All you have to do is click the Edit button at the top of an article's page. In the page that you see afterward, you can make your changes and then save them.
You won't be able to edit some Wikipedia articles, however - instead of an Edit button, such protected articles will show a View Source button.
Also, when editing an article, it is recommended that you click Preview
before you save your changes. This way, you can make sure that your changes were made as you intended.
For editing, you don't even have to log in. However, if you don't log in, there are a few disadvantages:
- Your IP address is posted and visible to the whole world - can lead to security issues
- You may lose some credibility
Before editing, I recommend you read some of Wikipedia's guidelines, so that you understand how Wikipedia works and how articles are supposed to be.
One last thing - it may be hard to get used to how formatting works on Wikipedia. That's why they wrote a cheatsheet for editors.
Wikipedia:Translate us is perhaps the project you're looking for from the encyclopaedia. But really it's more of a "heads up" and "where to start" for people who want to contribute a translation for another language or back into English.
This page is a guide for anyone, but particularly new volunteers, willing to help translate articles from the English Wikipedia into other languages.
In particular it lists steps that you'll go through to translate. Some of which include:
- Find a suitable article, which exists on the English Wikipedia, but not on the Wikipedia in the other language (or where the other language only has a stub). This tool can help.
- Translate the English article into the new language.
- On the other Wikipedia, go to the corresponding page, and click the button marked "create" or "edit" in the new language.
- Paste your translation in. Don't worry too much about formatting at this stage.
etc.
So Wikipedia has more of a guideline than an appointed committee on these efforts.
Best Answer
1- Create the page in the new language
On the page you want to translate, change the language prefix (
xxx.wikipedia.org
) to your language's prefix. This will bring you to a blank page and Wikipedia will ask you if you want to edit it. If you don't know your language's prefix, find it by going to www.wikipedia.org where all the languages are listed.For example, if you want to translate the article
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange_Network
to Japanese, go toja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange_Network
and find the link to edit the page.However, it can most often be that the translation of the article has also a translated name. For example, if you translate the page square into french, you would not create the page
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/square
but the page https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carr%C3%A92- Link the new created page to the other languages
a. Once you have created the article in your language, let's say
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carré
go to the page in an old language, e.g., englishen.wikipedio.org/Square
and there click onEdit Links
under the languages namesb. Now, a site opens with a frame called just
wikipedia
andEdit
on top of the languages: click again on this "Edit" link.c. Finally you end up in the linking form. There you have to fill the fields
Site ID
with the language wiki id, for example, in our case isfrwiki
for the french wikipedia page. And fill the fieldSitelink
just with the name (not the full address!) of your new translated page, in our case, withCarré
.d. Click
Set the sitelink
and your translated page should be accessible from the main page of the other languages in the languages links.