Wikipedia:Be bold

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Our motto is "Be bold!", which is basically: "Go for it". The Wikipedia community encourages users to be bold. You cannot break Wikipedia, so do not be afraid about helping us out. We do have rules, but the best way to learn them is to start writing and talking to other Wikipedians. If you mess something up, you or someone else can always change it back.

Be bold! also means that you should be nice to newcomers. People who are new to Wikipedia may not know all the rules. Also, people from other Wikipedias may not know how we are different. If someone does something wrong, do not bite them. A biter is someone who is not nice to other people. They are usually mean and call people terrible, dumb, stupid or other insults. Be kind, help them out, and remember that many people on Simple English Wikipedia do not speak English as a first language.

Non-article namespaces[change source]

A Namespace is a prefix that comes before the title. For example, Wikipedia:Be bold would be in Wikipedia mainspace, Category:1990 births would be in Category namespace and Template:reflist would be in the Template namespace. Problems may arise for a variety of reasons in non-article namespaces. These problems should be taken in consideration when deciding whether to be bold and how bold to be.

Template namespace[change source]

A user must be careful when editing templates. This is because templates can affect a large number of pages with a single edit. You can find out how many transclusions by using the What links here tab under the tools section. Templates may also have complex source code that can easily be broken by edits. If the source is complex, please test edits in a sandbox before applying it to the template. Fortunately, if a user does manage to break the code, it can be corrected with a single revert.

Related pages[change source]