Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Lending Other Editors a Hand

Most of this book is about articles—creating, improving, arguing over, deleting. But Wikipedia is more than just a large number of articles. It’s a community of people—the editors. Wikipedia has a number of pages and activities to assist editors: to answer specific questions, to help editors learn more about good editing, to help resolve differences of opinion, and even just to show appreciation. As with everything else at Wikipedia, the people who run these pages and activities are also editors—volunteers just like you. This chapter shows you all the places and ways you can lend other editors a hand.

If you’re not an experienced editor, you may feel that it’s too soon to read this chapter. But many of the pages and activities described below don’t require a lot of experience. More importantly, you can pick and choose where you want to help. For example, if you’re looking at a page of questions by editors, you can just skip any questions that you don’t understand. Furthermore, you have one advantage that many other editors don’t—you have this book.

Answering Questions

One of the easiest ways you can help other editors is by answering their questions. If you don’t know an answer, or don’t have the time to research an answer, you can simply leave the question for other editors to answer.

Tip

You may find answers to other editors’ questions in this book. But there’s another general resource for researching questions—the ...