Wikipedia talk:Tip of the day
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[edit] This is the tip of the day project
To display the tip of the day on your user page, read the Tip of the day tip.
To browse the tip collection, see the complete list of tips.
This project is responsible for developing and maintaining the tip of the day templates which are displayed throughout Wikipedia, and the collection of tips that are displayed by those templates.The tip of the day appears on Wikipedia's Help page, on the Wikipedia:Community Portal, and on many user pages too.
[edit] Project procedures
Here is how this works:
- Those who would like to participate in this project should place the {{totd-tomorrow}} on their user page, which is a template that displays tomorrow's tip of the day (for monitoring purposes) as well as this project's task list (announcement box).
- Submit new entries on this page, below.
- Please help prepare the new entries below by proofreading and editing the tips for factual accuracy, clarity, readability, and proper formatting.
- The goal of this project is to provide tips and advice for making Wikipedia easier to use, and to help users participate in Wikipedia more effectively.We shall make power users of them all!
- Toward this end, we collect useful wikitips wherever we can find them. Do you know an expert on some aspect of Wikipedia's operations? Please ask them to record their favorite techniques on this page (below).
- On the project page is a list of links to subpages, titled by date. Each subpage either has or will have a single Wikipedia tip stored in it.
- This project's templates automatically display the contents of the subpage with the current date. (Templates are pages that get displayed on other pages, duplicated like boilerplate.) The tip of the day is displayed on Help:Contents and Wikipedia:Community Portal.
- When you believe an entry is polished and ready, move it up to the ready to post section, for somebody else to post to the subpages.
- Move entries from the ready to post section (that you actually agree are ready to post) to the tip schedule. To do this, you may replace any tip on the schedule that is a rerun (check the previous dates of the current year's schedule, and the archives). Be careful not to replace new tips. If you feel an entry in Ready to post is not ready, move it back down to New entries. Do not post to subpages the entries that you placed in the Ready to post section (unless you are a veteran of this project and have a feel for what makes a good tip). This ensures that each entry is given final approval by at least two editors.
- Entries that are not worthy of this project get moved down to not suitable.Generally, this means that the subject matter doesn't fit here, or the tip is complete nonsense.Include a little message as to why, and your sig.
- If you see an entry under "not suitable" that you agree is not worthy of this project (due to inappropriate subject matter), then delete it from this page.But please do not delete entries that you placed there.This again ensures that at least 2 editors are involved in the decision.
- Keep an eye on the tip schedule. Proofread tips in the queue before they become today's tip! Many tips are reruns, so each tip needs to be checked for relevance before it is displayed on the template(s). We don't want to display tips about things that no longer exist, for instance.
[edit] User boxes
User boxes for Wikipedian tipsters.
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{{user tipster}}
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{{user tipster2}}
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{{user tipster3}}
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[edit] Required formatting
Formatting required for entries: see the Wikipedia:Tip of the day/February 21 entry for the format.In order to allow users with table-formatted user pages to display the tip of the day template without it messing up their page, please do not include headings in the tips.Instead, we'll have to do this the old-fashioned way with <center><big>'''Tip title'''</big></center>.Each entry should also include a link for users to be able to read more about the topic, if such a link exists.And of course don't forget the tip itself, which should take just a paragraph, or two at the most.(These are tips, not treatises).The best tips are one sentence long.
[edit] Some good places to find ideas for tips
And one last tip for you tipsters:Have fun! The Transhumanist 14:03, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Ready to post - individual tips
Looking for a group of people interested in editing specific types of articles? Try joining a WikiProject! A WikiProject is a way to collaborate with a group of editors for many articles in a specific topic, create guidelines for those articles, and much more. A list of WikiProjects that you can join is available at the directory.
Want to stay up to date on the latest level of vandalism going on around Wikipedia? Include this useful template on your user page so that you can see the current level of vandalism and help keep Wikipedia clean!
Read more: Template:Wdefcon
Use your userpage to do stuff you can't normally do on Wikipedia. Try out techniques, have userboxes, try out your template skills, and make a userpage worthy of Wikipedia!
Have a difficult question? Want to take a break from editing and share your knowledge with others? Take a trip to the Reference Desk to ask or answer the tough questions.
Read more: Wikipedia:Reference desk
If you are stumped on what to edit next, try using User:SuggestBot. They, however, need to know what you've edited previously.
As a general guideline, do not create an auto-biography article. Also, if a notable article about you is created by someone else, do not edit it directly. Instead, contribute information about yourself on the talk page. Feel free to correct mistaken or out-of-date facts.
