User talk:Carl Haworth

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Carl Haworth, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! RexxS (talk) 15:47, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Writing a New Article

I saw your inquiry on the New Contributors' Help Page and I hope you don't mind my offering a little follow-up. Yes, it is possible to create an article in MS Word or another word-processing program and then copy and paste it into Wikipedia - that's how I created my first article. I started by hitting "edit" on a similar kind of article, copied and pasted that into a new Word document, and used it as a template for the organization of my new article and for the markup language. The only problem with the strategy is that the word processor may change the apostrophe followed by another apostrophe that the Wiki markup uses to create italics into double quotation marks, so you need to use the preview button to see what it's going to look like before hitting save (which I did not do). To create a new article, you search for the title you want to use - which you should do anyway to see whether an article already exists, especially since they are being written at a tremendous rate - and the search results will have at the top something like "No article titled X exists, you may create it if you wish"; to do so, you click on that redlinked title and you get the input screen to copy your text into from the wordprocessor.

However, the Article Wizard is very helpful and it may wind up being easier for you to use it. For one thing, you can then get the markup into the article by highlighting and clicking on the edit buttons at the top, rather than typing the apostrophes and brackets. Also it gives you information on the whys and hows of inserting references.

Either way, you need to be autoconfirmed before you can create a new article in Mainspace: I believe that now requires 4 days and 10 edits, so you should fix some typos to get the 10 edits . . . or create the new article in your Userspace and then you can move it out to Mainspace.

I hope that's helpful; since I wrote my own first article that way, I thought I'd point out that yes, you can copy it from a word processed draft. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:49, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]