Editing basics

This page takes you from having an account to saving your first correct edit. It assumes you have never edited a wiki before. If you have edited Wikipedia, everything here will feel familiar, and you can skip to Infoboxes.

Read KhmerConnection:How to Contribute for what belongs in an article, and this page for how to put it there.

Nothing you do here is permanent

Every version of every page is saved forever. Anything you change can be put back with two clicks, by you or by anyone else. Nobody can delete the site by clicking the wrong thing.

This matters more than any instruction below. The usual reason people never make a first edit is fear of breaking something, and there is nothing here to break. If you are unsure, save it anyway. A steward would much rather fix a small mistake than never receive the correction.

You also have your own practice page. Click Sandbox at the top of the screen once you are logged in. Nothing there appears in the directory, and you can write anything you like in it.

Step 1: Get an account

Go to Special:CreateAccount.

Choose any username you like, as long as it has no spaces. A real name, a nickname or a pen name are all fine. You will be asked a simple question about Cambodia or this site to show you are not a machine.

Your account is created straight away. Before you can edit, confirm your email address by clicking the link we send you. If it does not arrive, request another from Special:ConfirmEmail.

Until you are logged in you can read everything but will see View source where Edit would be.

Step 2: Log in and find a page

Click Log in at the top right.

To find something, type in the search box at the top. You can also browse by category from the main page, or use the links in the sidebar on the left.

Throughout this guide the example is a real page: Udom Khmer Restaurant, a restaurant in Cambodia Town. Open it and follow along, or use any page you know something about. The screenshots show another page, Fish Amok, so the key art is visible too.

Step 3: Make your first edit

At the top of the page there are tabs: Read, Edit, Edit source, View history.

Click Edit. The page opens in the visual editor, which works like a word processor. What you see is close to what readers will see.
Click into the text and change something. Fix a spelling, add a sentence, correct an address.
Click Save changes at the top right. A box appears.
In the Summary: box, write a few words saying what you changed, such as corrected opening hours. Other people read these to understand the page's history.
Click Save changes again.

That is the whole cycle. Everything else on this page is a variation of it.

Edit and Edit source are two ways of changing the same page. Edit is the visual editor and is the easier one. Edit source shows the underlying markup, which is useful for some tasks described below. Either is fine, and you can switch at any time.

If a page is long, each section has its own edit link beside its heading. Use it. Editing one section is easier to check and harder to get wrong than editing the whole page.

Step 4: Check your work before saving

In Edit source, two buttons sit next to Save changes:

Show preview displays the page as readers will see it, without saving. Use this every time.
Show changes displays exactly what you altered, with old text and new text side by side.

Preview catches most mistakes, particularly a missing bracket that breaks a link or an infobox.

Step 5: Read the history and undo a mistake

Click View history at the top of any page to see every edit ever made to it, newest first.

Click a date to see the page as it looked then. Click prev beside an entry to see what that edit changed: removed text appears on the left in red, added text on the right in green. This side-by-side view is called a diff.

To reverse an edit, including your own, open the diff and click undo, then Save changes. The edit is reversed and the reversal is itself recorded, so nothing is hidden and nothing is lost.

Step 6: Infoboxes

The grey box at the top right of most pages is an infobox. It holds the facts that the site can search and sort: the type of organization, the city, the year, the website. Editing it correctly is the most valuable thing a contributor can do here, because those values drive the browse pages.

In the visual editor, click the infobox once. A dialog opens showing each field with a plain-language label such as Operating status and Last verified, along with a short description of what belongs there. Change a value, click the dialog's apply button, then Save changes.

In Edit source, the same infobox looks like this:

{{Organization
| name = Udom Khmer Restaurant
| type = Cultural business
| business_type = restaurant
| city = Long Beach
| state = California
| country = United States
| status = active
| address = 1223 E Anaheim St, Long Beach, CA 90813
| founded = 1984
}}

Each line is one field: a name, an equals sign, a value. To change the address, change the text after address = and leave every other line alone. To add a field that is not there, add a new line in the same shape. To remove a value, delete the text after the equals sign; the row disappears from the page automatically.

Three rules for infoboxes:

Leave a field blank if you do not know it. Blank is correct. A guess is not, and neither is a placeholder like "unknown" or "n/a".
Do not change review_status, reviewed_on, reviewed_by or page_level. Stewards use these to track what still needs checking.
Use the standard wording. The field dictionary lists the accepted values, such as Religious organization for a temple and United States rather than USA. The visual editor shows the accepted values in each field's description.

Step 7: Add a source

Every fact should be traceable to somewhere a reader can check. On this site a source is a footnote: a link with a descriptive label, placed right after the claim it supports.

Write the sentence, then put the link inside <ref></ref> tags after the punctuation. The footnotes are listed automatically under a References heading at the bottom of the page.

Before:

The restaurant opened in 1984.

After:

The restaurant opened in 1984.<ref>[https://www.example.com/article Long Beach Post, Restaurant history (March 2024)]</ref>

And at the bottom of the page, once:

== References ==

<references />

To cite the same source again, give it a name the first time, <ref name="lbpost">…</ref>, and reuse it with <ref name="lbpost" />.

