Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Showing Appreciation for Other Editors

Wikipedia gets better every day, because of the efforts of thousands of editors every day. There are many ways you can help other editors by recognizing the time and effort that they give to Wikipedia.

For brand-new editors, Wikipedia has a Welcoming Committee (the shortcut to its main page is WP:WC). Committee members mainly post welcome notices (in the form of templates) on the user talk pages of newly registered editors. They also suggest to anonymous (IP address) new editors that they register and get user names. The committee also maintains pages specifically for helping new editors get started. You can see a list of such pages—including the New Contributor’s help page and the Help desk—at WP:WC.

For appreciation of more established editors, the Kindness Campaign main page (shortcut: WP:KC) provides a good starting point. The most common way of recognition, by far, is to post an award—a template—on the editor’s user talk page, with a signature identifying who gave the award. You’ll find more information at Wikipedia:Awards (shortcut: WP:Award), including the box of links shown in Figure 12-5.

Figure 12-5. If you’d like to give accolades to an editor who made tremendous improvements to a number of articles or a huge contribution to a project, check out one of these pages with information on awards.