Shalor (Wiki Ed)'s profile - activity

I need help adding citations and references. How do I add a references section? How do I add an in-article citation? I can't figure it out using the Visual Editor. How do I edit a source?

Hi! Your students can enroll in Dashboard by following the directions here. Please let us know us if you have any questions or if the students are trying these directions but aren't able to log in.

I want to create a new page in my userspace/sandbox. How do I do that?

My class has a lot of students and Wikipedia has told us that only six new accounts can be created each day per IP address. How can I get around this? I've heard that there is a way to create multiple accounts at once without going through this.

Per Wikipedia, close paraphrasing is the superficial modification of material from another source. In other words, it refers to a situation like this one:

Source: The poem Little Miss Muffett first appeared in print in 1805, in a book titled Songs for the Nursery. Like many such rhymes, its origins are unclear.

Close paraphrasing: Little Miss Muffett first appeared in published form in 1805, in a tome named Songs for the Nursery. Akin to other old rhymes, its origins are uncertain.

For the example I only changed only a few superficial things, such as the first few words of the source sentence were removed and I used some synonyms for the words "print" and "book". This is an example of what not to do with source material.

A better way to rephrase this would be something along the lines of "The authorship and creation date of the poem Little Miss Muffett is unclear, a common issue with many nursery rhymes, however the earliest known publication of the poem dates to the 1805 book Songs for the Nursery. Re-writing it this way does sacrifice a little brevity, however it's different enough from the source material to where it wouldn't be considered plagiarism.

Re-writing content isn't always easy or in some cases, really possible without close paraphrasing. WP:LIMITED gives a number of examples of this. The basic gist of this is that it's OK to do this when you are dealing with simple factual statements such as "John was born in X on 1/2/2017" or technical terms. To a degree lists can also fall under this criteria as well.

You can also review our training module on plagiarism copyright violation for information on this as well!

Related questions

• How do I report plagiarism?

For information generally about finding and assigning articles for your students to access from the Articles tab, see our "Finding Articles" training here.

For information about re-assigning or unselecting a topic, see our reply here.

Student view

Students can assign themselves articles from the "available articles" list by choosing "select" next to the topic of their choice on the Articles tab of their course page.

Once an article is selected, it is automatically removed from the list of "available articles" and is assigned to the student on the Students tab and in the "assigned articles" list (see above and below for examples of how the article moves).

Instructor view

The instructor view of this page is different, as instructors are able to add or remove topics to the list of "available articles". You can read more about how to add articles to this list here. You can read more about manually assigning topics to your students from the Students tab here.

For more information about how to populate the "available articles" list, see our answer here.

Related questions

• How can I unassign an article?
• How do I reassign an article?

As of May 2016 all new Wikipedia accounts will have the source editor automatically enabled. If you created your account after this point, you may need to take some extra steps to enable the VisualEditor. If the VisualEditor is enabled on your account, you will see "edit" and "edit source" as options on Wikipedia articles. If not, follow the following steps to enable it.

Click on edit to use the VisualEditor and click on edit source to use wiki code. If you do not see "edit source," then follow these steps to make sure you have the VisualEditor enabled.

1. Make sure you are logged into your Wikipedia account.
2. Click on "preferences".
3. Click on the "editing" tab.
4. MAKE SURE "Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta" is not checked.
5. On the "Editing Mode" drop-down, you can select your editing mode as shown below.
6. Click "save."

You may select "Show me both editor tabs" so that when you load a Wikipedia article, you should see both the "edit" and "edit source" options.

Hi! There are several ways that you can find a good article to work on! We also have a module that can help you find an article, which you can find here.

One of the first things you should do is look at the topics you're studying in class. Are there any major topics that stand out to you? Any terms? Try looking them up on Wikipedia to see if they have an article. If so, could the article be improved and expanded? If not, are there enough sources out there that cover the topic to justify a new article?

You can also find article ideas by looking through category pages. You can find categories at the bottom of an article. Clicking on a category will bring up a page containing all of the articles that have that specific category on their page. For example, the article on business ethics is also in the category "business ethics". Clicking on this will bring up a variety of articles that you could select. One caution about choosing articles - the more complete they are, the harder it might be to find a way to expand and improve it.

Finally, you can also find ideas on the requested pages section on Wikipedia, which is broken down by topic area. These are articles suggested by others, so some of these may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines, but it's still a good place to look for ideas.

I hope this helps!

That's a very good question! Sources do not have to be open access, so you can feel free to use sourcing hosted by databases that require fees to access, as well as other sources. They can even be offline sources! Just make sure to remember to add a complete citation (author name, title, journal title, pages, ISBN or DOI, etc) for the material so that people can track down and read the source if they wished.

There are other things to remember when searching for sources, such as

• What makes for a "reliable source"?
• What is the difference between a primary and secondary source?

It's also a good idea to review the module on editing medical topics if you are editing anything that falls under or brushes close to the topic of science and medicine, as it also gives some excellent tips on sourcing. Of course if you ever have a question you can also approach your Wikipedia Content Expert or post a question here as well.

Hi! It looks like there was an update that temporarily caused this to happen. It should be fixed, so it should not impact you now.

Hi Matt,

I'll respond to you via e-mail!

Adding a citation or reference

Start by clicking "Edit" in your Sandbox or on the live article. Then click "Cite."

This will bring up a dialog box where you can drop in a URL link, book ISBN, or DOI, then hit "generate" to create a citation. You can also add a citation manually by hitting the "manual" tab of the dialog box, which will bring up the options to manually create a book, journal, newspaper, or website citation.

Clicking any of these will bring up a new box with specific fields to enter, such as title, page number, issue number (for journals), and so on. Whichever way you choose to enter the citation, be it manual or automatic, after completing the citation make sure that you select "insert" to insert it into the article or draft.

Once you've made your citation you can review it. If it looks correct, click "Save Changes" and add an edit summary and your citation should be live!

Adding a references section

References will typically show up at the bottom of your article by default as long as you've added in-line citations, however to get them to show up like they do in live articles you need to add a section title called "References" with the main Heading format. Directly under this section you need to add a references template - there are a few different templates you can use, such as {{reflist}} or <references/>. If you are adding this template via VisualEditor you will produce this template by going to the insert tab and selecting the option to add a template, then writing "reflist". Once added, the template should look like this prior to saving the page:

Editing a source

To edit a source to add missing information, you must be in edit mode. Clicking on the source will bring up the citation, along with an edit button:

Click on the edit button. This will bring up several fields. If the field you want is present, fill it out with the necessary information.

If you don't see the field that you are looking for, scroll down the pop up box until you get to the end. You'll see an option to add more information. Clicking on this will bring up a search field where you can look for the desired field. Once you see the field you want, click on it - this will bring it up as a field you can fill out.

Once you have added the desired information, click on the "apply changes" button on the top right side of the citation box. This will add your changes to the citation.

You can read more about adding section headers here. You can learn more about templates here.

Hi!

In cases where you have more than one person by the same name, you can create an article with some sort of description after their name. So for example, if we have two Zeng Jings then the second article can be titled "Zeng Jing (character)", as you've stated that it's a historical character. If you have more than one fictional character by the same name, you can name them after the author or work, such as "Zeng Jing (author's name)".

For living people (or people who are no longer living), you can title the article after the era they lived in "Zeng Jing (Qin dynasty)" or after their occupation "Zeng Jing (politician)".

Visual Editor

To create a new section using VisualEditor, click the "edit" tab on your chosen page, be it sandbox or article. I have both VisualEditor and source enabled, so I have two tabs for each version. I recommend doing this because it makes it easier to switch between the two.

Once in edit mode, click in the area you want your header to appear and enter the header text. Next, go to the taskbar and select the dropdown menu. This menu gives you a variety of headers that you can use on your page. To create a basic header, select "Header".

This will give you a blank line - all you need to do now is enter the header text. Alternatively, you can click on a line of text and do the above steps to turn a line of text into a header.

You can also create subheaders the same way.

Source mode

If you prefer source mode, you can create a new section by entering in the following text:

==New section==

This will create a header similar to the one above. To create subheadings you add an additional equals sign to each side, like this:

===Subsection===

You can continue adding equals signs to create subsections within subsections - test it out in your sandbox!

Now if you want to know how to create a new section on a talk page, you can use the above directions for source mode, but it's easier to click the "new section" tab at the top, which will open up a new section for you.

*How do I enable the VisualEditor on my account? - How do I create a subheading?

How do I create a new section in my sandbox, article, or talk page?

The reason that some students may only see one version over the other is that Wikipedia's default setting is to remember the last editor that the account used. So for instance, if a student edits an article in source mode, it will then default to editing in source mode. Since article and user talk pages can only be edited in source mode, it's not uncommon for an account to default to source editor.

However students can enable both editors on their account by adjusting the settings in their account preferences. We have some directions on this here.