Becoming A Wikipedian

So the first and possibly most meaningful thing I took from training to be a wikipedian is “to be bold”. Editing wikipedia pages and creating new articles is a collaborative process between other editors, and wiki experts, so any mistake (some more challenging that others to fix) can be rectified. Even when adding citations and editing pages, I noticed that even though wikipedia has a large catalog and diversity in articles, there is always something that can added or new work to be done. Through completing training, I learned many things that would be very beneficial for future wikipedia editing. First is that every article has a talk page. Here other wikipedians and editors can give constructive criticism on what is missing and what is needed in order to make the article better. In the talk page you can also put your contributions to editing the article, as well as when publishing (will show in the history), as a common curtesy to let the primary writer know what was changed and why. I also learned that when drafting new pages on wikipedia you can write it in your sandbox first, this will allow you to lay out your page properly without publishing it. Something else that I learned was how to link key words to other related wiki pages, this adding to the strength and related information for better understanding your wiki article. Lastly, anything written has to be cited. This includes credible unbiased sources which include journals, textbooks, peer-reviewed articles, and not blogs, newspaper articles or biased sources.