Join the Postcolonial Digital Humanities (#DHPoco) TODAY in our Global Women Wikipedia Write-In from 1-3pm EST! This write-in is aimed to improve and increase the amount of Wikipedia coverage on women outside of Europe and the United States.

If you’d like to join in, please sign up on the Wikipedia meetup page and check out the #GWWI main event page. Also, if you’re on Twitter, send out a Tweet using the hashtag #GWWI so that we’ll know you’re there. Real-time events are going on at HASTAC 2013, UCLA, Foothill College and the Sanger Papers at NYU.

Roopika Risam (@roopikarisam) and I will be live-blogging #GWWI developments here between 1-3pm EST, so  do follow along and let us know what you’re doing so we can add it to the live-blog! (Every little edit counts.)

Now on to today’s event. New Wikipedia editors often find that it is hard for them to create entries that will “stick” around according to Wikipedia’s own ground rules about what makes a proper entry (for example, see the issues of “Notability” and “No Original Research“). The following notes will help you to create entries and changes that will stick around:

• Wikipedia editors like citations–the kinds of citations that would be recognized in a scholarly paper, or in a well-written undergraduate academic paper. Such sources include peer-reviewed sources, reports by respected news organizations, or anything that has been fact-checked.
• When you write entries/additions, refer to an academic paper you’ve been working on. Don’t cite your unpublished paper, but use the citations from your paper’s bibliography to create a more robust entry. Also note that unlike most of the papers you are used to writing, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, or a tertiary resource. In other words, Wikipedia summarizes secondary sources and does not include any original research. As we have noted, one of the core statements of the site is ‘verifiability, not truth,’ meaning that its key objective is to find good sources for its statements.
• Try to reference as many Wikipedia pages as possible in your entry. Entries with many links to other Wikipedia pages cannot be easily deleted.
• Save multiple drafts of your edits and annotate what you’ve changed in each draft on the “Talk” page. Explain your edits on the “talk” page of the article so that the community understands what kind of material you are adding and why. This helps prevent a removal of a large chunk of your edits at once, as editors are able to look through your draft and decide which changes they want to delete/overwrite. If your edits are separated into multiple drafts, editors may just change one or a few of your edits rather than delete everything.
• Make minor grammatical and word choice cleanup on non-controversial articles, as they help to establish that you’re a “good faith” member of the community. They also help your input be taken more seriously if you become embroiled in larger disputes later.
• More help on getting your posts to stick can be found in Adrianne Wadewitz’s (@wadewitz) handy post on improving Wikipedia articles. 

Finally, please tweet to us if you have questions and/or need help! We can be found at @roopikarisam and @adelinekoh. @wadewitz, our experienced Wikipedian, will also be happy to answer questions during our edit-a-thon.

Have you ever edited Wikipedia? Please use the comments section to share your tips for successful editing.

Tips written by Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam. Suggestions sourced from Adrianne Wadewitz, David Golumbia, Fiona Barnett and Kaysi Holman.