Help:Introduction

Introduction to Wikipedia

Welcome to Wikipedia! Almost every page can be edited by anyone, and hundreds of changes are made every hour to add content, correct mistakes, and improve readability. Changes are immediately viewable to all readers and no matter how trivial an edit may seem, you can be proud to have helped make Wikipedia better.

This page takes you through a set of tutorials aimed at complete newcomers interested in contributing. It covers all the basics needed to navigate, comment on, and contribute to Wikipedia articles. There are two methods of editing: the VisualEditor, and Wiki markup. Each tutorial takes only about 10 minutes, so you could become a proficient 'Wikipedian' in under an hour!

Introduction

Policies and Guidelines

Wiki Markup is the primary editor, used by the majority of people. It shows the underlying page content, and works like a plain text file. A link to the Earth article looks like this: [[Earth]].

VisualEditor is a secondary editing interface preferred by some people. It hides the underlying Wikitext, and works more like a word processor. Links and other objects are edited using a toolbar or popup interfaces. VisualEditor has some limitations.

For more training information, see also:

Full help contents page
Training for students
A training adventure game
Resources for new editors