User:Landfish7/FishyAdvice

In no particular order, here is some advice and suggestions I've come up with for new or inexperienced users. This page is just for some useful tips! For rules and regulations, take a look at the links on your Welcome message. Don't have one? Then try asking someone to give you one because Welcome messages are very important and very useful if you are inexperienced as a user.

Advice and Suggestions

Navigation Menu

• If you want to find something to help out with, you can try clicking "Recent changes" on the navigation menu located to the left. This'll tell you what pages have been edited most recently and might help you find something to work on.
• On the navigation menu located to the left, you can try clicking "Random page" and try making the article you get linked to better.
  • If the article seems perfect already, you can always click "Random page" again for a different article.

Edit Focus

• Find something that you are good at doing and make that your main focus on your edits. Some people help Bulbapedia projects that specialize only on certain types of articles.
• Try joining a project! If you have one thing that you are focusing on than you can find yourself making tons of useful edits.
• Though it is often an easy route to go to for edits, please try to focus your edits on factual information rather than Trivia sections.
• You can patrol articles for errors that need to be fixed or taken away.
  • This could include correcting grammatical errors and spelling errors.
  • This could include correcting or taking out false information and speculation.

Preview Edits

• Make sure to use the "Show preview" button to revise your edits to make sure they turn out the way you want them to before you press "Save page".
• Before saving edits, you can see how your changes differ from before by pressing "Show changes".

User Contributions

• In the top right corner of the screen there is an option called "contributions". This is to check what kind of edits you have made recently. I highly suggest using that to go back to pages you have edited recently. You can also see if you are making too many edits to the userspace. If a majority of your edits have the word "User" at the beginning, I'd suggest taking a break from editing the userspace and saving it for the next day or save it for when you have made more productive edits to the mainspace before you get in trouble by Admins.

Userspace

• If you wanna experiment with codes that can be used for the mainspace, you can make a subpage in your personal userspace by naming it under this format:

User:YourUsernameHere/YourPageNameHere

• If you don't know what to name your subpage you can just use this: User:YourUsernameHere/Sandbox.
  • This method can also be used to make fun pages such as Predictions for upcoming Pokémon events. Remember, games and friend lists are not allowed!!

Ask an Admin[1]...

• When in doubt . . . ask an Admin.
  • If you are confused about anything when it comes to editing Bulbapedia, the best thing to do is to look for an admin and get help! They may not respond immediately, but help usually comes sooner or later.

DON'T SOCKPUPPET!!!

• NEVER MAKE A SOCKPUPPET ACCOUNT!! If you REALLY feel like you need to, ask an Admin for permission.

New Pages

• When you want to make a page for the mainspace, I suggest putting it in your userspace first and then an admin will add it if it meets Bulbapedia's standard and isn't downright awful! You can also link to it on an Admin's user talkpage to ask them if it can be turned into a mainspace article.
  • To do this name the article like this:

User:YourUsernameHere/YourArticleNameHere

Firefox

• Try to view Bulbapedia on Firefox. Bulbapedia is meant to be viewed by Firefox and it is much better. Honestly, once you've seen what Bulbapedia is supposed to look like, Internet Explorer makes Bulbapedia look awful in comparison!

Welcoming New Users

• If you are new to Bulbapedia, you probably have recieved a welcome message on your talk page! If you truthfully have nothing you can do to help Bulbapedia, you can always welcome other fellow new users! Here is how to welcome other new users! If you go here-->[2] you can see all of the newest users! If you find one that doesn't have a talk page, go to it and type this in--> "{{subst:welcome}}" Then click save! As easy as 1.. 2.. 3... *POOF* You've welcomed a new user!

Talk Pages

• If an article is protected and you have something useful you want to add, make an edit request on the respective talk page, or ask an Admin.
• Article discussion pages are only for discussing how to make the article better and are not for discussions about the subject of the article. If you do wanna know something about the article, you can click "Bulbawiki Forum" located on the navigation menu to the left, sign up, and post a thread with the respective question, and chances are someone will find your thread and help you out. Bulbapedia is not a social network and is not the place to ask questions that don't help make the article get better.
• "In order to facilitate navigation and for ease of future reference it is highly recommended that each discussion topic is contained under its own heading which makes the topic of discussion clear." - User Beligaronia
  • What this means is that when you click that plus button at the top of a discussion page, be sure the "heading" of your discussion is very clear about what you are about to discuss. So let's say you start a new section on Pikachu's discussion page questioning one of the facts in the article as false. Instead of making the heading title vague like "Um" or "Uh oh" be specific. If the article said "Pikachu's tail turns blue when using electric attacks."* You could possibly title your discussion topic heading "Pikachu's tail turns blue when using electric attacks." so that people know that you are quoting a fact from the article. Then in the actual comment you can start the subject by saying something along the lines of "When has this ever been canon?" or "I believe that this has never been stated anywhere in the games, anime, or manga. Am I incorrect?" depending on the situation.
    • To make a long story short "Be sure all discussion topic heading titles clearly state what you're about to discuss". - User Landfish7

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I will add more to this list once I find more tips and suggestions.