Hello, and Welcome to the Simple English Wikipedia! Allow me to give you the jist of Wikipedia:
- Simple English
This is the Simple English wikipedia, like the ordinary English one but using words that are easy to understand. Try to use words that are on this list.
Simple English is useful for people who are learning English and also children.
Not all editors here use English as their first language, so some may struggle to understand more complex sentences. You should be fine when on talk pages though.
- Editing articles
If you see an article you wish to edit, click "change this page" at the top or "[change]" at the side. There are certain rules you should follow when writing to an article:
- Link to other articles: You should include a link to other articles to explain what you mean. If you wanted to link to the Communism article for example, you would type [[Communism]]
- Sometimes though, you might want the link to say something else. Like this. That will still link to the same article, as above, Communism. What you do here is create a piped link by typing [[Communism|this]]
- Next you may want to make text italic or bold. To do this type two apostrophes where you want italics to start, like this: ''This is all in italic text'' and for bold it is three apostrophes like this: '''This is bold text'''
- Change Summary: When you make a change, put a short description of what you have done in the Change Summary box under the edit window. For example you might say "made a link to Communism" or "added information on Karl Marx" or "fixed spelling mistake."
- Create a new article
If you go to a page which does not exist, you can write the article yourself. Just click Start this page
- Templates
If your article is quite short, add {{Stub}} at the end. If it is an article about a place use {{geo-stub}}. If it is about a person you can use {{bio-stub}}.
- Inter-Wiki Links
Usually it is a good idea to add a link to the same article in another language. To do this, type: [[en:Communism]] - Make sure the article is the same name on the other language. So you would go to the English.wikipedia version and find the article there.
- Categories
To make sure we can store and find all the articles, it is a good idea to put them all into categories. To do this, just type [[Category:Politics]] and it will slot your article into the Politics category, which you can view here.
- If you need any other help at all, do not hesitate to ask. You can leave a message for me here. You can leave messages at Simple Talk or on talk pages of other editors. Regards Kennedy (talk) 16:35, 15 January 2009 (UTC)