:Wikipedia:FAQ/Contributing

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: For how to volunteer, see Help:Introduction.

: For how to donate, see m:Donations FAQ.

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: See why on Earth would I want to contribute to a wiki.

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:No. Anyone can edit without any kind of registration (except disruptive users who have been blocked).

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:There are many reasons: see Wikipedia:Why create an account?

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:No. Anyone of any age may edit articles or register. Wikipedia does not even require that users disclose their age when registering!

:Note that users who identify themselves as minors (generally those under 16 years of age) are encouraged, and will be required, to protect their identities via safe practices where the posting of personal information is concerned. See Wikipedia:Protecting children's privacy.

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:No. Real names are not required; some Wikipedians use real names, some don't: see Wikipedia:Username.

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:See Wikipedia:Changing username.

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:On talk pages and in the edit summaries of a page history, you will often see editors using terminology and abbreviations which are unique to Wikipedia.

:*rv or revert, usually in an edit summary, indicates that the page has been reverted to a previous version, often because of vandalism.

:*NPOV means working towards a Neutral point of view, whilst its opposite, POV, is used to suggest that an edit was biased.

:*To Wikify means to add internal links and other formatting to an article which was mostly plain text.

:*dab means a small touch, and can also be short for disambiguation, or improving a link so that it goes straight to the relevant article.

:For a more comprehensive list see Wikipedia:Glossary.

: The term "page" encompasses all the material on Wikipedia, including encyclopedia topics, talk pages, documentation, and special pages such as Recent Changes. "Article" is a narrower term referring to a page containing an encyclopedia entry. Thus, all articles are pages, but not all pages are articles. See Wikipedia:What is an article for more.

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: An orphan is an article that no other article links to. Such articles can be found on Wikipedia, but it is preferable that another article should link to each article. You can find a list of orphans at :Category:Orphaned articles.

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: A stub on Wikipedia is a very short article, usually of one paragraph or less. For a more comprehensive explanation, please refer to Wikipedia:Stub.

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: See Wikipedia:Disambiguation.

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:When editing a page, a logged-in user has the option to flag an edit as "minor." You should flag an edit as minor only when you believe it is an edit that no one would object to, such as fixing spelling or grammar.

:This feature is important because users can choose to hide minor edits in their view of the Recent Changes page, to keep the volume of edits down to a manageable level.

:See also: Wikipedia:Minor edit.

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:Yes. See Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines. There are a lot, but you'll get the hang of it!

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: Recent Changes lists all the edits that have been made over a given time period. See Wikipedia:Recent Changes.

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:Yes. We have a Manual of Style that articles should follow.

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:You could merge them yourself if you are feeling bold. Pick the most suitable page name (which may not necessarily be one of the existing ones!). If you're not sure which name to use, or whether the two articles should really be merged, use the procedure at Help:Merging. You can also make a mention of the problem on the list of Wikipedia:Proposed mergers.

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:See Wikipedia:Article size.

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:No. Wikipedia is not a forum. Talk pages are for discussing improvements to the article.

: See Help:Reverting.

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:On the English Wikipedia, use English, unless you're mentioning a name or a quotation that has no known English translation.

:If you want to write articles in other languages, you need to do it in an edition of Wikipedia in that language. As of 2024, there are editions of Wikipedia in more than 300 languages, and their full list can be found at :m:List of Wikipedias on the Meta site. If your language is not in the list, see the next section.

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:Yes! If there is no edition of Wikipedia in your language yet, and you would like to change that, read the page How to start a new Wikipedia on the Meta site to find out how to create a new language edition of Wikipedia. This will require some work from you, but it's a great thing to do for the people who speak your language.

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:The official policy is to use British spelling when writing about British topics, and American English for topics relating to the United States. General topics can use any one of the variants, but should generally strive to be consistent within an article. See Wikipedia's Manual of Style for a more detailed explanation.

:Use of one English variety in article titles can cause a Search in another variant to fail. In this case, it is recommended that you create a new article using the alternative spelling that redirects to the main article.

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:A spelling checker has been requested for Wikipedia, but has not been implemented yet, except as a [http://code.google.com/p/wikimediaspellchecker/ third-party extension]. Some common web browsers have a built-in simple spell checker for forms such as Wikipedia editing forms. You may also install a browser addon for more advanced spelling and grammar checking, such as LanguageTool, or use another online spelling checker. When editing a larger article, it may be more convenient to paste the text into your text editor or word processor first, to edit and check the spelling there, and then paste your corrected text back into Wikipedia editor to complete your contribution.

:There is a list of common misspellings, which you can use to check if a listed misspelling is on any page in the database, although this process fails to identify any misspelled words not on that list.

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: A page with that name has not yet been created. You can click on that link and start a page with that name. But be careful: there may already be articles on similar topics, or an article on the same topic under a different name. It's pretty important to hunt around for similar topics first. See Wikipedia:Article titles for information on naming pages, and Wikipedia:Red link for more guidance on red links.

:If you just registered, your username is probably shown as linking to a page that doesn't exist. Don't worry! This just means you haven't filled out your user page yet. Click on the link and tell the world all about yourself! See Wikipedia:User page for more information.

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:Those are external links; i.e. those that link to pages outside Wikipedia. They look [http://www.example.org like this].

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: This is called an edit conflict. You'll get a conflict screen that displays both versions in separate windows, along with a summary highlighting the differences, and instructions on how you should proceed. It's virtually impossible to lose any data.

