Wikipedia:Instructional material

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This page links to instructional material useful for Wikipedia users, especially new users. The intent is to provide a central directory of all such materials Wikipedians have found useful, including tutorials and manuals on Wikipedia itself, and books, videos, and documents available outside Wikipedia.

Because Wikipedia runs on the MediaWiki software, much of the training material for new Wikipedia users is also useful for users of other MediaWiki wikis, and vice versa.

Contents

[edit] Individual screencasts

  • A basic editing screencast, approximately 3 minutes in length, non-interactive, no audio, with pop-up balloon explanations of edits being done on the screen, is available here.
  • A screencast (tutorial) on "How to add links" is available here.

[edit] MediaWiki training videos

An administrator of a public wiki recorded some MediaWiki training videos, to help people learn how to edit on his wiki:

Most of the material in the videos applies to any MediaWiki site, including Wikipedia. Many of the examples feature Wikipedia. The videos could be better, but they are not bad. They should be helpful for Wikipedia beginners as an easy way to get a quick overview of how to edit on Wikipedia, particularly those who prefer to see software demonstrated rather than read about it. If nothing else, these videos demonstrate the value of the concept, and may inspire similar efforts from Wikipedians interested in educating new users.

[edit] Hi-resolution .avi files

You may prefer to download the video files to view directly rather than from the wiki page in the previous section. Here are direct links:

The above videos use the x264 codec (a lossless codec which reproduces screen shots clearly). To view the videos, you may need to install one of these video players:

If you want to watch all the videos sequentially, you can download them to a directory on your computer (for example, in Microsoft Windows: C:\JUNK), and make a playlist file for VLC media player (for example, C:\JUNK\mediawiki_video.m3u). In the playlist file, edit a list of your video files in the order you want them to play:

C:\junk\001-intro.avi
C:\junk\002-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi
C:\junk\003-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi
C:\junk\004-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi
C:\junk\005-shortcuts-and-interwiki-links.avi
C:\junk\006-wikitext-markup.avi
C:\junk\007-wikitext-markup.avi
C:\junk\008-wikitext-markup.avi
C:\junk\009-wikitext-markup-lists.avi
C:\junk\010-wikitext-markup-links.avi
C:\junk\011-wikitext-markup-links.avi
C:\junk\012-wikitext-markup-tables.avi
C:\junk\013-wikitext-markup-templates.avi

and then you can open your playlist file in VLC media player via the usual File | Open... command.

[edit] Low-resolution .mov files

If you don't want to install VLC media player, you can download lower-resolution (but still fairly legible) versions of the videos in QuickTime format from Revver:

[edit] See also

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