There is no perfect browser for editing Wikipedia but the newer your browser the better experience you’ll have. Older browsers may not perform as well. While you can edit Wikipedia on a mobile or tablet, it is much easier on a laptop or desktop computer.

When you first join Wikipedia you have limited editing rights. This is to prevent vandalism.

You will gain full editing rights and access to the full set of editing tools after you have made a small number of edits and after a particular timeframe. Generally after about 10 edits and 4 days of being part of Wikipedia you should have full editing rights.

After this, Wikipedia will no longer ask you to complete the captcha tests when you are editing.

The short answer is, it depends. A good rule of thumb is fewer than 5,000 words, but if you’re starting a new page, ten sentences and more than three quality references should be enough to establish the article, so long as your subject is notable.

When you are creating a new page, it can be really handy to have another Wikipedia article open featuring similar content, and follow its structure. For example, how did they format awards and what headings did they include? The same kinds of articles follow similar structures, so using an existing article as a model can be really helpful.

You are looking for information published (online or in print) by a neutral author about the subject of the article, not by the person (i.e. not the person’s own writing or CV). This can be tricky for living academics and scientists. Focus on writing about their work, which may be written about in review articles, conference proceedings, research grant announcements or professional association publications.

To edit the whole page at once, click the “Edit” tab at the top. To edit just one section, click the “edit” link to the right of the section heading.

All content on Wikipedia is released under a Creative Commons license. Therefore, images  must be copyright-free, or you must have taken the image yourself and therefore own the copyright. The best way to find a copyright free image is to look on Wikimedia Commons, which is the multimedia repository for Wikipedia. 

Institutions and professional bodies often upload images with a Creative Commons license that can be used on Wikipedia. 

If you have your own photos, you can upload these to Wikimedia Commons using the Upload Wizard, releasing them for use under a Creative Commons license.Once uploaded, you can add them anywhere on a Wikipedia page or in an infobox. Just go to the “Edit” tab and use the image button to insert the url or search for the image title. And it’ll give you a preview. Once you publish the page, add an edit summary such as ‘add image’ and then your image will be live. You can edit the caption if you wish to as well.

We highly recommend you use your Sandbox for starting a new article but if you wish to draft your content offline, you can use any kind of word processing software. Drafting content without any formatting can also be helpful (e.g. Word formatting can be tricky, so use Notepad).

The Sandbox is your own personal user space for drafting articles and trying out features such as Visual Editor or Source Editor. Articles you create in your sandbox are not published on Wikipedia, and will not appear in searches, but they can be moved later (refer to video Chapter 8).

There is no save feature on Wikipedia. Instead, when you are finished adding or editing any content, just select the ‘Publish’ button and add a brief edit summary of the changes you made before publishing. This is similar to saving as your edits and will go live immediately. Additionally, there’s no auto-publish or auto-save, or saving to draft on a live Wikipedia page (only in your Sandbox).

Unfortunately you are not able to edit your own Wikipedia page, that of your friends or family or the organisation you work with because it is considered a conflict of interest. It is difficult for us to be neutral about those that we’re close to. It can be quite frustrating when we discover errors on pages we’re close to or know a lot about, but because of that conflict of interest issue, we have to find other editors to help us rectify those issues.

Stubs are very short articles that need to be expanded. A fellow Wikipedian may have started the page and got it going but only added minimal details. 

You can improve an existing article by fixing the grammar or spelling, or correcting the tone to be more neutral or encyclopedic, adding missing citations, or adding some more recent information, like a new award or a publication.

Adding more information and citations to these pages is important because it prevents these pages from being deleted but it also means that readers can find more information.

When moving your page, you need to create a new name as it can’t share the same name as an existing page. You can add something in brackets to differentiate two pages, eg. ‘Joan Smith’ exists but your page is about a scientist Joan Smith so you move your page to ‘Joan Smith (scientist)’ etc.

For biographies, use the form of the name by which the person is best known, for example Beyonce’s article is titled Beyonce, not Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter. 

Always check that your article title is unique, and if necessary, add a descriptor after the name to make it unique, eg Linda Smith (Scientist).

Yes you can! To rename a page, you carefully move it (the exact same process as moving your drafted page from your Sandbox to Wikipedia shown in Chapter 8). 

Select “Move” from under the drop down menu in the right corner of the article box. And then type the corrected or new name of the page exactly as you want it with the right sentence case.

You’re then going to add a reason for this change, so ‘typo in title’ for example if that’s the issue, and select ‘Move Page’, the blue button at the bottom.

The page will now be live under that new title on Wikipedia. 

If you do not have a Move button yet, you may need to wait a few days after your account was created. 

Generally deleting Wikipedia pages is a complex process that can involve editors with additional permissions, called admins. 

The full procedure for deletions is explained at Wikipedia:Deletion policy.  

Articles tagged for deletion are most commonly nominated at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and considered by the community before deletion.

If you accidentally delete part of a page or change some of the formatting, you can revert to a previous version by undoing your last edit. Simply go to the ‘View history’ page, and just undo the last change and it will roll back to an earlier version of that page.

While any editor can edit any page, multiple editors can’t edit at exactly the same time, or you’ll get something called an edit conflict. If another editor is editing you may need to wait a few minutes before making your edit.

The Women In Red project uses a play on words. On Wikipedia linked content is displayed in blue. If this content does not exist yet, the link will appear in red. Red links are a way of   indicating that content is missing. Women In Red is a community initiative that focuses on adding the women missing from Wikipedia to grow their visibility and representation online.

If you have any other questions go to Wikimedia Australia, or your local Wikimedia affiliate body, and ask the community for help.