Month: April 2020

Create your user page – say hello!

Say hello to a wonderful new world of editors!

Once your user account is all set up, you should create a user page which other people will use to find out more information about you.

We’ll also cover adding a wee template which lets other users know that you’re a new editor and just learning the ropes so they can help welcome you to the world of Wikipedia editing.

How-to:

  1. Click on the red link to your username at the top of the page. You will see that this tells you that you do not have a user page yet.
  2. Click on the top option from the dropdown list, which says Create [username] user page,  to create your page.
  3. Type a sentence introducing yourself to the Wikipedia community. You may find it useful to add a short sentence to explain that you are new to Wikipedia and still learning to edit. Think of it as some voluntary ‘L’ plates while you get to grips with editing.
  4. Go to ‘Insert’ and select ‘Template’ from the dropdown list.
  5. Search for “This is a new user” in the box.
  6. Select the “This is a new user” link, and then click ‘Add template’.
  7. Finally, click ‘Insert’ and you should see a banner appear which identifies you as a new user.
  8. To identify you as a Women in Red activist and contributor, repeat steps 4-7 but add the template “User WikiProject Women in Red” and insert.
  9. Click Publish Page in the top right of the screen.
  10. A box will appear prompting you to provide an edit summary. These exist on all pages on Wikipedia to help other users identify which changes have been made, and to prevent page vandalism. Type a short summary, for example ‘created user page’ 
  11. Click Publish Page
  12. You will see that your the user name link at the top of the page has changed in colour from red to blue.
  13. You’ve now got a Wikipedia user page!

You are now ready to begin editing Wikipedia and join a growing community of fellow contributors. Click through to the next slides to learn more about formatting pages for publication – you’ll be adding minorities to Wikipedia in no time!

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