Cracking on with editing

  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 […]

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Running your editathon

So you’ve had fun, you’ve done your bit in the name of information activism, but you want to do more. You want to go forth and spread your new-found knowledge to the world, in your communities and keep increasing the diversity of editors on Wikipedia. Fab! So how would you go about running your own […]

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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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Why Women in Red?

  Women in Red is a WikiProject (more details on those later) which has been running since 2015 and aims to turn Wikipedia “redlinks” blue. We need a community of editors and collaborators such as you to bring these women to the forefront. It’s estimated that fewer than 20% of regular contributors to Wikipedia are women […]

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Citations, Links & Images

  Adding a citation Citations are the most important part of any Wikipedia page. Every bit of information on Wikipedia should be backed up by a reliable, high-quality, published secondary source… anyone can edit but we can’t just say anything. We should aim to have a citation at the end of every sentence, or at […]

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