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The purpose of this page is to help users of Wikipedia solve problems they may encounter when browsing or editing. Note: If you're trying to get help for a specific technical problem that isn't answered by the FAQs, try asking at Wikipedia:Troubleshooting or at the Village pump.
Editing Wikipedia articles using a full-fledged text editor is often more convenient than a web browser's standard text area. Text editors provide facilities that are very useful for writing and editing articles (especially long articles), such as spell checking, search and replace, macros, syntax highlighting, and alphabetic sorting.
Editing most Wikipedia pages is simple. Wikipedia uses two interface methods: classic editing with the Source Editor through wikitext (wiki markup), and a new VisualEditor (VE). Wikitext editing using the Source Editor is chosen by clicking the Edit source tab at the top of a Wikipedia page (or on a section-edit link). This opens an editable ...
Maintenance tags are routinely added to articles that have one or more deficiencies. These can include cleanup requirements, disputes, and references.Maintenance tags are important because they categorise articles according to the deficiencies that need attention, which allows interested editors and maintenance WikiProjects such as the League of Copyeditors to find and fix them.
To force a single new line in this mode, press Ctrl-Enter (or Command-Enter on Mac). When editing in "Edit source" mode, pressing the Enter key twice will start a new paragraph. To force a single new line, insert the HTML element <br /> after the line.
Clicking an edit link for a section will scroll to the appropriate section upon opening. In VisualEditor's model, editing sections would be paradoxically slower than editing the whole page. [Note: Opening an entire page for editing does not increase edit conflicts, which are (roughly) based on editing the same paragraph.]
A note about editing on mobile devices: Most Wikipedians prefer to edit from a computer, as the editing interface works better there. You can edit from a mobile device and tablet, though. See this page for more information. Wikipedia is formatted using its own language called wiki markup, also called wikitext. It's pretty easy to learn the basics.
You can also edit a template that is already on the page. When you click on the template to select it, it turns blue, and a box appears with a "Template" icon (a puzzle piece). Then click on the "Edit" link. Some templates are not visible to someone reading a page. In VisualEditor, such hidden templates are shown as puzzle icons, such as Anchor.