Editing Wikipedia: Visual Editing
A guide to editing Wikipedia articles.
Before jumping into the world of editing Wikipedia articles, an editor should be familiar with the ground rules of Wikipedia. Beginning with the Wikipedia Policies, here it is important to pay close attention to the Five Pillars of Wikipedia. Following to that, an editor should learn what Sandboxes, Talk Pages and Watchlists are.
Now, it is the time to edit Wikipedia articles! A Wikipedia article can be edited in two ways:
- Source code editing
- Visual editing
The source code editing, commonly known as source editing, is editing through the underlying wiki code, similar to HTML, and is mostly used to edit/talk on the Talk Pages.
On the other hand, visual editing is editing the article as it appears on the screen. Visual editing is similar to editing documents on Microsoft Word or any other word processing apps.
Visual Editing simplifies the process of adding text, citing sources, linking to other Wikipedia articles, and formatting your article.
Consider the following guidelines to learn the basics of visual editing. These guidelines aim to set you up for your editing journey on Wikipedia. The most efficient way to learn editing is by following along the suggestions below. To do so, start by editing your sandbox.
Visual Editing Tool Bar
Once, an editor click on the “Edit Button” you will see a tool bar as shown below:
Starting from the left:
The Paragraph drop down menu lets you set the style of the text. For example, the header, sub header, and the body.
The A dropdown menu helps you with bold, italics, underlining, and the making edits to the texts of that nature. Few other options in this menu are; Superscript, Subscript, and Strikethrough.
Links: The chain symbol helps you link a website, or other Wikipedia page, to a word or text that you prefer. This tool works similar to hyperlink on the Microsoft Word processor.
Cite: This tool helps you cite the content or information that has been added in the Wikipedia article. This tool gives you two options; automatic or manual. With automatic citation an editor can simply copy-paste the URL, and it will generate a citation. Whereas, manual citation requires the editor to enter the details of a book, journal, article, or website.
Bullets: Lets you to create a bullet or a numbered list.
Insert: This tool lets you add images, media, and tables.
Ω: This tools lets you add special character like scientific notations.
Pencil Icon: The pencil icon to the far right helps toggle between source editing and visual editing.
Adding Citations
The Five Pillars of Wikipedia has thought us the importance of citing the source of the information. Lets look at adding citation in detail.
Automatic Citation
The animation above shows how the Automatic Citation tool works. As discussed earlier, simply pasting the URL and clicking the Generate button will create a citation for you. This is an easy way to cite your sources, however I recommend checking the auto-generated citation before clicking “Insert”.
Manual Citation
Upon clicking the Cite tool on the Visual Editing tool bar you will see the following options:
Under the “Manual” tab you will be presented with various types of sources to choose from. Choosing a type of source will prompt you to enter information about your citation, before generating one for you.
The “Re-use” option helps you reuse an existing reference.
The Final Touch — Edit Summary
After making edits, it is time to leave an edit summary about the changes that have been made to the wiki page. For example, lets say you corrected grammar in a sentence, as well as, added a citation. You should write something like “corrected grammar & added citation”. Writing the reason as to why the changes were made is recommended as well.
While editing wiki through visual editing, clicking “Publish Changes” on the top-right corner will bring up a box as shown above. Here is where an editor is asked to leave edit summary
In this article, I took you over the basic process of how to edit a Wikipedia article through Visual Editing. We looked over:
- Different types of editing
- Visual editing tool bar
- Adding citations
- Citation summary
Reviewing these steps should ensure that now you are ready to make edits to a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia offers detailed training modules on their WikiEdu website, which I recommend for new editors.