Read more: Wikipedia:Auto-biography
Do you sometimes make edits, without realising that you weren't logged in? There is an easy way to avoid this. Log in, go to preferences, and choose a different skin. Or change the quickbar so it is on a different part of the page. That way, it's obvious straight away whether you are logged in or not. E.g. you may wish to use the Cologne Blue skin.
If another Wikipedian uses the same computer and likes the same skin, one of you could place the quickbar on the right hand side so that it's obvious who is logged in.
Read more: Wikipedia:Customisation#Skins
If you use Opera 9, you can add some tools to help you search Wikipedia.
- Create a custom search: Right-click your mouse in Wikipedia's search box, and select "Create search." You can add a keyword such as "wp," so in future you can search by entering "wp Ziggy Stardust" or "wp Amy Smith," without having to bring up the Wikipedia page first. You can also
- You can also add a search box to the toolbar. I can't remember just now how to do it - need to complete this later. --Singkong2005 talk 15:13, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
- Add a button that lets you search any website with Google. When you're in Wikipedia, you may find this a more powerful search than the standard Wikipedia search. Power Buttons - Search Site With Google.
Read more: Wikipedia:Tools/Browser tools/Opera
If you click on a user's name, you can view their user page. If the user exists, there should be a "User contributions" link in the sidebar. This link will show you all the edits that user has ever made, up to 500 per page. Edits with a "top" link are the most recent ones to that particular article. If you click the link you will see exactly which changes the user has made. This is useful for tracking vandalism in progress. The "hist" link will show the history of the page. You have your own contributions list, which is particularly useful for tracking your conversations on talk pages. If you are logged in, you can access the list from the "My contributions" link in the sidebar.
To help keep track of your discussions on talk pages, you may wish to place the {{Discussion tracker}} template to your talk page.
Read more: Help:User contributions
Wikipedia is one of several projects organized under the Wikimedia non-profit foundation. There is also Wikibooks, a collection of
Someone seems to've broken this entry. :-( — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 15:39, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
With this trick you can look up any Wikipedia article directly from any web page by merely highlighting the word you want to know more about and clicking a button! Use the javascript below as a link on your browser toolbar. Make sure you get it all on one line, a simple Copy/Paste will probably only get the first line:
- javascript:q = %22%22 + (window.getSelection ? window.getSelection() : document.getSelection ? document.getSelection() : document.selection.createRange().text); if (!q) q = prompt(%22Enter a Wikipedia topic:%22, %22%22); /* if (q!=null) { location=%22http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22 + escape(q).replace(/ /g, %22+%22);} void 0; */ if (q!=null) { WindowObjectReference = window.open(%22http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22 + escape(q).replace(/ /g, %22+%22), %22DescriptiveWindowName%22, %22resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,status=yes%22); } void 0;
Now, when you highlight any word on a webpage and click this link, a new window will open up with the Wikipedia article for that word! You can also change the URL and have the link take you to Wiktionary definitions, or even perform a Google search on the term (put in "http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=") So there it is, have fun with it!
Orgone 14:57, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] New entries
- Please add new (fresh) tips to the top of this section (the old tips which are being recycled are at the end).
Do you have workpages in your user space that give the appearance of being in article namespace? Try adding {{workpage}} to the top of that page.
Read more: Template talk:Workpage
Jreferee 22:49, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
If you've looked at your Watchlist or at Recent Changes lately, you'll notice that after each entry there is a colored number. This number represents the amount of bytes that have been either added or removed in that edit. Usually this is the same as the number of characters added or removed. Green numbers (+xx) show the number of bytes added while red numbers (-xx)show the amount of bytes removed.
Read more: Wikipedia:Added or removed characters
Harryboyles 01:44, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Although there is no spell checking available within the Wikipedia Edit Page, you can spell check anything which is in a text form (which the edit box is) if you're using the latest Google Toolbar which has a spell check option available.
Also, the 2.0 release of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, now available to the general public at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox, has automatic as-you-type spell checking in all text fields. The spell checking is turned on by default when you install the browser.
JAXHERE | Talk 19:04, 20 December 2006 (UTC) / JDG 22:24, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps the best navigation aid is one you create yourself.Your userpage can serve as a custom navigation tool: simply add the links you need most to it.Note that there are many ready-made link lists available in the form of Wikipedia:Navigational templates.
For easy access to the above link, add it to your user page.
