Welcome. You know what Wikipedia is. It's a free online encyclopedia, a big Web site with millions of pages for reference, without advertising. Web search for a topic usually brings you there pretty quickly. Wikipedia is also the encyclopedia anyone can edit. What, anyone? But, doesn't that make chaos? No, not entirely. We have teamwork, mostly.
Who is Wikipedia? edit
Anyone with a Web connection can edit Wikipedia; just click on "Edit" at the top of a page. You may have heard the joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Well, what if people who wanted to be on the committee simply chose themselves? No application form, no qualification for membership. No definite membership list; no fixed number of members. Anyone can go in, unannounced, and change a bit. And they do that all the time. Yes, that's who makes Wikipedia.
Millions have done this, so there are millions of Wikipedians. However, not equally much. Participation varies; most of those millions don't edit every year. They make a few changes to a few articles in a few days and that's enough. Tens of thousands add and change things every few weeks, creating more text than those millions make. Thousands go even further; we make a hobby of it, checking and improving a few little things in Wikipedia almost every day.
Not equally in some other ways, too. Anybody with Web access can edit some 99.9% of Wikipedia articles, but for the remaining bits you need an account. Also an account gives you extra powers. You can watch pages for bad changes, and undo them with a click. It's kind of like "follow" or "friend" on a social network. Watching is how checkers catch advertising, bad grammar, imbalance, sensationalism, hoaxes, whatever, before many people have read them. The majority, anyway; some junk gets through and WP will never be perfect. Nobody is. You get an account by clicking on "Account" in the upper right and answering a few questions. Nothing intrusive like your age, sex or country. And no, there isn't someone to approve your account. You are instantly one of the millions of registered editors.
Who is Wikimedia New York City (WMNYC)? edit
First, Wikimedia? Wikipedia? What's the difference? The Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco is host to a big complex of Websites, of which the most famous are the almost 300 Wikipedias (There's an awful lot of languages in the world). Besides those, the sites include one that supplies pictures and other media to all of them. There are also ones for tourism, taxonomy, and several other specialties. English Wikipedia is merely the biggest and most famous of those associated Wiki Websites.
WMNYC is the local Chapter of Wiki-editors, kind of a club but more formal. We started meeting a dozen years ago to chat about our hobby. Eventually, somebody came up with the bright idea that we should recruit and teach new editors. This idea eventually became the edit-athons that we do, some thirty times a year. We get a bunch of interested people in a room with their laptops, give a speech or lecture inviting them to pick an article that needs improvement or maybe creation, and coach them through the process.
Editing edit
Just click "Edit" at the top of the page, we said. Well, making a success of the thing is more complex than that. Minor problem, there's a vast array of official Policies, Standards, Guidelines, usual practices and similar things, that say they're not rules but the distinction is not very real. That problem is minor, because nobody can understand most of the rules or expects to. If you study them enough, you will discover rules that flatly contradict each other.
There are also thousands of watchers. Some of us watch thousands of articles. When we see a change we check it and undo it if it's bad. We give an explanation usually, and you can try again another way. Since anyone can edit, the rules can't say what anyone can add or subtract. Only what ought to stay. Some of us understand only a few of the rules; others have studied many. Editors are expected to try something, get corrected, and discuss it to figure out a way. Which is to say, it's collaborative, and sort of like a social network site except it's focused on the encyclopedia and not on us, our lives, or our feelings.
For help at a live event like an edit-athon, speak to whoever's next to you. If that doesn't help, raise your hand and someone will give it a try. There is also help when you're home alone. For one thing, clicking "Help" in the left-hand column of the page will lead you to plenty of information about how to edit. If it's a more specific question about a particular article, every article has a Talk Page. Click Talk at the top of the article, and New Section, and ask. Naturally you can't expect an immediate answer; sometimes only hundreds of experienced editors are online, and maybe they aren't paying attention or ready to answer you quickly. So, check again, hours and days later.
For a little preliminary editing, see your name at the top of the page. Click that, and it will be like creating a new article, except this one is about what you have done or hope to do in Wikipedia. There won't be much checking by other editors, and Web searches will seldom find it. You can experiment, making mistakes and fixing them without harming an existing article.
Disagreement edit
Anybody can change Wikipedia, and anyone can change it back, or change it to something else. Someone's competence in a topic may be deep, or slight, or imaginary. These differences sometimes bring disagreements on the right things for an article to say and how to say them. What to do? Discuss it. We do a lot of discussing. Mostly that's on the Talk Page of the article. Sometimes it's on your own User Talk Page or somewhere else. If you disagree with someone else's change, better to seek discussion than change it back. If nobody answers you in the Talk Page, then it's probably okay to change back. Discussions usually go slowly; check back in a few days.
Controversial topics such as current events or politicians will have a livelier talk page; better look more often if you want to keep up. But hot and heavy topics are better handled by editors who have already suffered a few disputes. Persistently improper tactics in disputes are one way to be blocked temporarily from editing, so if you don't understand the accepted ways (they're complicated) then don't persist with a method that has failed in the past. Persistence pays, or it can pay if you're thoughtful about it.
With thousands of rules, nobody knows them all, so innocent failures to follow them will just be quietly corrected or undone. However, rules are especially tight for biographies of the living.
Thousands of experienced editors are ready to help you, but with millions of articles, we are spread thin. One place to seek help is in the Teahouse. That's at Wikipedia:Teahouse. You can also try the Talk Pages of editors you know, for example ones you met at an edit-athon or during online discussions in other article Talk Pages. And come to meetups of WMNYC and ask.