This post is here to soothe fears and give practical starting points, so there will be no sales pitch with reasons to edit. Skip around to whatever sections are relevant to you.

It’s easier than it looks

Getting into Wikipedia looks like walking into a minefield: with 7 million articles, finding things to create is hard; a tangle of policies, guidelines, and cultures have developed over 25 years; and stories of experienced editors biting newcomers make it look like a fiefdom. “It takes a certain type, and I’m not that type” is how I used to look at it. What I didn’t realize is that it doesn’t take a type; it creates a type.

Everyone sucks at editing when they start. No one has ever started out knowing what they’re doing. Even the project itself had to learn what it was doing. Here was our article on Guinea worm disease in 2004 plagiarized verbatim from the US CDC’s website. Here’s our article today. Teachers in 2005 used “Wikipedia” as a slur, and they were right: editors didn’t know what they were doing. But somehow, they learned.

You might be right if you think editing wouldn’t be worth your time or too boring. You might be right if you think you can’t handle rejection from having your early edits changed or reverted (trust me: me too; it hurts). But if you’ve ever told yourself that you’re not “competent enough” or wouldn’t “fit in”, then you’re dead wrong; that humility is the kernel of a good editor. If you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you’re prepared.

Prep work?

See what I said before: if you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you are prepared. If that satisfies you, skip this section. If you’re not convinced, here’s some material to make you feel more secure:

• Wikipedia operates on five fundamental principles called pillars; this is the most useful page you can read as a new editor.
• Too vague? “I need to grind to level 50 in the tutorial dungeon”? Fine. You asked for this. We have a page called “Contributing to Wikipedia” that gives you about a year of trial-and-error’s worth of information if you can digest it.
• “Okay, fine, that’s too much, but I still don’t feel ready after reading the five pillars.”
  • If you like reading, the ‘Introduction’ is for you.
  • If you like doing, The Wikipedia Adventure is for you.
• “But what if I get lost?” Experienced editors (especially admins) will probably help you out if you go to their talk page with a question, but for a 100% guaranteed answer, the Teahouse is always two clicks away. The two most prominent “hosts”, Cullen328 and ColinFine, are both really nice and care a lot about the little guy.
• “But what if I don’t fit in?” If you’re not any of these things, you don’t need to worry about fitting in.
• “But the markup looks too complicated.” Thanks to the VisualEditor, you don’t need to touch the markup for most edits. 99% of the time when experienced editors use markup, it’s because it’s faster, not because it’s impossible in the VisualEditor.
• “I’m going to make mistakes.” Literally everyone does. Here are some of the most common ones if you want to stay aware of them.

Everyone have their warm blankets on? Cool.

Getting started

Language

So you want to start but don’t know where. The biggest consideration is what language you want. The English Wikipedia is only one of many, and an account on one lets you edit on all the others. Fundamental principles are the same between Wikipedias, but policies and guidelines might change, so beware if you want to straddle multiple languages. Just because it’s the biggest, don’t ever feel pressured to contribute in English; diversity is a strength, and Wikipedia needs more of it.

Registration

Before contributing anything, you should register an account. This gives you a face (a user page and user talk page), it gives you a track record that builds community trust, and it means your IP isn’t publicly logged in the edit history. It also gives you access to the ‘Preferences’ tab, which becomes very useful when you start learning what its options mean.

Types of contributing

So what are the best kinds of edits to make to get into editing? (Disclaimer: Almost nobody stays on the same type of editing indefinitely, and all of these “types” are very, very broad categorizations of millions of types.) It really depends. We keep a task center classifying different types of contributions.

What I did

I started by fixing typos and grammatical errors on articles I was already reading, then when I got more comfortable, I started adding wikilinks to articles that didn’t have enough. This continued for about a year until I made an article about a retro video game. In hindsight, it was really poor quality and a bad decision, but it evaded notice (I eventually cleaned it up some), and it was the point where I broke out into more intermediate and advanced types of contributing.

“Advanced” versus “non-advanced”

To be crystal clear: if you even just occasionally contribute with edits that don’t require deep knowledge of Wikipedia or intensive effort, you’re still an editor, you’re still valued, and you’re still helping. Wikipedia adheres to a hierarchy only when strictly necessary (even admins are not considered “above” other editors), and you aren’t treated as disposable just because you haven’t almost single-handedly made Wikipedia the best resource for US local television stations in human history (srsly gurl how the fuuuuuuuuck).

Other options

Other good options I didn’t do early on are categorization (every page goes into different categories which you’ll find at the bottom) and fact-checking. Categorization is the weirdest one out of all of these since it’s a major part of what makes Wikipedia tick, but almost no reader realizes how important this is. Fact-checking, meanwhile, is the most difficult of these unless you’re a subject matter expert. But it’s also the most crucial one, and it teaches you a lot (it teaches you policies like verifiability and reliable sourcing, linked below). This involves adding citations where there aren’t ones, improving citations where they’re poor or malformed, and removing or editing statements which aren’t verifiably true. Also consider looking at WikiProjects, which are informal groups working to improve some aspect of Wikipedia. (An example is Women in Red, which seeks to create more biographies on women.)

🚨 Actual warning fr fr on god 🚨

The only “here be dragons”-style warning I’ll give is to not try creating a new article until you’re really experienced. In 2025, no brand-new editor is ready for this: there’s just too much to know. Creating an article involves policies and guidelines like notability, reliable sourcing, independent sources, article titles, verifiability, no original research, etc., and for brand-new editors, this goes through a heavily backlogged process called Articles for Creation. If you want to jump into the deep end, expanding out short articles is both way easier and often way more useful than creating new articles.

So what now?

Now just ask yourself “What’s the worst that could happen?” If you somehow magically get in over your head, I’ll step in and save you. But if you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you’re prepared.