Memo for Wikipedia editors who are starting

Contents

This page gives information that is likely to be useful to new editors of Wikipedia Timelines Wiki working for Vipul.¹

Editing

• Since Vipul is paying for edits, we would like you to make all edits under a single account. Please let us know what your account name is so we can see your edits. If you don’t already have a Wikipedia account, we would like you to make one.

• Disclosure no longer applies since we do not actively edit on Wikipedia.

  To comply with the Wikimedia projects Terms of Use (which Wikipedia also enforces; search “Paid contributions without disclosure” on that page) we would like you to add a note on your user page saying that you are receiving payment from Vipul. You can see an example of this on my user page. The suggested note is something like the following (feel free to copy verbatim):

  This user is accepting money from [[User:Vipul|Vipul Naik]] to edit Wikipedia. The payment is by mutual agreement but not all articles are proposed by Vipul.

  See also the failed (i.e. unofficial) paid editing policy page—even though that’s not official policy it’s probably better to be safe than sorry on that front.

• Depending on your experience with other online text editing platforms, editing on Wikipedia might be slightly confusing. In particular, Wikipedia has both a visual editor (also called WYSIWYG) and a source editor. I prefer the source editor but for beginners the visual editor may be preferable. It’s difficult to explain more until I know which editor you are working with. Wikipedia also has a tutorial that may be helpful.

• Vipul might provide a different answer on this, but as far as I know there is no strict deadline on editing tasks. That said, in general if it seems like an editor has lost interest, we will probably check in to see if indeed this is the case, and will pass on the page to another editor if the original editor has lost interest (with possible partial payment to the original editor).

• Main/user space distinction no longer applies since we don’t actively edit on Wikipedia. All edits on Timelines Wiki can simply go on main.

  If you are making a new page, be sure to start the draft in your user space, not main space.

  • User space pages are prefaced by “User:username/”. An example of a user space page in my user space is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Riceissa/Timeline_of_global_health. This page was used as a place to draft the timeline of global health. User space pages are not patrolled as heavily as main space pages, so it is a good place to store drafts.
  • Main space pages are “normal pages” that people read. An example of the main space page corresponding to the user space page given above is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_global_health. Once the draft was good enough, the content from the user space page was pasted into the main space page. Main space pages are patrolled more heavily than user space pages, so there is risk of a page being deleted if it is only a draft.

• It is a good idea to periodically keep local backups of drafts. Another strategy is to work locally and periodically sync your draft with the user space page for the draft.

Using reliable sources

Wikipedia can be strict about what belongs on the site, and some editors on the site may try to delete your page as being not notable. The two rough stances regarding inclusion are “deletionism” (adhering to strict rules about what belongs on Wikipedia) and “inclusionism” (being more permissive about what belongs), with many editors in between. Vipul and I are inclusionists. This means that often, content we would like to add to Wikipedia will try to be removed by other editors. To guard against deletion, we must use lots of reliable sources.

Appearances matter a lot with Wikipedia editing, and publishing a page that, on first glance to a casual editor, looks like it is supported by a wide array of sources, is critical to increasing the odds of survival in the Wikipedia world. Of course, the page should also actually be backed by good evidence, but we want to avoid putting people on the path of suspicion.

Here are some tips on finding and using reliable sources:

• First, try to use Google to search for the topic you are writing about, both with and without quotes.
• Search using Google News.
• Use Google operators such as “site:” and “filetype:”. For instance, you might try “site:.edu” or “filetype:pdf”.
• If you have access to journals, check for papers or ebooks there.
• If you are writing about an organization or company, it’s important to not make it sound like their website. Therefore it is important to limit your use of their official website in the article (though it’s good to read their site to get an idea of how they present themselves).

Citing sources

It’s important to cite at least one source for each claim. In the source editor markup, the way to do this is:

<ref>{{cite web |url= |title= |author= |date= |publisher= |accessdate=}}</ref>

where each of the empty fields is filled with information about the source. Note that accessdate isn’t actually about the source, but rather the date on which you accessed the source.

If you would like the accessdate field to automatically be filled with the current date, you can instead use:

{{safesubst:#tag:ref|{{cite web |url= |title= |author= |date= |publisher= |accessdate={{subst:Today (mdy)}}}}}}

If you are curious, you can read about the details here.

If citations appear near punctuation marks, they should appear immediately after the punctuation mark. In particular, there should not be a space between the citation and the punctuation mark.

A common question is whether it’s okay to cite the same source more than once. This is completely fine! However, in order to prevent the same source from appearing more than once in the references section (thus cluttering it up), you must define a name for such sources. Suppose the name for a source is some_source. Then for the first citation, you would write

<ref name="some_source">...</ref>

and for all the others you can write just

<ref name="some_source" />

If the source you are citing is in print or a PDF, please include the page numbers in your citations. There are various ways to do this, but I recommend the {{rp}} template. You can use it in the source editor like this:

<ref name="some_source">...</ref>{{rp|3}}

or if there are multiple citations for the same source:

<ref name="some_source" />{{rp|3}}

Both citations indicate that the information is from page 3.

Copying

ETA: The situation here is now more complicated since the copied content doesn’t stay inside Wikipedia.

Since content on Wikipedia is licensed under a ShareAlike license, it’s okay to copy content from another Wikipedia article onto your own as long as you provide proper attribution to the original article. Here, “proper attribution” usually means linking back to the original article in your edit summary; see “Copying within Wikipedia” for details.

In fact, I often like doing this and starting from a paragraph (or more) from another article rather than from scratch. (I will even say that the first step in writing a new page is to scour Wikipedia for similar articles or articles that mention your topic.)

However, be careful about trying to copy content from outside of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is fairly strict about copyright issues, so unless the content is licensed under a Wikipedia-friendly license, it’s generally not okay to copy things verbatim.

I should be clear that there is not necessarily a moral issue with plagiarism (which is something that school often cares about). The issue can be made sense of in purely practical terms: we want more Wikipedia pages, and Wikipedia pages with non-permissive copyrighted content are more likely to be deleted (or have large parts of them removed), so we want to avoid such content in the first place.

An article template

ETA: For timelines, this template can be used instead.

The following is a bare-bones template you could use for a new article:

'''Page title''' is ...

==See also==

==References==

{{reflist|30em}}

A couple things to note:

• Wikipedia automatically adds the page title to the top of the page based on the URL of the page, so you do not need to add it.
• Since Wikipedia’s automatic page title takes the first level heading, you should not use a first level heading, denoted as =heading=. All of your headings should start at the second level, denoted as ==heading==, as in the template above.

For most articles, there will be similar articles that you can borrow the structure from. For instance, we’ve written a lot of tax forms pages, which all have a similar structure.

Capitalization

In article titles and section headings, only the first word is capitalized, unless a word is a proper noun. You can verify that this is the case in the Timeline of global health. Notice how “global health” is not capitalized in the title, and how “picture” is not capitalized in “Big picture”.

Payment

• Payment can be done through multiple methods at multiple intervals of time. Vipul can elaborate more on this.

• For a list of payments made by Vipul by method and year, see here.

• Completely separately from Vipul’s payment, you may also be independently funded by others for the same output (i.e. payment is non-exclusive).

Other

• If you are based in the United States: Vipul does not pay you in the course of a trade or business, so he is not required to send you a Form 1099, nor are you required to send him a Form W-9. However this does not mean you do not need to pay taxes on money you earn from editing Wikipedia. You will likely want to figure out the tax and reporting implications at some point.

• Let me know if you need any help on anything! I can be reached via Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/riceissa (which might be better for more synchronous communication) or via email at riceissa@gmail.com.