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Well done for covering the information in the Get Started section on WikiAfrica. You are welcome to consider other equally important tips of how to better contribute to Wikipedia.
 | This page in a nutshell: This article should help you learn about wikify, citing, adding references, linking articles and becoming a part of the community. Tools to help you achieve these tasks will also be outlined to make your editing and use of Wikipedia easier and fun. |
Wikify?
Wikify simply means to format using Wiki markup (as opposed to plain text or HTML). Many articles written on Wikipedia or other similar sites of the Wikimedia Foundation, may lack Wiki markup in most areas. For instance, by adding internal links in an article, you are helping wikify it. There's more to Wikifying an article though. It goes far to include adding infoboxes, templates, heading and layout, and even bolding and italicizing appropriately. A good article on Wikipedia is appropriately Wikified.
How to Wikify?[edit]
After Wikifying, an article will look great and perfect. What should a perfect article look like? Learn more
- Check for copyright violations on articles. Not all articles written on Wikipedia conform to Wikipedia's copyright terms. Helping resolve such copyright violations means you are Wikifying the article
- Add Internal Wiki links. Internal links refers to links in Wikipedia articles leading to articles also on Wikipedia. If the link in a Wikipedia article sends you to a different website other than Wikipedia, it is an external link. You can link to internal articles on Wikipedia by putting "[[" and "]]" on either side of the relevant word or words. For instance, if you want to link to an internal article about the company Facebook on Wikipedia, you would put the "[[" and "]]" on both sides of the word, like [[Facebook]]. After saving your changes, you should see the link turn to Facebook. See Linking articles section below to learn more.
- Format the lead introductory text. Some articles have abnormal lengthy introduction text to them. Introductory text should "define the topic, establish context, explain why the subject is interesting or notable, and summarize the most important points".
- Arrange layout. Arrange section headers as described at Manual of Style to layout. (see structure of an article below) For instance, be sure that any stub template appears after any category links, separated by two blank lines. Proper arrangement of an article is essential. Stub articles only contain a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject. To mark articles as needing help and improvement, the Stub Template ( using this markup
{{stub}} )is placed in the article. It is best to place the template after the Category links beneath the article. - Replace HTML tags with Wiki markup where equivalent Wiki markup exists. Using <a href="link.html">To Link</a> is inappropriate as there is a Wiki markup for linking articles. However, HTML is permitted where no corresponding wiki markup exists: e.g.,
H<sub>2</sub>Ofor subscripts and for a non-breaking space. - Add an infobox template if appropriate. Add an infobox if it is appropriate for the article; An infobox template is a panel, usually in the top right of an article, next to the lead section, (in the desktop view) or at the very top of an article (in mobile view), that summarizes key features of the page's subject. Infoboxes may also include an image, and/ or a map. When considering any aspect of infobox design, keep in mind the purpose of an infobox: to summarize key facts in the article in which it appears.
- Add {{coords}} if missing. Does an article about a place or building not have the coordinates? Add this template, with a suitable region parameter. For instance, consider this {{coords}} template with its parameters:
{{Coord|57|18|22|N|4|27|32|W|display=title}}.These coordinates are in degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc. And the display='title' means that the coordinates will be displayed next to the title. You can pick up the coordinates of the place from Google maps or using GPS tracker on Android. - Remember to save all your changes
Structure of the article[edit]
Paragraphs should be kept rather short, because the eye of a reader can get tired of following solid text for too many lines. Most normal articles should be written in paragraphs, not bullet points. But lists can be used for reference.
Headers also help make an article clearer and easy to see the structure in the table of contents. On the other hand, try not to use too many subheaders that are not needed, because this can make the article look messy. Short paragraphs and single sentences normally do not need their own sub-heading, and in these cases it may be better to use bullet points or bold text instead.
Editors should use their judgment in deciding whether subtopics should have their own pages, or be kept on the main page.
Citation[edit]
Citation is basically a means of informing the readers of your article where you got your information from. By doing so, the reader may decide to proceed to learn more about the context under discussion from the source or citation you've provided. It may be a cite from a book or from an online resource or website. Citing and referencing are used interchangeably when referring to articles on Wikipedia.
How to Cite or Reference?[edit]
The easiest way to create an inline citation is with a footnote. You can create a footnote with Wiki markup, by adding ref tags around your source, like this:
- <ref> Your Source </ref>
If you're adding the first footnote to an article, you also need to make sure that there is text that tells the software Wikipedia uses to display footnotes. That text will look like this:
- {{Reflist}} or <references/>
To automate and make the process easier to deal with, it is recommended you use the graphical interface for adding citations. In visual editor, click on the Insert drop down, select Transclusion, and type in 'Cite Web' if you wish to cite from the internet.
Click on the individual images to get a bigger view of how the visual editor referencing makes it much easier graphically.
The Wikipedia:VisualEditor article covers even more on this.
Linking articles[edit]
Linking Wikipedia articles together is very important. These easily created links allow users to jump to information related to the article they are reading, greatly adding to Wikipedia's usefulness.
How to link[edit]
To make a link to another Wikipedia page (called a wiki link), put it in double square brackets, like this: Sandbox which the reader will see, after you save your edit, as this: Sandbox. If you wish to have some text displayed or shown to the reader and links to the article intended, you can do this for instance: display text will display this: Display text
When adding your links, be sure they point to the article you intend to. For instance, pointing to the article Apple, will lead you to the fruit, instead of the company Apple Inc. Many articles might be of the same title. To avoid confusion for users by sending them to wrong articles they requested for, the Disambiguation pages are created, which lists all articles having the same titles. The reader can therefore click on the specific article he/she wants to read.
In the above instance of the article about Apple, there is a disambiguation page for it.
When to link[edit]
Although linking is a good way of giving your readers more articles to research and learn from, it can be distracting to have too many links in an article. To avoid excessive links, you should normally create a link in an article only where the first occurrence of a word or phrase occurs. And you should not link common words such as "you" and "world", even though Wikipedia has articles for those words, unless these common words are central concepts to the article.
Add Categories[edit]
You can also put the article in a category with others in a related topic. Near the bottom of the article, type [[Category:]]</nowiki>, and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets. For example, . It is very important to put in the correct categories so that other people can easily find your work. The best way to find which categories to put in is to look at pages on similar subjects, and check which categories they use. For example, if you write an article about a type of tree, you may look at an article on another type of tree to see which categories could be appropriate.