User:Gjjixzoh/Welcome to the Wikimedia Foundation! How to Start Contributing

(Okay, I'm bad at writing so please add and build upon this essay as much as you can.)

Hello, and welcome to The Wikimedia Foundation! Ready to join a team of Millions of people across the globe? Well you can start anytime you want to, so why not start contributing your knowledge today! If you came here directly to the Meta-Wiki, Then read this. This site is a place for documentation and coordination of a project Called the Wikimedia Foundation. If you want to contribute, please visit Wikipedia here: https://www.wikipedia.org/, for a list of our sister projects.

We need your help!

As you know, almost anyone can access WMF And edit it. This is a great thing, where thousands of people contribute every month, but a majority amount of WikiMedias citations are unreliable and outdated. Not everyone can access Wikimedia, because we do not have enough languages, and a majority of our translations are very poor. There are thousands of vandals making inappropriate edits to our project. So, we need your help to give your contributions and clean up this part of the Wikimedia Foundation, and give more people more access to more knowledge, Which is the main goal of the project. So when you make an edit to a Wikimedia article, thousands, possibly millions of people get too see your edits, and they will then refer to your page in other articles. They will share it with social media, redistribute your work etc. and then the world just becomes a better place. You can even edit this essay to contribute! So go, Go save the world by typing on a keyboard! For help editing visit Help:Wikitext here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help%3AWikitext

How You can Contribute to the Wikimedia Foundation

Translations If you know multiple languages, The WikiMedia Foundation greatly appreciates translations for articles. This means more people can get access to more knowledge, which is the main goal of WMF.

Corrections Grammar, Spelling, Typos, and Layout corrections or improvements are an easy way to help and contribute your work to WMF.

Check if sources are reliable See if the article is reliable and trustworthy for your work.

Students If you are a student and you would like to contribute to Wikimedia, this would be greatly appreciated. If you are , I would advise that you go to Wikiversity or Wikibooks to edit, because they have real College course material.

How to Find Reliable Sources for your Work

On the internet, there are actual millions of unreliable sources, So you need to pay attention to every little detail and see everything as obscure and suspicious. You should :

1. Look for names, and research if they are actually licensed in the particular field of the pages subject.

2. Look for any sources which the article is based on.If the site does not include citations, well I don't know.

3. Always look for extremely defined detail in the article.Look up if the sites facts are correct, See where the site came from. Is it from a site with a collection of articles about a particular topic? If so, is the site altogether reliable?

4. Check if the article is up to date

Okay, Let's do an example with a real article and evaluate if this is a fully credible source. There's this page called: "Here's what it's REALLY Like to work For the FBI". This is a source from a website with a collection of numerous articles (see item №-3) Called " Business Insider ". I've looked at a few other sites here, and there is a large amount of credible material as well as unreliable/outdated material, So I am going to say this article should not be used for papers and essays.

How Does this Help Me?

You're probably saying, How does this help me? Well if you want a reason why, then the answer is this : When you make a page or edit, Other Wikimedians will come around and build upon and edit your work, which leads to more knowledge you have access to. Which in return lets you edit more pages, and so on. And it is even kind of fun to do! But the reason of Wikimedia is not to give advantage to yourself; It is to be charitable and give more people access to your work. Is is to know that someone, wherever they are, whoever they are, has read what you have made, and that's just the best thing.