Wikipedia:Tip of the day/March
The CategoryTree is a MediaWiki extension that provides a dynamic view: you can change how much you see of a category's structure as a tree. You can use it to show a category and its subcategories by putting the category name between category tree tags like this:
<categorytree>
Trees in religion
</categorytree>
The result is a category tree like the one shown to the right. Click on the triangles to expand and collapse the tree.
MediaWiki:Extension:CategoryTree
Your sandbox is a place for you to experiment with wikicode, to keep notes, to draft sections to add to articles, or for any other purpose that helps build the encyclopedia. Although your sandbox will usually be left alone by other editors, you do not have 100% control. It can't be used to host copyright violations or personal attacks on people, for example.
Have you ever added an example image to a page, only to have it removed and receive a warning? Here's a solution. If you want to test some unfamiliar wiki-markup, or practice image placement, head to the Sandbox, where you can test to your heart's delight (or you can create your own sandbox for more demanding tests). Or open your own sandbox by clicking on "Sandbox" on your user menu at the top of the screen.
Bonus tip: you can have as many sandboxes as you like, but only one gets displayed at the top of the page. To get to the others easily, you could list their links on your sandbox page, using it as a menu of sandboxes.
Here's how to install a nifty little program called Navigation Popups, that lets you peer into Wikipedia articles when you hover the mouse cursor over internal links:
- Quick installation: Enter Special:Preferences and click "Gadgets", check the box to enable Navigation Popups, under the "Browsing" section, then click save. Follow the instructions on the page to bypass your browser's cache.
- Other installation method: add
{{subst:navpop}}to your current skin's .js page. See Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups#Installation for full installation instructions.
For this to work, make sure you have not disabled javascript in your browser. By the way, Navigation Popups is recursive: it works on links that appear in its popups.
There are a number of ways to improve your web browser to make it a more effective Wikipedia tool:
- install plugins
- install user customized JavaScripts (a simple cut/paste operation) into your user page's vector.js or monobook.js skin. Installing to your common.js subpage will allow both skins to use a single JavaScript installation.
- add pre-saved bookmarks to your favorites
- add bookmarklets to your favorites or to your browser's toolbar
As you can see, tools are implemented in a number of ways. There are tools available for many different purposes, and with many different functions, and some that are multipurpose. Many of these are explained at Wikipedia:Tools/Browser tools, which includes a list of tools, for each major browser.
Click on "Edit" at the top of an article. Then place double square brackets around the topic you want to link to.
For example: [[pear]]
- produces the link pear
For the plural write this: [[pear]]s
- which will look like this: pears
If you want to create a link to a section of an article (for example "Cultivation" of the "pear" article) place an internal hyperlink "Pear#Cultivation" separated by a vertical bar ( "|" ).
For example: [[Pear#Cultivation|cultivation of pears]]
which will look like this:
Links
The Wikipedia Article Wizard helps you submit a new article to Wikipedia in six easy steps.
Important: you need to have a user account to use the Wizard. If you don't have one you can
- register as a new user (no personal info required)
- Submit an article for possible creation
Just below the edit box in the Wikipedia text editor is the edit summary field. Please summarize each of your edits! They are displayed in an article's history to make it easier for other editors to know what you did to an article.
Do you keep forgetting to fill in the edit summary box before saving your edits? To have Wikipedia remember for you, go to your Preferences, select the "Editing" tab, and check the option box, "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary". With this option set, Wikipedia will remind you to create an edit summary if you forget.
Subpages are pages that have a parent page. They share their parent page's title, followed by a "/" (slash), followed by their own name. The Wikipedia, Portal, and User namespaces allow subpages. WikiProjects, user pages and Portals often have subpages. Below are two options to obtain a list of subpages for a particular page.
* Option 1: In the left toolbar, under tools, select Page Information and an information page is shown. In the first table, there is a link for Subpages of this page.
* Option 2: Click on Special pages in the toolbox menu on the left side of your screen. Then click on All pages with prefix which is under the header Lists of pages. Then select the namespace the page is in (from the pulldown menu), and enter the pagename in the inbox, and add a forward slash (/) to the end of the pagename. So if the pagename is "Wikipedia", then you should enter Wikipedia/ in the inbox. Then press the Show button. The subpages are displayed at the bottom. If nothing happens after pressing "Show", this means the page has no subpages.
Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the technical ability to perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia, including the ability to block and unblock user accounts and IP addresses from editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages without restriction, and use certain other tools.
They are never required to use their tools, and must never use them to gain an advantage in a dispute in which they are involved.
Admins are selected by the Wikipedia community at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship through an often grueling review process. Go there if you would like to nominate someone to be an admin (including yourself).
