Wikipedia:Guidance for younger editors

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This page in a nutshell: The purpose of this page is to provide some advice for younger users who choose to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia policies and guidelines apply to editors of all ages, but we hope this advice will be useful to younger users who are new to Wikipedia. The page may also be useful to parents, guardians, and teachers monitoring younger people’s work on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit." You do not have to be a certain age before you are allowed to register as an editor, make changes to Wikipedia articles, and even write new articles. What you contribute to articles and discussions is judged based on how good and useful it is, not based on your age or background. All Wikipedians are entitled to be treated equally and to be judged based on what they do here, not on their age.

However, experience has shown that there are some things that younger people who choose to edit Wikipedia should bear in mind. This page has been prepared as a guide for them. It discusses some common issues that younger editors face, as well as mistakes that have been made by some younger editors (and also by some older editors) in the past, which you should try to avoid. We hope this advice will be helpful both to younger Wikipedians, and to others who are collaborating with them in creating our encyclopedia.

Parents, guardians, teachers, and other adults responsible for younger people's computer use may be interested in the advice on this page, and may also wish to consult Wikipedia:Advice for parents and the links on the bottom of that page for further information.

Just like anywhere else on the Internet, young people must be careful about giving out too much information on Wikipedia concerning their real-life identity and location.

It is strongly recommended that younger editors should not disclose real-life information about themselves on Wikipedia. This applies in selecting your username, in writing about yourself on your userpage, and everywhere else you post on Wikipedia. Data such as your full name, specific location, exact age, or what school you go to could enable someone to locate you in real life or to harass you.

Specific information about yourself such as your address or phone number should never be posted on Wikipedia. If you have any questions about what information you should reveal or are allowed to reveal, you should discuss this with your parent or guardian.

If a younger editor posts too much revealing information about himself or herself, an administrator or other editor may step in and remove the information. If this happens, please don't be upset; it is done for your own protection. You should feel free to discuss the issue with the administrator who helped you.

If you have already posted personal information about yourself and you now want to remove it, please consult with an administrator you trust. If you don't know someone who can help, or if the problem is urgent, please go to Wikipedia:Oversight and follow the instructions there.

Although this page is about Wikipedia, you should use good judgment and caution when discussing yourself anywhere else on the Internet as well. Also bear in mind that if you use the same username on Wikipedia and on other sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc., someone looking for information about you could easily discover what you have written on these other sites.

If you are a new user and would like to get some help from a more experienced user, please see the Wikipedia:Help page for the various ways you can request help from other editors.

We are not going to tell you much on this page about how you can contribute to Wikipedia. Why not? Because the ways that younger editors can contribute to Wikipedia are pretty much the same as the ways that anyone else can contribute. There are lots of guidelines and help pages that will answer any questions you may have, and we are not going to repeat all of them here.

All types of editors are valuable to Wikipedia. The most obvious method of contributing is by working on articles—whether it is adding to or correcting an article that we already have, or writing a new article of your own. If you write a new article about a subject that belongs on Wikipedia, you have improved our encyclopedia, which is the main reason we are all here.

Apart from editing articles, you can contribute to Wikipedia in other ways. You can help combat vandalism committed by people who do not yet appreciate the value of Wikipedia as much as you do. You can participate in community discussions, such as deciding which articles should be kept or deleted, or whether some of our policies should be changed, or which editors should be promoted to administrator. You can take photographs or create other images and upload them to Wikipedia, as long as you are willing to allow other people to re-use the images here or on other websites. (Photographs of yourself or other younger people should not be posted without the parents' consent.) There are many other ways to contribute, which you will learn about as you get more experience.

Try to use your best judgment about what you know and how you can best help Wikipedia. For example, a good way to learn more about Wikipedia articles and policies may be to spend some time working on the articles for deletion page. However, remember that Wikipedia contains a lot of articles about pretty much every subject there is or ever was, some of which may not be familiar to you. If you see an article about something that happened years before you were born, don't nominate it for deletion just because "I never heard of that!" Remember, no one knows everything! There are lots of things that you have never heard of that are still very important and deserve articles in Wikipedia, just as there are lots of things that any one person won’t have heard of that deserve articles in Wikipedia. You also can't rely just on running a Google search in which the topic doesn't come up too much, because lots of things happened and lots of people lived before the Internet was invented.

Some contributions may be help you learn how wiki-coding works, or interact with other people, but don’t directly help create the encyclopedia. For example, some new editors spend a lot of time creating a nice-looking userpage, or creating and signing "signature books" or "hidden pages," or on other "social" type activities. Wikipedia editors are encouraged to have fun, but the encyclopedia is the most important thing. (There is a slogan that "Wikipedia is not Myspace.") If you spend some of your Wikipedia time working on "fun" or "social" pages, remember to keep this at a reasonable level compared with your other contributions.

