Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/New College of Florida/Work Organization and Its Alternatives (Spring 2015)

Sandboxes and training

Hi folks, I'm Adam Hyland, a content expert for the Wiki Education Foundation. I'll be providing some online support for your class this term. It looks like some students have already started editing, but some may be very new to wikipedia editing. If you are new, don't worry, everyone has to start sometime!

I'd like to point everyone to the interactive training we have developed, which will help you get the hand of the editing interface as well as some of the conventions and practices we have on wikipedia. Other students have found the training very helpful and in general classes where most of the students do the training tend to be a lot more successful than those who don't.

When you're done with that you may still feel nervous about directly editing an article. Or you may want to create a brand new article but want to work on it without someone closely scrutinizing your individual edits. In any case, you can work in your "sandbox" page (you may read a bit about sandboxes if you like), which you can always reach from the user links at the top of the page when you are logged in (the ones that have "talk", "sandbox", "Preferences", etc.) Or by going to a page like User:Adam (Wiki Ed)/sandbox (where your username is in place of mine). Working in the sandbox allows you to play with formatting, dump lists of sources, see how images look, all without worrying about being reverted for trying anything you want.

If you are interested in making a big expansion to an existing article, you can copy the code on the target article (what's in the edit window, not the rendered page) in to your sandbox. When you are done adding the content you can take a look at our guide (PDF) on how to add your changes to the article.

If at any point you have questions about this you can contact me on my talk page or you can email me (adamwikiedu.org). I'm happy to answer questions and offer help where I can. Thanks, Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:37, 13 May 2015 (UTC)