- Requests for administrator assistance: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard
- Wikipedia:Requests for adminship
- Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests
- Wikipedia:Requested articles
- Wikipedia:Requests for adminship#Current nominations for bureaucratship
- Wikipedia:Requests for comment
- Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship
- Requests for help: Wikipedia:Help desk
- Wikipedia:Requests for mediation
- Wikipedia:Requested moves
- Wikipedia:Requests for page protection
- Wikipedia:Requested pictures
- Requests for research assistance: Wikipedia:Reference desk
- Wikipedia:Requested recordings
A piped link is a link that is labeled differently from the name of the page it links to, using the vertical bar ( "|" ) character (AKA: the pipe).
For example, to change the appearance of the link to the article "Orange (colour)", try this:
[[Orange (colour)|{{color|orange|the color orange}}]]
will show: the color orange
It is proper "Wikiquette" (WI-kee-ket) to sign your messages on talk pages. This prevents readers from confusing your posts with messages by other users.
To sign a message, move the cursor to the end of the message, and then with your mouse click on
the signature icon (
) in the toolbar at the top of the edit box.
This inserts the signature code (~~~~) where the cursor is.
When you save the page, these tilde characters are converted to your signature followed by a date stamp.
You can also type this code in manually with the four tilde characters ~+~+~+~.
- To sign without a date stamp, use three tildes ~~~ ~+~+~ instead.
- To sign only the date stamp, use five tildes ~~~~~ ~+~+~+~+~.
If you can not find the answer to a research question you have, try the Wikipedia:Reference desk.
If you are stuck because you do not know how to do a certain thing in Wikipedia, try the help system or ask a question at the Help desk.
Or if you are looking for a department, but do not know what it is called, try the Wikipedia:Department directory.
In the search box, type in the name of the article you wish to create. When told that the page does not exist, click the link either in red or with the question mark.
You can also type the title as the URL in your browser's link field and get there directly – e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_name
Perhaps the easiest way to start a new article is to follow a link to a page that does not exist yet. Depending on your settings, these links may show up as red links or have a question mark at the end of the link (red links?).
Note: The ability to create articles directly in mainspace is restricted to autoconfirmed users, though non-confirmed users and non-registered users can submit a proposed article through the Articles for Creation process, where it will be reviewed and considered for publication.
And the winners are...
- Create link buttons to Wikipedia on your browser's toolbar
- Edit Wikipedia faster with AutoWikiBrowser
- Jump to the search box with ⇧ Shift+Alt+F
- Search Wikipedia from any website (an oldie but goodie)
- Templates
- Work faster using keyboard shortcuts
- User scripts
- Use your watchlist
- Install Navigation Popups, here's how...
- Navigate faster using Wikipedia shortcuts
If you know even more powerful tips, please visit Tip of the day and add them to our tip collection. Come on, show off! You know you want to.
Have you run across a problem that requires the attention of an Administrator?
The fastest way to catch the attention of administrators in general is to post an alert to the Administrators' noticeboard (A.N.). Administrators go there all the time to see what is up with Wikipedia; one of them will see your message and will take immediate appropriate action. Experienced editors hang out there too and sometimes will answer a question before an Admin gets to it.
Another option is to paste a {{admin help}} template (with the four curly braces) along with your question on to your Talk page and an Admin will stop by shortly.
Here is a trick to make redirected wikilinks stand out by turning them green instead of blue! This is especially useful when working on navigation aids like lists and outlines, where you need to be sure a link leads to where it says it links to. This quick and easy solution uses customized CSS:
Go to your Preferences, click on the "Appearance" tab, and click the "Custom CSS" to the right of the skin you use. It opens a page to edit, and you can add the following code (just copy and paste it):
.mw-redirect {
color: #006633;
}
.mw-redirect:visited {
color: #009900;
}
.mw-redirect:hover {
color: #990000;
}
.mw-redirect:active {
color: #990000;
}
Save the page, and reload (bypass your browser cache) and/or () the Wikipedia server to force the new CSS to be included. All redirects will now show up as green links! If you prefer a different color, you can modify them by using six-digit hex codes.
Have you ever been frustrated that you are limited to viewing 500-edits in View-History for pages?
Solution to see more edits:
- On any page with more than 500 edits...
- Click on that page's "View History" tab
- Click on the "|50)" wikilink just above and to the right of Compare selected versions
- Go up to your web browser's address bar and change limit=50 in the URL to any higher number (N) up to 5000, for example: limit=2500
- Press ↵ Enter or hit "go"
Go slow with "N", until you know what your web browser and computer can handle. If you get greedy your computer and browser may lock up. After the page fully loads you can use your browser's search feature to find what you are looking for or you can scroll down the page. As a bonus, your "next" choice will now offer next-N instead of next-500.
Bonus tip #1: The same process works in "Contributions", and on the search results page.
