Wikipedia:How do I do this
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How do I do this ...
Q. How do I edit a page?
A. See How to edit a page. A link to this help text also appears as "Editing Help" below the text area when editing a page.
Q. How do I delete a page, especially one of my own?
A1. Consideration for others demands that you exercise extreme caution in doing so, if the page in question isn't one that you started, or is one to which many others have contributed something of interest. But, strictly speaking, there's nothing stopping you: all you have to do is remove the text from the page. You can also click on the link that says "Pages that link here" at the top of the page to see what other pages link to the deleted page, and delete links to it. Again, extreme caution is advised ... and you can make use of the bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page.
A2. Usually (but not always), rather than deleting a page, the page should be redirected somewhere useful. If someone writes a nice article on 'JFK' it should be moved to 'John F Kennedy' (or similar) and a redirect put in place. If someone writes a nice article 'Lincoln' (about Abraham Lincoln), then it should be moved to 'Abraham Lincoln', and then 'Lincoln' should be a page which lets people select from Lincoln, Nebraska or Abraham Lincoln. In this way, accidental linking is maximized. I think that this plan fits the principle of least astonishment.
A3. To permanently delete a page and its complete history, you need to be an administrator. To be an administrator, you need the admin password; as of October 23, 2001, Jimbo Wales "will give it out more or less willy-nilly to anyone who I know." [1] We ask that only specifically designated people actually perform deletion of pages, but also that those people follow the Wikipedia policy on permanent deletion of pages.
Q. So, how do I change the entry heading for a topic? "TheLaw" is a topic and should be "Law".
A. Only system administrators can do that, so you'd ask Jimbo Wales or Larry Sanger (we might just set up a "change request page" for this
purpose). In the meantime, you can use the #REDIRECT new page name command. On this, please see our page editing instructions.
Q. How do I edit a page that has been redirected? I made a definition of polymer, and tried to put a link on the organic conductors page, but clicking on edit, for either "Organic Conductors", or "Organic conductors" gives the redirect command.
A. The easiest way to edit the redirected page is to click on the link you see at the top of the page after being redirected: "redirected from ...". For example, if you try to go to the BillClinton page, you are redirected to the William Jefferson Clinton page. At the very top of that page, you will see a message: "(redirected from BillClinton)", and "BillClinton" will be a link. Click on that link, and you will edit the "BillClinton" page. (You could then change the redirect command, or remove it altogether and add your own text.)
Q. How do I learn about changes to certain topics without having to go there from time to time?
A. If you are a logged-in user, at the top of every page you will see a link that says "Watch this article for me". If you click on it, the article will be added to your personal watchlist, and by going to special:WatchList you can get a list of the recent changes to those articles.
Q. How does the search box at the bottom of the page work?
A. See wikipedia:searching.
Q. How do I report that something isn't working properly?
A. Add it to the wikipedia:Bug reports page. If whatever's happened is so serious that you can't even do that, well, someone will notice it soon enough.
Q. How do I submit a suggestion for a new feature?
A. Simply enter it on the wikipedia:feature requests page.
Q. How do I spell-check a page?
A. A spell checker has been requested for Wikipedia, but has not been implemented yet. When editing a larger article, it is in any event much more convenient to paste the text into your favorite text editor first, edit and spell check there, and then paste back into your browser to preview.
Q. How can I put pictures on my pages?
A. First, you need the right to publish the picture under the GNU Free Documentation License. This means that either you created the picture and therefore own the copyright, or it is in the public domain. If the picture is located on a server you control, you can refer to that image from your wiki page by simply including its URL, like this:q <code>http://my.webserver.com/image.png</code> and it will be included. If instead you want to upload a picture to wikipedia.com, you can use special:upload as a logged-in user and once it is uploaded, you can refer to it in your wiki pages as above, by including its URL <code>[[image:NameOfImage.png]]</code>
Q. How can I delete uploaded items ?
A. You cannot, but you can upload a new item with the same name, thereby replacing the old one.
Q. I can see several files in the upload-log with the label "delete" with the name of different users. How can this with the explanation that is impossible to delete files ?
A. You must have sysop status to delete an uploaded file. Jimbo Wales, the owner of this site's servers, gives sysop status at his discretion to users that have been around awhile.
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