3) Creating information using Wikipedia

  Creating information using Wikipedia


Wikipedia is a storehouse of information in order to access information the user need not have an account in WikiPedia. On the other hand if a user wants to create wiki pages then there has to be a Wiki account. To access wikipedia, type the URL www.wikipedia.org in the address bar.  The contents of this encyclopedia can be viewed in various languages. Choose the language English from the home page.

The main page of Wikipedia is displayed.

Creating an Account in Wikipedia

Steps involved as under:

 1: To create an account in Wikipedia, click on Create Account .

 2. Enter the required details in the form that appears. If you have not created your email id, you may  leave it blank as it is an optional field.Thereafter click on Create your account button.

Creating an article in Wikipedia

Wikipedia consists of numerous articles. Anyone who has created an account on Wikipedia can contribute by creating and uploading their articles on Wikipedia. The tool that helps to create an article is Sandbox. It is a page designed for testing and experimenting.

To create an article using sandbox in Wikipedia follow the steps given below:

1. Visit Wikipedia Main page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) and Click Login.

2. Enter Username and Password and Click Login button.

3. Click Sandbox.

4. The Source editing page of Sand box is displayed. Start typing in the area highlighted with red colour box. (The formatting of the text can be done using various tools on the formatting toolbar.)

5. Write the brief summary of changes done in Edit Summary text box.

6. Click Show Preview to view the page or Click Show Changes to compare the versions of the page.

7. Once the page is complete, click Save Page option to save the page.

8. After saving the page switch from Source editing to Visual Editing. For this click on Edit icon and then choose Switch to Visual Editing option. Using this option, various formatting features, hyperlinks, audio and video files can also be inserted in your article.

The status bar appears that shows the progress of the Switch Process.

Once the switching is complete, the Visual editing page is displayed with a notification message saying You have switched to visual editing.

9. To insert  links of other wiki articles. Select the word on which hyperlink is to be created and click the Hyperlink icon.

Type the address of the target page in the text box and click on Done button. The hyperlink will be inserted in the Wiki page.

10. To add sources of information like books, newspapers and website, click Cite button and specify the URL of the resource to be added to the Wiki page.

11. To add media files / resources to the Wiki page,  click Insert -> Media option.

After typing the keyword for the images to be searched, select the image to be inserted from the list of images. The selected image will pop up on the screen. Click Use this Image on the top right of the pop up.

The Media Settings pop up will appear. Type the Caption and click on Insert button on the top right corner.

The image will be inserted in the Wiki page. Click Save Changes button to save the Wiki page.