Bonus tip #2: If you prefer, you can tweak the web address (URL) on a view history page to go back from a specified date, which is useful for looking way back in long histories. In your browser in the URL after "&action=history" add "&offset=YYYYMMDD", where YYYY is the year, MM is the month, and DD is the day. Then press ↵ Enter or hit "go".
1. Magic pipe trick: Synonymous article titles may be clarified with terms in parentheses, like this: [[Self (psychology)]]. But when you want to include such a link in the body of an article, this would look rather awkward. So all you have to do is use the "magic pipe trick", like this: [[Self (psychology)|]]. Notice the pipe ("|") character stuck in there at the end of the link? That makes the link look like this: Self, without having to type the name of the link after the pipe! This trick also works with namespaces, so that [[Wikipedia:Tip of the day|]] (again notice the pipe character) displays like this: Tip of the day.
2. Plural trick: While editing, you will often need to make a link to a plural. For example, suppose you wanted to link "Fred Foo was famous for his study of puddles" to puddle; you could link it like so: [[puddle|puddles]]. However, you can save time by instead writing [[puddle]]s. This also works for adjectives ([[Japan]]ese), verbs ([[dance]]d), and any other suffixes or prefixes, like [[bring]]ing. It does not, however, work for some irregular verbs. For example, [[try]]ied does not work; you have to use [[try|tried]]. Nor does it work with apostrophes needed outside the wikilink like: [[J. R. R. Tolkien]]'s.
MediaWiki is the software that runs Wikipedia.
MediaWiki is opensource and is available for download for free. You can use it for offline access to the Wikipedia database, or to set up a wiki of your own.
However, MediaWiki requires other software to be able to run. The prerequisite programs are Apache/IIS, MySQL4 or later (5 or later as of version 1.19) and PHP5. When bundled together, these are referred to as AMP. They are also open source and free.
The Manual Installation Guide explains how to install MediaWiki from scratch.
Note that some users may find MediaWiki software bundles and MediaWiki hosting services with 1-click installation and wiki farms to be convenient alternatives to manual installation.
Many of the pages in the Wikipedia namespace have specialized redirects called "shortcuts" that can be entered into the search box. Most shortcuts start with WP: followed by a capitalized abbreviation of the page name. Some common shortcuts are: WP:HELP, WP:WELCOME, WP:IMAGE, WP:5P, and of course, WP:TIP. A semi-complete list of shortcuts is available at Wikipedia:Shortcuts.
A shortcut can be used in the search box or in a link.
To jump to the talk page of a page with a shortcut, start with "WT:" instead of "WP:".
- Searching with regex online
To search Wikipedia live with regular expressions, use the insource: parameter, followed by your regex search string enclosed in forward slashes, like this: /regular expression/. Here is an example:
insource:/(Abraham|Abe) Lincoln/
insource searches the wikitext version of articles, and so, wikiformatting codes can be included in the search string. If any characters you wish to find are used as special characters within regex, they will need to be "escaped" by preceding each with a backslash. For a cheat sheet on writing regexes, see Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Regular expression.
For case insensitive searches, include an "i" after the closing forward slash.
- Searching with regex offline
To search all of Wikipedia offline using regex, you need to download the Wikipedia database and do the search offline with AutoWikiBrowser's Database Scanner. Activate it from the tools menu in AutoWikiBrowser (AWB). It returns the names of the pages that match your query, which you can have sent directly to AWB's list maker (then you can use AWB to view them all). The Database Scanner has many features, and each query can be easily configured to match, exclude, specify namespaces, ignore redirects, etc. as you see fit.
- Other methods of searching Wikipedia with regular expressions
- To search Wikipedia titles with regex, use Grep.
- To search within the current page use the edit window:
- If source editing, use the "Search and replace" dialog by clicking the magnifying glass icon at the far right of the "Advanced" toolbar.
- If visual editing, type Ctrl-F to get the search box, then click the "(.*)" icon for regular expressions.
- Regular expressions are also supported by the WikEd text editor gadget.
- AutoWikiBrowser can do regex search/replaces, on a list of articles that you provide it.
Instead of counting your edits 500 at a time in your contributions list, you could look up your grand total on your Preferences page. Your number of edits is listed under "Basic information", near the top of the page.
To get more details about your edits, try X!Tools's Edit Counter, which tallies up all your edits of each area of Wikipedia, and displays the totals for each and the grand total. It also shows the number of unique pages edited, the average edits per page, number of edits still active, and how many edits have been deleted.
There are two main ways to use templates on articles:
- Transclusion – also called "inclusion", and accomplished by using
{{Template Name}} - Substitution – notated like this
{{subst:Template Name}}
Transclusion will include the content of Template Name on the fly whenever the article is loaded, while the latter will permanently insert the content of the template into the article. With substitution, even if the template content is modified at a later date, the article's content will not change.
