User:Hrodulf/How To Get Started Editing Uncyclopedia

Welcome! Sorry, but you're probably not as funny or as good a writer as you thought you were! But don't despair! Keep reading and find wisdom!

This is just a little bit of useful advice for n00bs. It's not a joke. However, it may still be funny anyway.

So you're on uncyclopedia for the first time. You have a great idea. Maybe it's about a joke you heard the other day. Maybe it's about your favorite tv star. Maybe it's even an 80s reference, or a gag about sentient sand particles. You get the idea.

Anyway, you take your great idea, and you type it in, and you can't think of anything else, so you click save and figure you did a great job, right?

Wrong.

Think of Uncyclopedia as a jungle. There's lots of animals, and they do lots of different things. A lot of them kill little articles like the three sentence jobbie about Fonzie getting pregnant you just uploaded.

But what can I do? I'm just a n00b!

Here's a few tips on how not to get summarily deleted, specifically for n00bs:

• If you have an idea, but don't have the time or the ideas to expand it into a full article, try adding it to an article that already exists instead of creating a new article. From my personal experience, it is a lot easier to add to a new article and have your changes survive on the site than it is to create a totally new article.

• If you're committed to creating a new article, do yourself a big favor, register and compose your article on your userpage. You can create a user page by typing "User:YourName" in the search box to the left and up a bit (sorry n00b, but don't actually type the literal letters "YourName," type the name you registered under . . . I'm so sorry that I actually need to say this, but take it all in stride and laugh at the craziness!), click the "go" box, and then click on the red link right at the top of the page, right after where it says "You searched for:."

Once you've created your userpage, you can type your page contents into the userpage like any other article on the site. Check out other people's userpages for ideas on how to organize and format your page. You can create subpages to your user page also, just type in "User:YourName/MySubPage" (No, don't really type in MySubPage, call the sub page whatever you wan- ok, you get it. Sorry. Stop looking at me like that, I said I was sorry!) in the search box, and create the page just like you created your user page. Make sure you remember to add a link to your subpage from your userpage by typing something like this somewhere on your user page: "here's how to get to my subpage: [[User:YourName/MySubPage|MySubPage]]". You can use subpages of your user page for anything, but a great way to use them is to work on articles without worrying about them being deleted.

Here's why having a userpage and subpages is important: think of uncyclopedia like a theatre (I know, first it was a jungle, now it's a theatre . . . just go with me on this for a second). When you go to the theatre, you want to see a completed play, right? Think if you sat down in your seats and wanted to watch a play, but instead of the play, the playwright comes out and says "Well, I want to do a lot of gags about Belgium really just being Backup France here, but I havn't written them yet . . . . maybe I'll think of something while we're waiting . . . . anyone in the audience have any ideas?" . . . . you get my point.

Writing on your user page is like writing at home. Writing on the uncyclopedia main space is performing live before a pretty vicious audience. Know the facts and make the right choice: do your compositional process on your user page, and once your (hopefully to someone other than you) brilliant, hilarious article is ready and fully expanded into an uncyclopedia article (see other pages on how to do this), then put it into the main space and see what people think of your writing. This will work a lot better than just laying down your idea and watching it die in the jungle theatre that we have wrought here . . . .

Lots of luck, and remember, if you start an article as a sub-page of your userpage, you won't lose it even if it gets deleted.