Most importantly, contribute in ways that you enjoy. All of us, of whatever age, work on Wikipedia mostly because we have fun when we do. Therefore, it makes sense for you to spend most of your time on Wikipedia doing work that you enjoy, and that you are good at. If you enjoy finding spelling mistakes in articles and fixing them, you should do that. If you enjoy reverting vandal edits and reporting repeat vandals to be blocked, you should do that. If you enjoy spending some time in the library to find material to add to an article, you should do that. If you enjoy working on image files, you should do that.

Sometimes, you may wish to work on areas of Wikipedia that you are less familiar with, to broaden your horizons and gain experience, and that is good. But if you spend too much of your time doing wiki work that you hate, you are not going to do your best work and you are not going to have fun—and what's the sense of that?

As was just mentioned, one of the best ways to help Wikipedia is to add to the content of our encyclopedia. This can be by writing a new article, or by adding information to an article that already exists. There are lots of policies concerning articles, which you will come to know as you gain more experience.

One mistake that many new editors make is contributing an article about a subject that does not meet our notability policies. Because we are a worldwide encyclopedia, we do not include some articles about thing that are not notable and affect only a few people. If your article does not meet our standards for any reason, it may be deleted from Wikipedia by an administrator. If this happens, do not be discouraged, but try to learn from the experience so that your next article will be kept.

You should make sure that information in your articles can be linked to reliable sources. This is especially important if anything you write is likely to be disputed or controversial.

An especially important policy for all articles and discussions in Wikipedia is our policy on biographies of living persons. It is extremely important that information in articles about living people, especially controversial or negative information, must be sourced to reliable sources. In addition, material that unfairly invades someone’s privacy should not be included, even if it may be true. Articles or portions of articles that violate the biographies of living persons policy will be deleted immediately.

The effect that false, misleading, or inappropriate information published online can have on people’s lives is a very serious problem. It it is especially important that Wikipedia have high standards in this area, because information in our articles is so easy to change, and because the popularity and structure of Wikipedia often make it the very top result when a search is run on someone’s name. If you are unsure whether something you wish to write might violate the biographies of living persons policy, you should discuss it with a more experienced editor before including the information.

Just as you can edit Wikipedia, so can anyone else. As you contribute, you will work with other Wikipedia editors, of all ages and qualifications and from all over the world. Wikipedia has grown as much as it has in the past nine years because of the many thousands of people who have participated.

Everyone is expected to follow our basic policies in dealing with other editors. Editors must be reasonably polite to each other and avoid making personal attacks. When problems or issues arise—for example, two people are editing the same article and disagree about what it should say—they are expected to discuss the disagreement and try to work it out, rather than to keep changing the article back-and-forth or start calling each other names. There are procedures available for asking for help from experienced editors when these types of disagreements arise.

Pay attention to feedback you receive from other editors. If someone points out that you have made a mistake, thank him or her for telling you, and try not to make the same mistake again. If someone raises a concern about an edit you have made, explain why you said what you said or did what you did. All experienced Wikipedia editors have learned a lot from the comments and criticisms that we hear from one another every day.

If you receive a warning message from another editor, think very carefully about what it says. It may be that you have done something wrong and violated a Wikipedia policy. If the warning is correct, again, you should accept that and make sure to avoid repeating the mistake that brought the warning. If you think the warning is wrong, you should politely discuss it with the person who warned you, or with an administrator.

That does not mean, however, that anyone is entitled to be rude to you or talk down to you. If that happens, and the person does not stop when you ask him or her to, you should raise the problem with an administrator or on a noticeboard.

Try to recognize when another editor may know more than you do about a given topic. If you bring information to Wikipedia about a subject, your information may be as valuable as everyone else's. But remember that another editor working with you on an article might be one of the world's leading experts on that topic! Just as you want to be respected for who you are and what you are ready to contribute, so too you must be ready to respect everyone else.

Most of your fellow editors will not judge you by your age, even if they know what it is, which they often won’t. But they will judge you by your maturity as it reflects on the page. There is nothing wrong with having a good time when working on Wikipedia, which can include playful comments and the like, but most of the time it will pay to be serious. Over your time on Wikipedia, you will develop a reputation for the quality of your work—you will want to make sure it is a good one.

There are lots of ways that Wikipedians recognize each other's good work. For example, a colleague may place a "barnstar" on your talkpage to recognize an especially fine contribution.

There are also systems for rating the quality of articles. A well-written article that covers the most important aspects of a topic in clearly written English, with appropriate references, may be rated as a good article. An excellent article may be awarded the title of featured article, meaning that it is one of the best articles in all of Wikipedia and may be given a turn as the featured article on the main page. A brand-new article containing an interesting fact may be listed in the Did you know? section of the main page. The best-quality images, lists, and other types of contributions are recognized as well.