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: You may lose your edit. Some modern web browsers, as well as the MediaWiki software, may be able to recover your edits when you restart your browser, but it's not certain that it will succeed. To some extent, you can guard against this by editing in a text editor for major work (but note that with regard to a system crash this does not help, unless you save frequently to disk, use a cloud-based editor such as Etherpad or Google Docs, or an editor with automatic saving such as Atom).

: When you get a time-out when you try to save, you might or might not lose your edit depending on your web browser. Some browsers (e.g. Opera and Mozilla Firefox) will recover the text you have tried to save if you use the back-button. In other browsers, you will lose your edit. You can protect against this by copying the text (at least to the clipboard of your system).

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:If you are a logged-in user, on every page you will see either a link that says "Watch this article", or a small five-pointed star next to "View history". If you click on it, the article will be added to your personal watchlist. Your watchlist will show you the latest changes on your watched articles.

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:For images, use JPEG for photographs, and SVG for drawings and logos. PNG can also be used. Use GIF for inline animations.

:For video, Ogg Theora is currently the only recommended format. See Wikipedia:Image use policy for more.

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:Multiple encodings are encouraged. WAV and Ogg Vorbis are allowed, but MP3 is not.

: See Wikipedia:Etiquette and Wikipedia:Dispute resolution.

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: Per Wikipedia:Be bold, there's no need to wait at all. Simply make your change. If someone else disagrees with it, they can always revert the change, and then you can talk the issue out with that person.

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: No. You can, however, change the setting on the page and bookmark the resulting page.

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: New articles are deleted for not following Wikipedia policies and guidelines. See Wikipedia:Why was my article deleted?

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: There are a variety of reasons (some common reasons). The first thing you should do is look at the history page for the article you edited. This will tell you who changed it, when they changed it, and hopefully a short reason why they changed it. If it says something like see talk, then you should look at the talk page for the article. Also, you should look at your own talk page to see if you have a message there. If you don't find a reason that is satisfactory, politely ask in the article's talk page about your proposed change, and maybe you will get suggestions about changes that you can make so that your change will go in, or you may get reasons why your change should not happen.

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: Yes, it's a good idea to cross-pollinate. Please give credit to the contributors of the original article by noting that you have done so, with a link to the original, in the edit summary or at the article's talk page. See Wikipedia:Translation for further information.

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: Machine translation is useful for obtaining the general idea of a text in an unfamiliar language, but it produces poor translations and should not be used on its own. If you want to use machine translation as a translation aid and intend to edit the result, please go ahead if you think it would be helpful. Do not paste a machine translation directly into an article.

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: We try to build links between different language pages – that's one way of seeing if an article exists elsewhere. If you don't see the language links at the left of a page, go looking for the corresponding article(s) on foreign Wikipedias. If you find them, make a link both ways; if not, you can translate. Bear in mind that article may not be in one-to-one correspondence between Wikipedias. See Wikipedia:Interlanguage links and Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination for more information.

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:External links are certainly allowed. Properly used, they increase the usability of Wikipedia. Keep in mind, however, that Wikipedia is not a web directory; external links should support the content of the article, not replace it. An article should be more than a container for external links, and the content should not require the reader to leave the site to understand the subject.

:Do not place advertising links in Wikipedia. Commercial sites are obvious, but this prohibition usually includes links to fansites and discussion forums as well unless the site is a notable one in the field. As a general rule of thumb: if you wish to place the link in Wikipedia in order to drive traffic to a site, it probably doesn't belong here.

:The current convention is to place external links in a separate "External links" section at the bottom of the article. Sites used as references for the article should be listed under a "References" section, or sometimes placed within the article as a footnote. See Wikipedia:How to edit a page for different ways to create external links.

:See the relevant guideline for more examples on when external links are appropriate.

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: There are many templates that help to add formatted links to specific sites at :Category:External link templates. For example, you can link articles about books to the online copies of those books on Project Gutenberg using the template {{tl|Gutenberg}}.

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:Unless the article you want to copy to Wikipedia is covered by Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA), a CC-BY-SA-compatible license or is in the public domain, it cannot be used on Wikipedia. Images, too, must be public domain or licensed under one of allowed licenses at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags. You have to ask the copyright holder of the material to license it so it can be used. See Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission. Under very limited conditions we can use copyrighted material even if it is not licensed compatibly; see Wikipedia:Non-free content for how and when.

:The text of Wikipedia is covered by the (CC-BY-SA) and, in most cases, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Images are covered by various free licenses (see the Wikimedia Foundation Licensing Policy).

: Providing they haven't altered the image then they can't claim a copyright on it. If it was in the public domain before they used it, it's still in the public domain afterward.

:No. The patent of the LZW compression algorithm used with the GIF format has expired.

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: Yes, you can on almost any page. There are some pages on Wikipedia that are protected, so that only administrators can modify them. This includes pages like the Main Page, which are permanently protected, or normal articles which are temporarily protected during the resolution of an edit war. Some pages are also semi-protected, so that anonymous and new users cannot edit them, to reduce vandalism. The vast majority of pages on Wikipedia are editable by anyone, at any time, and any changes made will be reflected instantly.

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:Your edit count, including deleted edits, is displayed when you enter your preferences.

: There are a number of tools called edit counters that can display the total count of your edits as well as the number of edits in various namespaces.

: See Wikipedia:Editing the main page.

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