Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia
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Welcome aboard! We're glad you wish to help develop Wikipedia, and hope you enjoy participating in its community as much as we do. As a new contributor however, you may feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer size and scope of this project... but don't worry, it will become easier and clearer as you go, and if you have any problems, there will always be other Wikipedians happy to help. Here are some resources below to help you get started. Good luck and have fun! -- The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee
If you do get stuck, the following people have volunteered to give you a helping hand learning the ropes:
Even more volunteers are standing by to answer your questions on the following pages. You can usually expect an answer quickly, often within just a few minutes: To understand Wikipedia, it is easiest to think of this website as having two types of pages: pages that are part of the encyclopedia itself, and pages of the community (used by contributors to help build and operate the encyclopedia). To find your way around the encyclopedia, either enter a term into the search box on the left side of the screen, or go to Wikipedia's table of contents. Wikipedia's community pages include instructions, help pages, policies, guidelines, discussion forums, places to make requests, pages to report problems, and user pages. These are all pages which we use to develop the encyclopedia and to communicate with each other in that mission. Some directories to help you find your way around the community are:
A good text editor like vi, TextPad or Kate (part of KDE) can be a lot more fun to work with than a browser's internal text editor. If you use Mozilla, you can call your favorite editor with a single click from the editing screen by using the Mozex extension. For jEdit [1] there is even a Wikipedia plug-in [2], which enables you to log in and load and save articles without having to use your browser at all. Read more: Wikipedia:Text editor support
Be sure to read the above pages! They are very important, and they will help you — even if you're not perfect the If you've made a mistake and wish to undo it, revert it. Here's how: click history at the top of the page you made the mistake on. Then click on the second entry in the history list that appears on your screen. Once there, click edit this page. Then save page. See more detailed instructions at Wikipedia:Reversion. There are two main styles of help on Wikipedia: self-help and assistance... Self-help involves reading the help and instruction pages around Wikipedia. Some very informative self-help pages are: For when you get stuck, confused, or befuddled, assistance is available on Wikipedia's "desk" and "request" pages - use these when self-help hasn't provided you with an answer:
Mostly anyone on these lists will help you as well: |