See also: Wikipedia:Contents,
Wikipedia:Searching, and
Wikipedia:User page
Many resources are available to save you time designing your user page:
- For lists of choices, examples of wikicode, and for links to a selection of very interesting user pages, see User page design
- For personal assistance with your user page and some general help resources, see the User page help WikiProject
For easy access to the above links, add them to your user page.
Read more: Wikipedia:User page
Simply go there and type in your search term:
To make the above link easily accessible, add it to your user page.
Read more: Wikipedia:Searching
Here's a way to get Cite.php references into two columns:
<div class="references-small" style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;">
<references /></div>
Read more: Wikipedia:References
Do you find yourself working on a lot of related articles, and wishing there were some rhyme or reason to how they were written, internally organized, cross-referenced to each other, categorized in Wikipedia, and templated with useful features like sidebars? You can make it happen! WikiProjects are groups of editors with special project pages for storing guidelines, templates and to-do lists for an entire general topic area, and a Talk page for coordinating on a topic-wide basis.
Starting a WikiProject is easy: Create a page in your userspace, such as User:MyNameHere/Wikiproject Project name, put {{subst:WikiProject|Project name}} in it, and save. You now have a fill-in-the-blanks Project page. Propose your WikiProject, and recruit active editors who work on relevant articles to support the proposal and join the project.
Read more: WikiProject Council Guide
[It's too long, but it's a start. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 09:23, 23 November 2006 (UTC) ] Shortened as requested. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 15:44, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
MediaWiki, the software which runs Wikipedia, is hosted by SourceForge. The right place to support problems with the software ("bugs"), or to request new features, is the SourceForge project site, not Wikipedia. Before you submit a bug report or a feature request, check for duplicates [1], [2]. If you have broader visions for MediaWiki, Meta-Wikipedia is a good place to work on proposals, and the wikitech-l mailing list is where you can announce and discuss them.
Read more: MediaWiki project homepage
MediaWiki, the software which runs Wikipedia, is hosted by SourceForge. The right place to support problems with the software ("bugs"), or to request new features, is the SourceForge project site, not Wikipedia. Before you submit a bug report or a feature request, check for duplicates [3], [4]. If you have broader visions for MediaWiki, Meta-Wikipedia is a good place to work on proposals, and the wikitech-l mailing list is where you can announce and discuss them.
Read more: MediaWiki project homepage
User:AndyZ/peerreviewer is an automated javascript program that highlights areas for improvment for any article on Wikipedia, including sources, lack of categories or tips for uploading images to the page. To use, go to User:AndyZ/peerreviewer and follow the instructions; then, edit any article and click the "peer review" text at the page top for an instant automatic peer review!
Anthonycfc [T • C] 17:28, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Do you merge articles? Are you a translator? Do you dislike using multiple windows to look at multiple pages? If you have a capable web browser, such as Firefox or Safari, you may want try tabbed browsing within your browser window for quick and easy organization of multiple pages of information. Try using ctrl-T or apple-T to open a new tab, or search your browser's help menu to get started.
HornandsoccerTalk 04:18, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Not suitable
[edit] General discussion
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[edit] I'm not sure how this works
Something like two months ago, I wrote up a potential TotD here, and never heard anything further.Does that mean that it was considered lame and ignored, or did it move into some other process? The workflow from the intial proposal of a draft TotD, to discussion, cleanup and eventual use at a TotD or rejection isn't very clear to me. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:33, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
- No, nothing like that. It's just that the project isn't in a hurry, because tips have already been scheduled to the end of the year. But it's all very flexible. Some tips on the schedule (listed on the project page) are repeats. So we can replace those with new tips, for instance. I'll be happy to have a look at your tip submission. The Transhumanist 12:53, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
The tip is a bit long, can you edit down a bit? The Transhumanist 03:06, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
- Done. How's that? — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 15:45, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] General TOTD encyclopaedia article?
I think "tip of the day" should be an actual article, discussing the use of TOTD as a supplementary form of online help in (primarily Microsoft?) GUI applications. I was a little surprised to see it redirect to this meta-type page. 86.138.65.206 16:52, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] April 3 TOTD
The TOTD for April 3rd is about Esperanza. Since the project no longer exists, it might be a good idea to replace it. -- MarcoTolo 04:55, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Jimbo tip?
Today (or yesterday) I saw 'spam Jimbo Wales', presumably for April Fools' Day - but I cannot find it anywhere. Link, anyone? If it was not, it should be BJAODNed.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 04:10, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
- Found it.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 04:14, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
