Wikimedia TV/How To

How to create a new entry

This is a guide to some things you should know before creating your first encyclopedia article.

1. Be bold.
2. Sign in with your account. If you do not have an account, you should create one. (Unregistered users can write articles using the Wikipedia:Articles for creation process, but users who register and sign in can create articles much more easily.)
3. Please don't create pages about yourself or your friends, pages that advertise, or personal essays.
4. Be careful about: copying things, controversial material, redundant articles, extremely short articles, and local-interest articles.

How to deal with a heated debate

Negotiate

Negotiation is a cooperative process whereby participants try to find a solution which meets the legitimate interests of both parties, which in the context of Wikipedia usually involves appropriate mention of all points of view in an article thus improving the quality of the article. Compromising or "splitting the difference" is generally inappropriate if it means departure from generally recognized points of view, both of which need to be included to achieve neutral point of view. However, this should not stop participants from finding compromises that provide a balanced presentation.

How to upload a file

Determine image copyright status

Determine which Image copyright tag is applicable for your image file.

Free license images

After looking over the Wikipedia:Copyright and Image copyright tags pages, you determine that the image is public domain or other free license (e.g. GFDL, Creative Commons), then you may upload it to Wikimedia Commons. This is a shared repository for images and other media files. Images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons can easily be used here on English Wikipedia as well as by other language Wikipedias and Sister projects (the [[Image:]] tag will find Wikimedia Commons images as if they were stored on Wikipedia). Another advantage of Wikimedia Commons is its category system that helps to organize and make images easy to find. An important caveat to Wikimedia Commons is that they do not accept fair use images.

Fair use images

If the image you need to upload is not under a free license, but meets fair use, then you may upload it directly to English Wikipedia. Remember that fair use images are not allowed to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, but are allowed through direct upload to English Wikipedia. In addition to fair use images, it is possible to upload any image directly to Wikipedia; though, doing so lacks some advantages of Commons.

How to upload

You can upload an image by using the Upload file link in the toolbox, which is a link to Special:Upload. On most browsers, you will see a "Browse..." button, which will bring up your operating system's standard file open dialog. Choosing a file will fill the name of that file into the text field next to the button. You must also check the box affirming that you are not violating any copyrights by uploading the file. Press the "Upload" button to finish the upload. This may take some time if you have a slow Internet connection.

Note that some licenses, such as the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License v. 2.5, require that licensees attribute the work as specified by the copyright holder. After uploading, you may need to manually edit the "Licensing" section. For this example, you would add the correct attribution as a parameter to the {{Cc-by-sa-2.5}} template, which would then appear as: