User:22ManzanaBoy/Guide to Wikipedia

Wait!
This guide is a work-in-progress and is not yet finished. Please wait for more updates before reading, as it is currently extremely poorly-written. If you're an editor, feel free to contribute.

Welcome to the 22ManzanaBoy Guide to Wikipedia! This guide strives to gather all introductory material into one place along with some personal thoughts, extra material, and stylistic flair. This guide is not meant to be formal, so expect some casual writing. Let's get into it!

Create an account

Creating an account is technically not mandatory, but there's little benefit in not doing so and it doesn't take long.

1. Create a username. You can have almost any user name you want, it just has to be appropriate. This activity is definitely low pressure. If you’re banned because your username was inappropriate, and only because of your username, you may create a new account.
2. Create a password. For people who've never used the internet a minute of their life, passwords are just secret codes to stop people from signing in to your account. While you may be tempted to create a password that has elements of your personal life, don't. That makes it much easier for malicious users to find your password and reveals personal information about your life if you're hacked. Don't share your password with people you don't trust.
3. Add an email address (optional). If you want, you can add an email address, which has benefits that I'll explain later. I personally recommend doing it.

There you go! Now, if you have eyes, you'll probably notice how boring Wikipedia is. For a guide on how to make it slightly less boring, click here. If you don't have eyes or any other device for vision, you can skip that guide.

No money? No problem!

If you have no money, then that really shouldn't affect anything, since Wikipedia is free. Not to be confused with freemium, a much more inconvenient form of payment (bonus points if there's loot boxes).

No, seriously. It's free of cost. Is it free of time? No. If you're truly committed (unlike me), you'll be spending a lot of time here. Hey, at least it's better than video games!

Anyone can edit, even your dog.

Even this apple can edit Wikipedia.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, which is why it grows really fast.

It also means that there's a lot of people who don't like you (and your dog), but you'll get used to it.

If you contribute to Wikipedia more than me, you're considered a Wikipedian.

Wikipedians are almost always mid-20s males since they're naturally drawn to the whole idea.

Since Wikipedians are volunteers, they're free to spend as much time as they want editing Wikipedia, whether it be 2 seconds or 10 years.

Wikipedians spend their free time editing an encyclopedia, so you can safely assume they're pretty smart people.

If you weren’t listening…

It’s actually free.

Free of cost, but also free to use.

Free to use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

What does that mean, you ask?

Share

You can copy the text anywhere.

You can even create an exact copy of Wikipedia’s text.

Adapt

You can take the text and adapt it into something ranging from slightly different to totally new.

You may be asking:

”So? What’s the point of the license? It’s totally useless!”

To this I say:

”Please, let me finish!”

There’s a very good reason for it. People aren’t THAT short-sighted.

You have responsibilities as well…

Attribution

You have to give credit to the people who made the original text, provide a link to the original text, and state if changes were made.

You can attribute the text in any way that isn’t totally off, but don’t pretend that the person who made the text actually thinks you’re a nice person.

Share Alike

If you end up changing the text, you have to use the same license.

I automatically complete this step since everything on Wikipedia is under the license, even this clunky poorly-written user essay.

No additional restrictions

You can’t impose any restrictions for things the license permits people to do.

If you don’t follow the rules, the licensor can remove your freedoms. It functions the same as any other good deal.

Of course, if anything the text used was in the public domain, you can use that without following the terms.

If there are other restrictions that apply, this license doesn’t override them. You are fully responsible for whatever happens.

I am not a legal expert and this summary could have flaws.

Work in progress

This is a quote from Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia:

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”

— Jimmy Wales

The quote is a good aspiration, but clearly, we haven't achieved this yet. To achieve this, we would have to fix a few problems.

“…every single person on the planet…”

Since you're reading this, you're probably in a place that has widely available access to the internet, but there are many places that don't (Iran, North Korea, Cuba. etc.). If people don't have access, they can't read Wikipedia, so the sum of human knowledge therefore isn't available to "every single person on the planet." This also doesn’t account for people who can’t read in any language at all, and unfortunately, fixing this problem isn’t doable inside Wikipedia.

“…free access to the sum of all human knowledge…”

Even if Wikipedia is free, internet is not, which is needed for using Wikipedia. Even if you had internet, you also need a device, which isn’t free. Getting your hands on both these things, again, needs to be done outside of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is also very limited, and definitely not even close to the sum of all human knowledge.

Unregistered users

Unregistered users can do a surprising amount of things, and even if you already registered (by creating an account), it’s good to know what they can do.

Unregistered users can read any page and edit any unprotected page (see below). They may create talk pages in the talk namespace.

Downsides of being unregistered include being identified by your IP address and the inability to upload media.

The unregistered also need to answer a CAPTCHA before they make edits that include external links (outside of Wikimedia projects).