User:Katr67/Tips and tricks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A work in progress...
How to be a better Wikipedia editor (make your articles look polished and professional and more helpful to Wikipedia readers):
- The article history is your friend!
- Before simply removing vandalism, check the page history. There may have been several vandal edits in a row and you will need to revert to an earlier version of the page.
- If you're wondering why your edits:
- Went away
- Were tagged with various Wikipedia templates
- Were altered
-
- Check the page history and read the edit summaries.
- Spellcheck is your friend! If your browser has a spellchecker installed, use it before you save!
- Check to see where your links are pointing
- If you slap a couple [[brackets]] around a word or phrase and it turns blue, your work is not done. Click on all your blue links (I like to right or middle click to open several of them at a time in new tabs or new windows, depending on what browser I'm using, or else just mouse over them using the popups feature.) and make sure they haven't pointed to the wrong article, or to a disambiguation page. Think about your readers.
- Learn how to pipe links. Leaving qualifiers hanging out for everyone to see is ugly and disturbs the flow of the text.
- Deadlinks
- Is that link really dead? Take a few seconds to Google the title of article, maybe it was simply moved to a different url. Websites get rearranged all the time.
- Link to a news story went dead? The citation is still good. Remove or <!--comment out--> the url, but keep the citation information. Google the title of the story--sometimes you can find the full or partial text of it in a commercial Internet archive (you sometimes have to pay to see the full text of the article). If you can't find it archived and don't trust the info, ask on the talk page to see if someone has access to the story via a library or other archive. See: User:Peteforsyth/O-vanish for more information about dead news links. The information is for Oregon, but could be applied to any region with online library access.
