Mastering the Visual Editor – Headings, bold, links

Now that you have created your userpage, we can explore how the Visual Editor dropdown menus work, moving from left to right.

The Visual Editor interface

Adding headings

  1. Click Edit to enter the Visual Editor.
  2. Look at the area of the screen indicated in the purple box above. Note the first menu options on the far left are Undo and Redo arrows.
  3. Type your username (as indicated in the green box above).
  4. Select the text you have just written.
  5. Select the Paragraph > Heading option from the dropdown menu. This will turn your username into a Heading.

Adding bold and italics

  1. Press the Return key and type an example sentence e.g. “I am learning how to edit Wikipedia“.
  2. Select one of the words in the example sentence e.g. learning
  3. Click the Style dropdown menu (indicated by A) and change the highlighted word to bold.
  4. Do the same again to change the highlighted word to italics.
Bold and italics

Adding links

Links to other Wikipedia pages are the backbone of Wikipedia; enabling other readers to journey down the rabbit hole about a subject to aid their understanding. Please note: you need only link a page the first time it is mentioned in an article and not every single time.

  1. Type a phrase that will have a page on Wikipedia as an example sentence. e.g. “I am learning how to edit Wikipedia”.
  2. Select the word you are going to link e.g. Wikipedia.
  3. Click the Link menu (indicated by a chain link symbol).
  4. Click on the appropriate link. It should turn blue.
  5. Repeat with a new example sentence e.g. I live in Edinburgh.
Links

Now that you have practised adding headings, bold and links let’s save the page. You should get in the habit of saving your Wikipedia edits regularly.

  1. Click the blue Save page button in the top right of the screen.
  2. Type a short edit summary of “Added headings, bold & links”.
  3. Click the blue Save page button once more to confirm.

NB: You may be asked to enter a Captcha code to confirm any saved edits. This is just a precautionary measure for the first day or two of a new account.

Video guides

  1. Adding headings.
  2. Adding bold and italics.
  3. Adding links.