Wikipedia:Help Project/Temp Newbiehelp

Hi, and welcome to Wikpedia. This is a page dedicated to helping new users, where hopefully you can find answers to your questions, or directions to where the answers might be.

How to contact other users

• Use Wikipedia:Clueless newbies to post a question, or IRC if you'd rather chat in realtime with another user.
• Visit Wikipedia:Bootcamp for directions on how to use IRC.

How to start an article in a few easy steps

• First, enter the subject you'd like to write about in the searchbox on the left side menu of the screen, and press Go. This is just to make sure that you don't write an additional article on a subject already covered in another article. If an existing article by that name and dealing with the same subject exists, consider extending the existing article instead. If the article deals with a completely different subject, create a new article by writing the following in the address bar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ followed by the article name. If you want to write an article about John Doe Jr., you'd write http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John Doe Jr.

If this article exists, also enter an additional word to the title, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John Doe Jr. (musician) if he's a musician.

• When you press enter, you should get a page saying something like "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." plus a link just below you can click on to start the article. Once you have done this, write the contents of the article, and take a little look at this page to see a basic list of the formatting tags used to insert images, headings, tables etc. If you're unfamiliar with how an article should look, just take a little look at another article to get a few basic tips.