Wikipedia Starter Tips

A brief tutorial with links to: editing policies and guidelines, how-to-pages, writing advice, community support, and interactive help.

This page takes you through a set of tutorials aimed at complete newcomers interested in contributing. It covers all the basics, and each tutorial takes only a few minutes, so you can become a proficient Wikipedian in no time!

The fundamental principles of Wikipedia may be summarized in five "pillars":

Wikipedia is the world's most successful online encyclopedia, now containing 6,080,624 English language articles. It is probably the largest collection of knowledge ever assembled, and is certainly the most widely accessible.

Black Lunch Table Wikimedians mobilize the creation and improvement of a specific set of Wikipedia articles that pertain to the lives and works of Black artists. In the field of mainstream contemporary art, Black artists are still marginalized within our field.

Wikipedia estimates that 77% of their editors are white and 91% of their editors are men. Our work shifts this demographic and empowers people to write their own history. Our sessions and events, including BLT Photobooth and edit-a-thons, equip new editors with the skills and resources to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles and encourages existing editors to focus on Wikipedia knowledge gaps.

Women in Red (WiR) is a group of editors of all genders living around the world focused on reducing systemic bias in the wiki movement.

The WikiProject focuses on creating content regarding women's biographies, women's works, and women's issues.

The Wikipedia project strives for a neutral point of view in its coverage of subjects, both in terms of the articles that are created and the content, perspective and sources within these articles. However, this goal is inhibited by systemic bias created by the shared social and cultural characteristics of most editors, and it results in an imbalanced coverage of subjects and perspectives on the encyclopedia.

Our largest encyclopedia overwhelmingly recognises the achievements of white men. For physicist Jess Wade, fighting this bias has been an uphill battle

Women make up 15-20% of the editors on Wikipedia. Katherine Maher, who heads up its parent organisation, discusses how she is creating a more gender-balanced community.

Amid COVID-19, an annual campaign has a renewed purpose. #1Lib1Ref calls on librarians around the world to strengthen a key informational resource: Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is an invaluable research tool, and more — and higher quality — references make Wikipedia more reliable and useful. Each year people from around the world join the 1Lib1Ref initiative to make small but meaningful contributions to this goal.

People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right.

Wikipedia has moved far beyond its initial limitations, and is a helpful—and reputable—source for conducting research.