In the visual editor, place the cursor after the claim, choose Cite, and paste the address or build a basic citation. Do not put footnotes inside the infobox; cite those values in the article text or list the source under a Sources heading below References.

Step 8: Add a section

Sections keep pages readable and consistent. KhmerConnection:Page starters lists the standard sections for each kind of page: an organization uses History, Programs and services, Community and Sources.

In the visual editor, start a new line, then choose Heading from the paragraph style menu. In Edit source, a heading is written with two equals signs on each side:

== History ==

Only add a section when you have something to put in it. An empty heading is worse than no heading.

Step 9: Link to another page

Links between pages are what turn a list of entries into something you can explore.

In the visual editor, select the words and use the link tool. In Edit source, put the exact page title in double square brackets:

[[Cambodia Town Film Festival]]

To show different words than the title, put the title first and your wording after a vertical bar:

[[Cambodia Town Film Festival|the festival]]

A blue link goes to a page that exists. A red link points to a page that does not exist yet. A red link is not an error. It is a note that something is missing, and clicking it starts that page.

Before creating a page, search for the subject first. Khmer names are written several ways in English, so the entry you want may already exist under a different spelling.

Step 10: Create a new page

Search for the subject, and search again using other spellings you can think of.
If nothing exists, type the title into the search box and click the red link offering to create it.
Go to KhmerConnection:Page starters, copy the outline that matches the kind of subject, and paste it in using Edit source.
Fill in what you know. Delete the parts you cannot fill.
Add at least one source.
Click Show preview, then Save changes.

A page with a name, one accurate paragraph and one source is a genuine contribution. Pages grow over time and nobody expects a complete entry on the first save.

Step 11: Add a photo

A photograph does more for a page than several paragraphs. A temple, a storefront, a festival night: one picture tells a reader they are looking at a real place.

Uploading needs an established account. You can upload once your account is four days old and you have made ten edits. This keeps spam off the site.

What you may upload

Only two kinds of photograph:

Photographs you took yourself.
Photographs whose copyright holder has given you permission, such as a photographer or an organization sharing their own image.

To upload the photograph and places it on the page:

Open the page and click Edit to use the visual editor.
Put the cursor where the photograph should go.
From the Insert menu, choose Images and media.
Choose Upload, then select the file from your device.
Confirm that you may share the file, then click through to the next step.
Give it a name and a description. Rename it to something descriptive such as Wat-Willow-exterior-2026.jpg. A camera name like IMG_4821.jpg tells nobody anything, and filenames are difficult to change later.
Complete the upload, then type the caption that readers will see.
Click Save changes.

Key art

A record page, such as a temple, dish, book or creator, can name one image as its key art. It appears at the top of the page, beside the page in search results and hub directories, and on the preview card when someone shares a link. A page without key art simply shows no image.

In the visual editor, click the record's details box, choose Edit, and fill in Image, Image caption and Image alt text. In Edit source, add three lines to the box at the top of the page:

{{Dish
|image=KC watercolor dish Fish Amok.jpg
|image_caption=Illustration inspired by a Khmer restaurant in Phnom Penh.
|image_alt=Fish amok in a banana-leaf cup, with a bowl of rice
...
}}

image: the file name, without File:. Upload the file first, as described above.
image_caption: one sentence. For a KhmerConnection illustration, write "Illustration inspired by" and a general description of the real thing it was drawn from, such as "a noodle house in Long Beach" or "the temple at sunrise from its western causeway". Do not name a business, a family or a person. For a photograph, say what it shows and who took it.
image_alt: what the image shows, for readers using a screen reader. Leave it out and the page name is used.

Choose an image of the subject itself, wider than it is tall, at least 800 pixels wide. A recipe without its own image uses the key art of its dish.

Step 12: Write in Khmer script

Fields named Khmer name or Khmer title hold the name in Khmer script.

If your device has no Khmer keyboard, use the CharInsert bar below the editing box in Edit source to click the characters in. You can also switch input languages using the language selector at the top of the screen.

Only enter Khmer script when you have seen the name written that way by the organization itself or in a reliable source. Do not transliterate it yourself and do not put a romanised spelling in this field. Leaving it blank is correct and normal. Romanised alternative spellings belong in the Other names field.

Step 13: Fix a warning

If a red warning appears after you save, saying a value is not in the list of allowed values, it means a field holds wording the site does not recognize, such as Temple where it expects Religious organization.

Open the field dictionary, find the accepted wording, edit the field and save again. The warning clears. It affects nothing else and there is no hurry.

Step 14: Ask when you are unsure

Every page has a Discussion tab for questions about that page. Click Add topic, write your question and click to reply. You will be notified when someone answers, and a bell icon at the top of the screen shows your notifications.

Use the discussion page when you are unsure whether something belongs, when two sources disagree, or when you would rather ask before changing something. Asking is always welcome and is never a bother.

For anything else, use the contact form.

A short version

Click Edit.
Change one thing.
Write a short summary of what you changed.
Click Save changes.

If it goes wrong, open View history and click undo.

Where to go next

KhmerConnection:How to Contribute — what belongs in an article
KhmerConnection:Page starters — outlines for each kind of page
KhmerConnection:Field dictionary — the accepted wording for field values
KhmerConnection:Scope — what this site covers