 To create an account on Wikipedia, you can go to any page on Wikipedia and click on create account in the top right hand corner of any page. This will ask you to specify a username and a password and it advises to consider using a username other than your real name, as the usernames are public and cannot be made private later. So choose something you are happy to be known as henceforth as all your edits on Wikipedia will be linked to this one account. The email address is a recommended option so that you can recover your account details and change your account password at a later date but also be notified of changes to pages that you yourself have edited. I've specified I'm going to create a username of unvid4 and added my password and confirmed it. The capture security checks are there to prevent Wikipedia being edited by bots and you will only have to do these for the first few days of your account and after that these capture security checks will no longer appear. There are some additional questions you can answer but otherwise that is your account created. These three links at the top of the page indicate pages that are related to your new user account. If I click on this one this takes me to my home page and on my home page you will find suggested edits and ask questions to your mentor and see your impact but if I click on my user page this is where I can provide more details about who I am as an editor and when I click on my user page it's asking me if I want to start editing using the old source editor which makes use of html markup or make use of the new visual editor which is a much more user friendly way of editing Wikipedia. So I'm going to advise you to always use a visual editor because it has these handy drop-down menus that you can make use of. I'm just going to close that notice down. If for any reason you don't have access to these drop-down menus you can use this little pen magic pen icon to switch between visual editing and source editing. If given the choice I would always recommend the visual editor. It's always good to add a short sentence to provide a little bit of details about who you are and what you're interested in. Now I've typed some text on my page and now I want to show you how you can wikify that text. First off we have the undo and redo options but the next one is about changing the text from paragraph size the normal size of writing on Wikipedia to headings. So this is the main heading option that you should select when breaking your text into easy to read accessible chunks. So the bottom heading should always be references because any citations we add in the main body of the article will automatically be saved at the bottom of the page as references. So I'm going to add a heading from my example citation and things I am interested in editing about and I will add one more which is my username because as soon as I save this page because I have more than three headings a contents box will automatically appear on the page. So if I click on the blue publish page button that just means save page. Added text to my user page. It's always a two step save process on Wikipedia where you click on the blue save button and describe the changes you made to that page and click the blue save button again. Now I have a page that is a blue link at the top because it's got content now and also because it has more than three headings it has this automatically generated contents box. If I click on the edit history of the page this shows you why edit summaries are important because it's every page on Wikipedia has this edit history where you can see in permanent links what change was made, when and by who and you can even click on someone's user page or leave them a message or see their contribution history and the size of the edit they've made. So edit histories are quite useful to seeing the transparency of what changes were made to a page. They'll also tell you how many times the page has been viewed. Now my page has only just been created so there are no views but it may be tomorrow. The page view tools would be updated tomorrow but importantly because it's your user page this is behind the scenes of Wikipedia and it is still discoverable in the search bar so I wouldn't add your phone number or bank details or address information but no one should be editing your user page other than yourself. I can click edit to go back into the page and I can use bold which is the next drop down menu the style menu to change the text into bold just highlighting the text and amending it using the drop down menu options. Wiki links are the most important aspect of Wikipedia other than citations and we know the University of Edinburgh has a wiki page so we can highlight the text and use the next drop down link menu to look for a page on English Wikipedia with that title and you can select the most appropriate result it will turn blue in color and then you can click anywhere on the page to come out of the link. Sometimes it's important to also highlight what Wikipedia is missing so let's imagine University Hogwarts was a real thing that should have a Wikipedia page because there is a breadth and depth of reliable published sources about that information about that page but we could then look for the page using the link menu and it would return as a red link and a red link on Wikipedia is a page that does not yet exist and sometimes it's important to highlight what Wikipedia is missing so we've added headings bold blue links red links citations are the most crucial page on Wikipedia although Wikipedia is the site that anyone can edit you have to cite what you write you must write loot neutrally in your own words but you must back up your statements on Wikipedia with a citation from a reliable published secondary source so the information needs to be published elsewhere in a source that has a reputation for fact checking that and accuracy to do that I'm going to use the BBC news site for my example and let's imagine I'm writing about Liz Truss I can go back to my page place my cursor after the full stop and use the citation drop down menu which again gives you a little handy hint that you must use citations from reliable published secondary sources so books textbooks broad sheet news avoid tabloids and websites that have reputations for fact checking and accuracy the automatic citation generator is the easiest way to generate a citation and it will accept a web address or if it's a journal article it may have a digital object identifier number DOI and I would say if you have the choice of either a URL or the DOI use the DOI because it's a much more stable link and it produces much more rich metadata about who wrote the article where the article appeared the page number the volume number etc if it's a book it should have an ISBN number but if it's a book also take note of the page because what we want is to be able to do is for anyone reading the page to be able to verify where that information came from if it's a pub med article it will have a pub med identifier and if you don't have any of those four things you can use the manual citation generator which will ask you for information about who wrote the book what date the book was published etc but easiest way is to add the automatic generator and paste in your link and hit generate it will auto create this citation with a clickable link to the source and when it was retrieved where it came from click insert and then you can even click edit to add more details if you had extra information about who wrote the article or the source date or for example page number or volume number or anything else you care to think there's a number of different fields if it's a book it may have an editor or a number of editors and different languages or place of publication publication date all of that information can be added to make a really rich citation and the excellent thing here is that when I get auto numbers of citation in order and once it's added once I can then reuse the same citation later in my article so I don't need to paste in the BBC News website again I can just hit site reuse and select the citation I want to use again and then just before I save my page I can provide details about who I'm in what I'm interested in writing about and provide that as an in a bullet pointed list and that comes in useful when you're writing articles about someone's notable achievements or notable accolades or exhibitions artworks list of publications etc but it's just simply using that drop down and highlighting the text and now if I save the page added bullet points and citations this creates the page and automatically the citations that I've added here appear at the foot of my page under the references heading that I've created where a and b show on one line that that source has been cited twice on the page and there we go that's my user page created