Help:Introduction to Wikipedia

Introduction to contributing to Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. Since 2001, it has grown rapidly to become the world's largest reference website, with 0 million articles in English attracting billions of views every month. For a more detailed account of the project, see About Wikipedia.

How you can contribute

Don't be afraid to edit – Anyone can edit almost every page; just find something that can be improved and make it better! You can add content (using references to support your claims), upload free-to-use images, correct spelling and grammar mistakes, improve prose to make it more readable, or help with any number of other tasks. It's normal for new contributors to feel a little overwhelmed by all of our policies, but don't worry if you don't understand everything at first; it's fine to use common sense as you edit, and if you accidentally mess something up, another editor can always fix or improve it later. So go ahead, edit an article and help make Wikipedia the world's best information source!

Suggest improvements – Each article also has a "Talk" page, where you can suggest improvements and corrections to the article.

Donate – Wikipedia is free to use and edited entirely by volunteers, but it relies on donations to keep the servers running. Please consider donating to help fund the project's maintenance and development costs.

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Sign up for an account

You're welcome to edit anonymously, but there are many benefits of registering an account. It's quick and free.

Sign up

Why not try out the editor right now?

You can test out how editing feels by editing one of the "sandbox" test pages below:

Edit page visually or Edit using wiki markup Edit page visually or Edit using wiki markup

Just type some text and click Publish page when you're happy with the way it looks. Don't worry about breaking anything; these pages are open areas for experimentation.

There's plenty more behind the scenes

Wikipedia has many community pages in addition to its articles.

Task Center – List of tasks with which you can help
Help pages – Support and advice
Community portal – The hub for editors

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