User:Awesome Aasim/Wikipedia for wikiHowians

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Welcome to Wikipedia! Thanks for coming. We are so glad to have you. We have over 6,916,094 pages, which is far more than wikiHow. If you have come here because you want to help, great! You may notice a few things that make Wikipedia different from wikiHow. These changes may seem daunting, but in no time, you will be ready to get started with helping out on Wikipedia!

Where do I start?

On wikiHow, you may be familiar with many tools. They have a community dashboard with stuff from Recent Changes Patrol to Spellchecker to Copyedit Greenhouse. We have a lot of tasks and tools as well. The key difference between our tools and wikiHow's tools is that on Wikipedia, much of the tools are written by the community, for the community. Of course, there are some tools by the Wikimedia Foundation like page triage, but many scripts and gadgets are maintained by community members. You can view this page for a full list of custom scripts on Wikipedia and this page for a full list of gadgets you can enable.

You do not have to start right away. Many of us just make an edit when we see something up. If you would like to work more behind the scenes, you can see some of these pages below. Also remember, Be bold! Wikipedia is not going to fix itself, so you can definitely help and dive in.

Recent Changes Patrol

Wikipedia has dozens of edits per second. For this reason, most edits are live as soon as they are made. Recent changes patrol involves sorting through these changes and reverting edits that seem to harm the encyclopedia. Like wikiHow, we have this policy called "Assume Good Faith", which means that we assume good faith with all editors, regardless on whether the editor has good or bad intentions. Because of this, if there is an edit that is not obviously problematic (like vandalism), you should give details as to why you reverted the edit in the first place. There is no marking edits as patrolled, though, unlike on wikiHow.

Start patrolling recent changes with this gadget called Twinkle. We do not have a dedicated special page where you can "rollback", "mark as patrolled", or "quick edit" edits in recent changes. Rather, we have a continuous stream of edits that fly by on this page. One thing that we do have that wikiHow does not have is this system called ORES, which makes guesses as to whether particular edits are problematic, made in good/bad faith, or are by newbies or learners. You can filter through these edits to make them using the "Filter" section of Recent Changes, and you can save the filter for later use.

After using Twinkle for a little while, you can request access to "rollback" which will allow you to quickly undo a user's edits to a page. You can do so at this page under "rollback". This will give you access to a second tool, Huggle, a program where you will be able to revert and patrol edits as they happen. Note, though, that "rollback" is only expected for reverting obviously harmful edits, and should not be used to revert good faith edits.

Patrolling Pending Changes

Pending changes is a tool used by administrators that prevents edits from going live until they have been approved. Only pending changes reviewers can accept pending changes, although anyone is free to undo any pending change.

Start by requesting pending changes reviewer permissions at this page under "Pending changes reviewer". Then, load this page. Click on "Review". For more complicated diffs, you may want to advertise to other reviewers that you are actively reviewing the edit. See the pending changes log for more details as to why the page is protected.

If the edit looks good, click on "Accept changes". If the edit is not good, click on "Revert changes". Enter a reason for the accept/revert and click on either of those two buttons. If you make a mistake, click on "Unaccept changes".

Side note about user warnings

Some of the warnings may seem a bit harsh. However, our goal on Wikipedia is to prevent further disruption to the project. These warnings are designed to address problems that good faith editors are causing while deterring bad faith editors at the same time. Of course, these warnings are optional in some cases, and in the case of trolls, users are blocked without warning.

In any case, it is appropriate to start with a level 1 warning (that assumes good faith) (such as {{uw-test1}}) and continue up to a level 4 warning (that tells the user to cease and desist immediately) (such as {{uw-vandalism4}}). After a level 4 warning is given, if the user repeats the inappropriate conduct, report them to AIV (in the case of obvious spammers and vandals) or to ANB (for other conduct-related issues). If after a block the user repeats the inappropriate conduct, give an immediate level 4 warning (such as {{uw-biog4im}}) and report the user again if the conduct resumes.

Some behavior is so serious that it requires only a single warning. For example, personal attacks or edit warring is so disruptive that it must stop immediately. In this case, leave the appropriate warning template, then report the user immediately to ANB. These warning templates assume good faith (in the case of first-time offenders) while at the same time stopping the inappropriate conduct.

On the other side, some behavior, while it may seem problematic, is not so serious and is easily fixable and so only requires a single notice. For example, if you suspect the user has a conflict of interest, you can leave the {{uw-coi}} template on their talk page. These templates assume good faith while at the same time providing the user advice regarding to the policy or guideline in question.

Spell Checking

You can start spellchecking articles by downloading a spellchecker (like Grammarly) and enabling it on your browser. Then, click on Random article on the sidebar and click on "Edit" (if you cannot edit the page). Then, run your spellchecker, taking care not to break wiki markup. Leave a summary indicating that you spellchecked the article and you are done.

After you have gotten experience with spellchecking, you can request access to AutoWikiBrowser and maybe get access to the automated typo fixer. Side note: you are still expected to review every edit you make, as if you made the edit without the tool. See the bot policy for more details.

Article Greenhouse

We do not have an article greenhouse, but you can get started cleaning up articles by browsing the various cleanup categories. Some categories you can look through are Category:All articles needing copy edit, Category:All articles needing additional references, and Category:All pages needing cleanup. Some of these categories may get really large, but you can use this page to find a random article meeting the required description.

New Article Boost

Like on wikiHow, you need additional rights to review new pages. Wikipedia does not call this process "New Article Boost", but they are fundamentally the same thing. Before any new page can be indexed by search engines, it has to be marked as patrolled by a "New page reviewer". That does not mean that logged out readers cannot view the page (they still can), but the page will not show up in Bing or Google search results. Marking pages as patrolled is done after all the necessary checks have been conducted. First, the page is checked against the speedy deletion criteria. Then, the page is checked for other irreparable problems, such as notability and neutral point of view. If there are any issues with the page that appear unfixable, the page is proposed for deletion or listed at articles for deletion. If the article needs a lot more work for it to be helpful to readers, it is moved to draft space for improvement. Then, maintenance tags are added, the page is cleaned up, and the article is marked as patrolled (if there are no deletion notices).

Other Tasks

Because Wikipedia is a really large site in terms of edits per second, many of the maintenance tasks that would need to be carried out manually on wikiHow are done by bots. For example, double redirects are automatically updated to point directly to their target. That does not mean you can't help reduce the backlog; it just means that there is little point in doing so.

Some other WikiGnome tasks you can do on Wikipedia:

Tagging unused categories for speedy deletion, although a bot already does some of the work for them.
Fixing double redirects (though a bot does that as well)
Deleting (or tagging for speedy deletion) or retargeting broken redirects per criteria G8.
More here and here.

What else can I do?

With a bit more experience, you can do the following tasks. Note that some tasks can only be done as an admin or require additional rights.

Answer edit requests
Run AutoWikiBrowser
Handle requested moves
Close deletion discussions
Review candidates for speedy deletion (admin only)
File reports on the admin noticeboard
- Admins can also handle reports on the admin noticeboard
Request page protection
- Admins can also answer requests for page protection there
Consider designing your own user script, maybe it will become a gadget someday!

Don't like the look?

You can choose between a bunch of skins. Timeless seems like a good responsive skin for wikiHowians, though you can choose between quite a few skins, provided that you are registered.