Cracking on with editing

Posted on By Laura Rose

 

We can fix that. We can edit.

What happens in a Women in Red session?

If you’re attending one of our Women in Red events, we’ll cover the basics of editing during the session with about 60 minutes of training. We’ll then hopefully allow a couple of hours for you to research and compile an article on your chosen individual.We’ll specify exact timings on the day, but we usually aim to publish before the end of the working day.

  1. Take a look at our List of Suggested Women and select an article to work on.
  2. Go to the Event Dashboard and assign the article to you (it’s important we know who is working on these articles so two editors do not create an edit conflict when they go to the save the page at the same time).
  3. If you’re having trouble assigning an individual, speak to one of our facilitators who will help you find someone to write about.

Create your sandbox

Now that we’ve covered setting up your User Page, I’m going to talk you through page formatting a little bit more but using your Sandbox. Your Sandbox is a kind of draft space where you can format articles before moving them into Wikipedia’s live space. You can play around here and format any pages you are writing before publishing them for the world to see!

  1. Click on the red ‘Sandbox’ link at the top of the screen.
  2. Click Create at the top of the page to use the Visual Editor.
  3. Place your cursor below the grey box* and type ‘This is my new sandbox’ in the space indicated in the pic above. Once you have typed at least one character of text onto the sandbox you can save it.
  4. Click the blue ‘Publish Page’ button in the top right.
  5. Type a short but descriptive Edit Summary e.g. ‘created sandbox’.
  6. Click ‘Save changes’. Your sandbox is now created!

When editing in your sandbox, remember to save regularly to prevent any progress being lost, just the same as you would in a standard word processor. You do this by following the same two step ‘Publish Page’ method as we have when creating pages. Don’t worry, it may look scary but hitting ‘Publish’ wont publish to Wikipedia’s live space, it’ll just save changes to the location you’re editing in.

*If what you’re seeing doesn’t look quite right, remember you can use the magic pen to switch to visual editor.

Cracking on with editing / Women in red editathon guide by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0