We could not be more excited about the upcoming Urban Tree Festival and our Wikithon. If you’d like to join in the fun, there’s plenty of time! Come along to our online event on Saturday 15th May at 11:00 BST for free training and information. You do not need any prior Wikipedia experience and we have nurtured a forest of useful resources to share with you.

If you’d like to get a head start, you can read our handy guide to setting up your Wikipedia account. There is advice on creating your account, Wikipedia's username policy and how to create your user page.

Once you have done that, or if you already have a Wikipedia account, please join our Urban Tree Wikithon dashboard (the enrollment passcode is vmqytwdr) and go through the introductory exercises, which cover:

• Wikipedia Essentials
• Editing Basics
• Evaluating Articles and Sources
• Contributing Images and Media Files
• Sandboxes and Mainspace
• Sources and Citations
• Plagiarism

These exercises aren’t time consuming – it’s definitely not an Entmoot situation – and they will help you prepare for editing Wikipedia during the Urban Tree Festival.

The easiest and swiftest way to verify your Wikipedia account is to do 10 small edits, one way to do this is to find articles where citations are needed, and add them via Citation Hunt (please make sure you are logged in for this!). For further information on adding citations, this video may be useful.

Treebeard and Hobbits, by Tom Loback, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

While it’s nice to be prepared, we understand that life is hectic and we are all busy bees, so if you don’t have a chance to do these activities in advance, it’s no problem. We will provide instructions on how to start from scratch at the session this Saturday.

Absolutely anyone can edit Wikipedia, and we can’t wait to help you on your way.

‘Tree’ you later!

This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian) & Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom). Embedded videos are by Ewan McAndrew (@emcandre), Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh.