete pages
• How to import articles
• How to break up a page
• How to use tables
• Browser notes
  

[edit] How do I edit a page?

To edit the whole page at once, click the "edit this page" tab at the top. To edit just one section, click the "edit" link to the right of the section heading. To edit on Wikipedia, you type in a special markup language called wikitext. See the cheat sheet for the most basic wikitext codes. See How to edit a page for more details and examples of making links, using bold and italics, linking to images, and many other things.

[edit] But I have problems editing with my browser!

See Wikipedia:Browser notes.

[edit] How do I make links?

The most basic syntax for making "wikilinks" in the wikitext is surrounding the words of the link with double square brackets: [[page name]]. Here "page name" can come from typing it in from memory, or using cut and paste from the URL. The URL for a page is all the text to the right of wiki/ in the address bar while on the link's target page. (The "_" underscores in a URL are interpreted as space characters.) Also, the search box name-completion mechanism is a shortcut trick to verifying page titles to make links with, but it only works if JavaScript is enabled within your web-browser preferences. See Wikipedia linking for more linking grammar such as when to link and when not to link. See help with links for more linking syntax like the fact that the capital letter that begins a page title will work just fine in lowercase (for your new links that don't begin a sentence).

Use "Show preview" to test the soundness of your new link. Testing the soundness of your link from a preview may warn about losing unsaved edits, but you will not lose unsaved edits. (See your user preferences to turn off this warning. But, for some versions of the WikEd editor, available from your user preferences "Gadgets" tab, you will lose any unsaved changes.) You simply use the back (left) arrow on your browser to return safely to your edit page after testing the link from a preview pane.

Improving an article's quality with wikilinks opens up a new kind of grammar for online editors, and eventually leads to understanding disambiguation, and redirection. Please note that on Wikipedia, editing any page to see how linking or any wikitext works is a always a very safe, and encouraged operation.

[edit] How do I make a link appear differently from a page name?

Use a piped link to separate the page name from the way the link will appear:

[[ page name | displayed text ]]

Note that the page name is the primary entry.

To add a suffix like "s" or "ed" or "ing", just ignore the brackets and append the letters right to the brackets:

[[page name]]s, [[page name]]ed, and [[page name]]ing

The additional letters will be the color of the link. See more wikilink examples at [[Help:Link]].

See the many "pipe trick" examples for an in depth look at how to save typing-in the right hand side of a piped link by appending the pipe character to the page name. Because of it's size and placement, the pipe character is shown here in red, but it is a commonly used keyboard key nowadays:

To make the parenthetical phrase disappear from a page name:

[[page name (disambiguation)| ]]

To make the namespace name disappear from a page name:

[[ Namespace : page name| ]]

[edit] How do I insert a new line?

Normally, Wikipedia doesn't start a new line when you press the Enter key. If you press the Enter key twice, Wikipedia will start a new paragraph. To force a single new line (for instance, when you want to insert a poem) insert the HTML element <br /> after the line.

[edit] How do I rename a page?

Registered users with a little bit of editing history under their belts can move a page; this moves the page content and edit history to a new title, and creates a redirect page at the old title. This method is better than just copying and pasting the content by hand, as it preserves the article's history, as required by Wikipedia's license. Use the "Move this page" tab at the top of the article to perform a move or rename. Once you have moved a page, please click the "What links here" link in the "toolbox" in the left column and fix the links to the old page (which will be labelled as a redirect in the "What links here" list). See How to rename (move) a page for more details.

Images and other media files cannot be renamed. You may save a copy of the file to your computer, rename it there, and then upload it with the new name. Fix any links to the old file to point to the new one, then tag the old file with an "images for speedy deletion" tag: copy the template {{isd|New image name}} into the image's description page (filling in the new image name). This will add it to the Images for Deletion category, and an admin will delete it for you.

[edit] How do I delete a page?

First off, please don't blank articles (remove all the text from them). Such changes will most likely get reverted soon afterwards, so they are pointless, too.

The procedure for deletions is explained at Wikipedia:Deletion policy. Articles that should be deleted are most commonly nominated at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.

[edit] How do I edit a redirect page?

The easiest way to edit the redirected page is to click on the link you see at the top of the page after being redirected: "redirected from ...". For example, if you try to go to the William Jefferson Clinton page, you are redirected to the Bill Clinton page. At the very top of that page, you will see a message: "(redirected from William Jefferson Clinton)", Click on the William Jefferson Clinton link, and you will edit the redirect page. See Redirect.

[edit] How long should the ideal article be?

Since one can link from page to page to page, how long should the ideal Wikipedia article be? A good rule of thumb would be fewer than 5000 words, unless the subject really, really needs much exposition. However, for a subject that is that complex, one can link several shorter articles together, using a hub page to tie all articles together.

For example:

Foo

History of Foo

Physical Description of Foo

Relationship with Bar

Modern Cultural Icons and Foo

Foo and You: Making it work in the long run

Minimum Foo-Tree, the Gidsy-David Algorithm.

If you write one long article, you will need new headlines anyway. If you write a long paragraph, then you need to add new linebreaks. The structure of Wikipedia is a web, instead of a text that you read linearly.

See m:Wiki is not paper for further discussion.

Keywords: Length

[edit] How do I figure out how big an article is?

The page history shows the size in bytes resulting from each edit. Search results also give the size. (You must explicitly click the Search button at the search text box because the default is the Go button.) Also, you could cut and paste the content of the edit box into a text editor application running on your PC, save it as a text file, and check the size of that file.

When the article size reaches 32 KB, a warning is displayed at the top of the edit screen, as that size gives some Web browsers problems. It will likely give readers and editors problems as well.

[edit] What do I do when an article is too long?

See Wikipedia:Summary style.

[edit] How do I determine what other users have changed in an article?

Wikipedia's software can produce a list of all the changes between two versions of an article (either between two consecutive versions, or between an old and the current version), laid out in two-columns side by side with changes highlighted (here's an example. From the Recent Changes page you can click the "diff" link; from an article page itself click "Page history", then "cur" or "last" to see changes.

To see the differences between two arbitrary versions of an article, see Wikipedia:URLs.

[edit] How can I add pictures to pages?

First, you need the right to publish the picture under the GNU Free Documentation License, an acceptable Creative Commons license or another free license. This means that either you created the picture and therefore own the copyright, or it is in the public domain. If you have a registered account that is four days old with at least ten edits, you can use Special:Upload to upload the image to Wikipedia, including it in wiki pages by including its file name, the thumbnail option, and a caption: [[File:NameOfImage.png|thumb|A descriptive caption]].

See also Image use policy.

[edit] How can I delete uploaded items?

Only Wikipedia:Administrators can delete uploads, but anyone can upload a new item with the same name, thereby replacing the old one.

If you want to nominate an uploaded image for deletion, see Wikipedia:Images for deletion.

[edit] How do I describe images?

Click on the image to get the description page. Also, when you upload the file everything you put in the upload summary is placed into the image description page. See Image:Boat.jpg for an example of what goes onto one of these pages.

[edit] Are there any tools to make editing easier / faster / more fun?

See Wikipedia:Tools for a list of such tools. Among other things, you can find browser plugins for faster editing and searching, and tools for HTML importing, and editing enhancements for the blind.

[edit] How do I cite sources?

See Wikipedia:How to cite sources and Wikipedia:Footnotes.

[edit] Is there any way to see how many people have viewed a particular page?

Unfortunately, there is not any precise way to do this. The servers that run The World Wide Web store copies of Wikipedia in "web caches" to speed up access to the material. Since many viewings will be of the cached copies and not of Wikipedia directly, there is no way to count viewings, because Wikipedia does not have access to those servers (which are owned by many different companies). Also, Wikipedia is free for anyone to download and display, and therefore many websites, such as Answers.com, autonomously provide their users with Wikipedia articles (see mirrors).

However, as of September 2008, User:Henrik is running an unofficial server that shows the count of the server hits. (e.g. [1]) But this doesn't account for caching or mirroring.

[edit] Why does part of an article not appear, although it's there in the edit screen?

This is normally due to a mistake in the markup for citing sources; look for a <ref> tag without a matching </ref> tag ('closing tag'), and add that closing tag in the appropriate place on the page. For more information, see Wikipedia:Footnotes.

[edit] Where can I find information on the markup used in editing, eg <br /> and <noinclude>?

See Wiki markup and Help:HTML in wikitext.

[edit] Why have I been blocked?

There may be several reasons for this — if you feel you've been blocked wrongly, then put the text {{unblock|reason}} tag on your talk page, putting the reason you think you have been wrongly blocked in for reason. An administrator will come and take a look. It may be due to an automatic block by the software. Please be sure to include your IP address, which you can find in the block message.

[edit] How can I insert a new section in an article?

See Help:Section. There is no automated way to create a new section within an article, it is done manually by placing ='s around a heading, for example:

==Original heading==

===New (sub) heading===

==New main heading==

[edit] Where can I find the quotation templates?

The big, blue quotation mark templates are {{Cquote}} and {{Rquote}}. Also see Category:Quotation templates.