Hello Everyone! Welcome to Women on Wikipedia
My name is Isha and I am a second year Graphic Design student
Hi, my name is Rakshanda and I am a third year Bioinformatics major.
We both work for the library and we are also new to editing Wikipedia.
The purpose of this event is get you more comfortable with editing on Wikipedia
and the following tutorial will guide you through the process.
Happy Editing!
So what is Wikipedia?
It is an online resource that anybody can edit.
All the articles are written from a neutral point of point and it is free worldwide.
A typical Wikipedia entry starts with a strong lead paragraph that explains why the person or subject is important.
Most articles will then have a Table of Contents that lists the different sections in the article.
One of the last sections is usually the References lists
followed by links to other sites of interest known as External Links.
For biographical entries you may see an InfoBox on the right-hand side that includes a brief
summary of the person based on the information in the article.
At the bottom of the article, you may see categories that help group topics by activities, geography, etc.
Every change to a Wikipedia entry is recorded.
You can view these edit logs and previous versions of the entry through the "View History" option.
Before I introduce you to the editing process for today's event, I want to direct your attention to the welcome packet you received.
All of the information covered in the next part of this tutorial is also outlined in that packet.
Volunteers in purple shirts are available throughout the event if any questions come up.
Learning to edit Wikipedia takes practice…you are bound to have questions and we are here to help.
You can edit Wikipedia without an account, but having an account is considered a best practice.
It allows you to take credit for your work and gives you access to certain features such as the ability to track your contributions,
watch articles of interest, and practice your editing in your personal Wikipedia sandbox.
To create an account, click the "Create an Account" option at the top right of the screen.
Think carefully about your username. Anytime you make an edit, the whole world can see the associated username.
We recommend choosing something that is not personally identifiable, so don't use your given name for example.
The only thing your email address will be used for is account recovery.
Your main task for today's event will be to add a book or article to the "Further Reading" section of a live entry.
The "Further Reading" section primarily lists books and articles that have been written about a person,
but that are not included in the list of citations for the entry. They are additional sources for someone to consult.
Following this training, you will be given the names of two or three women's entries to edit,
along with suggested items to add to the "Further Reading" section.
For now, let's focus on how to add the entry itself.
First you will need to see whether your entry has a "Further Reading" section already.
"Further Reading" usually appears under the "References" section and before the "External Links" section.
If you find a "Further Reading" section, you can click "Edit Source" to the right of the heading to get started.
Otherwise, click "Edit Source" at the top of the Wikipedia entry.
Scroll to the end of the source code and look for the "References" section.
First we will need to add the heading. To do so, type ==Further reading==.
To add your first entry, you will start by placing an asterisk symbol.
This will appear as a bullet on the live, published version of the site.
Then, at the top of your editing window you can click "Cite" to reveal an option for some Wikipedia citation templates.
If you were going to cite a journal article, you could click the "cite journal" option.
Fill in all of the appropriate information. If you don't know something, leave that field blank.
There is a preview option that allows you to see what the citation will look like on the live entry.
Once you have filled out all of the information that you have, click "Insert" to add the reference to the entry.
The final step is to remove the two "ref" tags at the start and the end of the citation. The curly brackets stay as does everything inside.
Scroll down and click "Show Preview" to view your changes.
If you are satisfied, you can write a brief edit summary, such as "Added further reading and article,"
and then click "Publish changes" to make your changes live.