Wikiverse

Dear friends,

I've been doing some preliminary research about Wikipedia itself in preparation for making a contribution of my own. I am finding the sheer volume of information (endless information, it seems) just about structure and editing alone a little overwhelming!

I’ll share with you some of my findings and hope it will help you frame your own work and get the information you need.

1. We all received a message from Voceditenore welcoming us to Wikipedia and sharing with us some very useful links. Here are the two that I recommend frequenting:
a. WP:LAYOUT – tells you how to lay out an article and also has a side bar with the Manual of Style and its subpages, which include music. The music Manual of Style (MOS:MUSIC) tells you how to get notation into your article and discusses style issues particular to musical subjects.

At the bottom of this page is a box containing the following links: “Writing better articles”, “Article Development”, and “The perfect article”, which are helpful places to go for additional information.

b. WP:FA – Wikipedia’s Featured Articles. This is a collection of articles that exemplify the ideal Wikipedia article. They are really helpful examples of how different articles may be formatted. In particular, the article on Toru Takemitsu is very clear in structure and contains all of the elements Wikipedia encourages in an article.

2. There are many ‘wikiprojects’, which, to the best of my knowledge, are groups of editors dedicated to improving articles around a particular area in wikipeda. For instance, I have joined the wikiprojects:Classical Music (WP:CM) and its banner appears of my user page. I’m still not entirely clear how it works, but I think it’s probably a good idea to see what’s out there and how your article might link up through one or several categories.

Ok, that’s the best I have so far. If anyone else has some illuminating insights to share about Wikipedia and how to navigate this labyrinth, I’m all ears!