Here you can digest how to use Wikipedia in bite-sized morsels. The tips listed below were created for the Tip of the day project, or the Styletips project, but are listed here by title and organized by subject area for your convenience.
A redirect is a page that has the sole purpose to automatically redirect readers to a differently named page; to take the reader where they really wanted to go. Redirects allow a topic to have more than one title. Redirects are used for synonyms, abbreviations (initialisms), acronyms, accented terms (diacritics), misspellings, typos, nicknames (pseudonyms), scientific names, etc.
To create a redirect for the term "Oof":
Type Oof in the search box, press ↵ Enter
Click on the redlink for Oof that it presents
In the edit window that appears, type #REDIRECT [[Foo]] on the first line to make it lead to the article Foo
Redirects should be organized in to categories too. Each redirect can have up to seven redirect categories. Categories go on the third line of the redirect. (Note: Plant has a subcategory within the category of scientific name; enter plant after a pipe).
Here are two examples of a redirect category using a category template:
{{R from birth name}}
{{R from scientific name|plant}}
Preview your new redirect before saving it. Make sure:
There is a big right-facing arrow to the left of the bolded name of your target page name.
That your target page is bolded in blue (if it is red, go back and double check your target name in the edit window).
That your redirect category has rendered properly and that the boilerplate it presents makes sense.
Sometimes you may be editing an article and want to link a plural to its singular form. For example, to link "Fred Foo was famous for his study of puddles" to puddle, you could link it like so: [[puddle|puddles]]. However, you can save time instead by writing [[puddle]]s.
This also works with adjectives (for example, [[Japan]]ese), regular verbs in present or past tense (for example, [[dance]]s or [[dance]]d) and any other suffixes or prefixes.
However, this method does not work with spelling changes, for example: [[try]]ied does not work; you have to enter [[try|tried]]. It also does not work with possessives, so you may want to use [[Fred Foo|Fred Foo's]] to get Fred Foo's. Using [[Fred Foo]]'s will look like Fred Foo's, i.e. the possessive suffix unlinked, in plain text, and black instead of blue.
Note: if a redirect exists from puddles to puddle you don't actually need to do any piping, it's fine to link [[puddles]] too.
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