Substitution is the preferred method for long-term, permanent notices because it is less confusing, and it even helps to lighten the load on the database. Substitution has the further advantage in that a template's content may be de-linked from any associated category or slightly modified to suit the circumstances, such as when the template is used on a talk page. Transclusion is preferred for displaying material that is normally updated, that way, all the places it appears are updated in a single operation.
You've come across a word that is crucial to understanding the article you are working on, and you want to create a link to its definition. But you find the encyclopedia article for that word would be overkill. So you want to link to its Wiktionary definition. How? It's easy. Here's an example using the word "understanding":
both [[wiktionary:understanding|]] and [[wikt:understanding|]] will look like this:
and link to the definition of the word "understanding".
Notice that the "pipe trick" (|) was used in the links above.
Let SuggestBot point the way. SuggestBot is a program that attempts to help Wikipedia users find pages to edit. It matches people with pages they might like to contribute to based on their past contributions. It uses a variety of algorithms, including standard information retrieval and collaborative filtering techniques, to make suggestions. It also sometimes points people to the Community Portal, or their past edits, as a source of inspiration.
If you are looking for SuggestBot recommendations, you have these options.
- To get a single set of suggestions:
- …based on articles you've edited, please follow the instructions at User:SuggestBot/Requests.
- …using WikiProjects you are interested in, go to the Teahouse's SuggestBot page, click on Get suggestions, and follow the instructions.
- …based on a specific set of articles or categories of articles, see our SuggestBot instructions for that.
- You can also get suggestions posted periodically to your talk page (or another page of your choosing). How to do that is described here.
Wikipedia has keystroke combinations that can speed up your work, like ⇧ Shift+Alt+F to "focus" on (jump to) the search box, ⇧ Shift+Alt+M to move the current page and its talk page, ⇧ Shift+Alt+T to open the current article's talk page, ⇧ Shift+Alt+Y to open a list of your user's contributions, and many more. Those are for Windows users. On the Mac OS, press Control instead of ⇧ Shift+Alt. For some browsers, the accesskey is the Alt key instead. For details see Keyboard shortcuts.
When asking a question about editing Wikipedia at the Teahouse or Help desk, please include all the facts needed to answer your question - especially the page title you're enquiring about. Most respondents will assume you are editing in 'desktop' view, and are using Source Editor, not Visual Editor (VE). So remember to say if you're working on a mobile or using VE.
Always give context to any question. At the Reference desk, for example, don't ask "who was president in 1900?" without mentioning the country you're interested in! This prevents volunteers helpers having to ask follow-up questions before providing answers. Friendly reminder: the Teahouse (for new editors) and Help desk are for questions on how to use or edit Wikipedia; the Reference desk is for questions about anything else (real world questions).
Being the gateway to the encyclopedia - the Main Page is Wikipedia's most frequently visited page. The main page is always protected and can only be edited by admins. But, most of the content on the main page is piped in each day from various departments, via templates. The volunteers in these departments work year round to prepare the content on the Main Page to be viewed by the World each day.
The departments that prep content for the Main Page are:
- Wikipedia:Today's featured article – prepares excerpts from featured articles, to be displayed on the main page.
- Wikipedia:Did you know – prepares and selects "hooks" to new articles or articles that have been expanded by a factor of five.
- Wikipedia:In the news – participants nominate blurbs from Portal:Current events, and decide which of these get displayed on the main page. Admins post the blurbs as soon as they are approved.
- Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries – prepares the pages that get displayed in the "On this day" section of the main page.
- Wikipedia:Picture of the day – copies and formats featured pictures into the POTD scheduling queue, and writes the captions that accompany the pictures.
Anybody can help prep the pages that feed into the main page's templates (up until the day they are displayed on the Main Page), by proofreading and correcting them, and we encourage you to do so. (continued tomorrow)
(continued from yesterday)
The scheduled queues of pages to be displayed by each department on the main page can be found at:
- Today's featured article queue: follow this link (which looks like this:
[[Wikipedia:Today's featured article/{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}|this link]]) - Did you know queue: Template:Did you know/Queue
- In the news doesn't have a queue. Instead, items to be included are decided on by participants (you) at Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates. News items that achieve consensus are posted by admins.
- Selected anniversaries queue: Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/All
- Picture of the day queue for the main page: the subpages of Template:POTD protected (their titles are dates). Only the current date is actually protected. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixIndex&prefix=POTD+protected&namespace=10
Important: Be sure to follow the instructions posted at each department.
Your browser's toolbar can be used as your Wikipedia navigation bar. To do this, bookmark the pages in Wikipedia you wish to have fast access to, saving each bookmark in the toolbar or bookmarks bar folder. Each one will immediately be available on the toolbar or bookmark bar. Some browsers let you drag links to the toolbar. To shorten any link, right click on it, select properties or edit, and type in a shorter title.