The various article-rating systems are based on trust that editors will provide their honest opinions in evaluating each other's work. All ratings are to be given only by editors who have not worked on that article, and are to be awarded fairly. You should stay away from rating articles written by your close friends, for example. "Trading" of nominations or votes, such as "I'll give your article a good rating if you give mine a good rating," is never allowed.

Although you should feel free to participate in selecting Wikipedia's best work, and to help to create it, please remember that Wikipedia is about working together to create an encyclopedia while having fun—not about winning awards. If you create an article that becomes a DYK or GA or even a featured article, you should be proud. But some people spend a little too much time worrying about how many barnstars or awards or recognitions they have. Barnstars and awards are recognition of achievement, not achievements themselves.

After you have edited for awhile, and gained experience at a wide variety of Wikipedia responsibilities, you may wish to become an administator here. Being an administrator is not a rank that makes administrators better or more important than other users! Rather, adminship is a set of additional powers, and responsibilities that go with them. Among other things, administrators have the ability to delete pages, to block users from editing, and to close certain types of community discussions. They are expected to do these things according to policies and only in the best interests of the project.

The process of becoming an administrator is described on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. A candidate for adminship must be nominated (either by another user or by himself or herself), answer a series of questions, and then is subject to a 7-day community discussion as to whether he or she is qualified to become an administrator. Successful candidates for adminship will almost always have edited Wikipedia for at least several months and will have thousands of edits on various aspects of the project.

A common mistake made by some younger editors is seeking adminship too soon. If the information on this page is still new to you, then you are not yet ready to become an administrator. By the time you are ready to consider adminship, it is likely that several more experienced editors will have asked you if you are interested in being nominated. If you are unsure whether you are ready for adminship yet, then usually it is best to wait a little longer until you do feel sure.

If you want to obtain feedback on whether you would make a good administrator, or on the quality of your work on Wikipedia generally, you can request an Wikipedia:editor review. Please be patient, though, as the editor review requests page is often backlogged.

There is also an administrator coaching program, in which experienced administrators work with editors interested in becoming admins, often by giving them assignments and guiding them through the different types of work that administrators perform. Admin coaching can be very helpful to some candidates, but it is also controversial with some users, who think the best background for adminship is learning by experience rather than being taught. (It’s a little like the argument at some schools regarding whether teachers should “teach to the test” or not.) Whether you have a coach or not, eventually you will be the one who has to show at your RfA that you have enough experience and you know Wikipedia policies well enough that you would be a good administrator.

There is no minimum age requirement for administrators, although a high level of demonstrated maturity is necessary. There are a few people who participate in RfA who disapprove of younger administrators, but theirs is usually a minority view. Most of the RfA participants will not judge you by your age, but by your maturity as demonstrated by your actions and contributions on Wikipedia.

If you pass your RfA, congratulations! Now help edit this page so that other editors can learn from your success.

If your RfA does not succeed, please don’t be discouraged. Keep on editing, and learn from the comments that other Wikipedians will have provided for you. It is usually recommended that you wait a few months before trying again.

Younger administrators have the same rights and responsibilities as any other administrator. Like other administrators, they are expected to use good judgment about which administrator tasks they are most qualified to perform. There are a few narrow, specific situations—such as dealing with with legal threat situations or certain types of explicit, controversial material—which are best handled by administrators who are legally adults. Younger administrators should use good judgment in connection with their choice of administrator tasks to perform.

Only adults (age 18 or older and of legal age where they live) are allowed to seek the positions of Checkuser, Oversighter, Arbitrator, or Steward. This restriction is based on a Wikimedia Foundation policy governing access to other people’s personal identifying information. It is considered a necessary exception to the general rule that editors have equal rights regardless of age.

A lot of people of all ages find editing Wikipedia to be enjoyable—otherwise we wouldn't be here! But please remember to use good judgment about how much time and effort you spend on Wikipedia, because we are sure there are also a lot of other important and interesting things going on in your life.

Your schoolwork is much more important than editing Wikipedia. If you work part-time, your job is more important than editing Wikipedia. Your family and real-life friends are definitely more important than editing Wikipedia. Your real-life (off-line) hobbies are at least as important as editing Wikipedia.

If you have schoolwork to do, or other things that you need to get done, or find yourself getting stressed from your time on Wikipedia, take a break. You don't need to make a big announcement that you are "on wikibreak" or "retiring." Just step away from the computer for as long as it takes. We promise that Wikipedia will still be here when you are ready to come back.

There are some people who think that our younger editors do not have the maturity, knowledge, skills, or attitudes needed to work on Wikipedia. Your good work can help prove that they’re wrong.