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.
Wikipedia articles are composed and formatted according to the Manual of Style (MOS). MOS sets the house standard on Wikipedia for attributes like link formatting, capitalization, punctuation, and sections. MOS includes guidelines for biographies, citations, titles, dates and numbers, proper names, and many other stylistic details.
Some examples of the elements of style in the MOS are:
Article titles—use normal body text capitalization for titles (beginning letter, capitalize proper nouns, etc.), and apply the singularform in titles wherever possible.
Capitalization—do not capitalize all words in section headings, or non-proper nouns
Link placement—list external links in their own section at the bottom of an article
To place the MOS template at the right on your User page for easy reference, edit your User page and copy/paste: {{style}} (including the curly braces).
Please follow the MOS guidelines when you update an article.
Communication between editors takes place at Talk pages.
To send a message to another editor:
Go to their user Talk page (e.g. User talk:xxxxx)
Click the "Add topic" button at the top and, when the editing window opens, you can type your message and a subject heading to your post.
At the end of your message, include your signature with ~+~+~+~ (~~~~ four tilde characters).
Note that user talk pages are publicly viewable, so it is not a private message to the user concerned. Even when deleted, the message is forever viewable in their History.
Editor replies: Unless the other user includes a link to your user page in their reply (called a Ping), you will not get a notification that they have responded, so it is a good idea to either check their talk page every now and then, or add it to your Watch list.
For a listing of current collaborations, tasks, and news, see the Community portal. For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the Dashboard.