IUT 2009 MediaWiki Workshop/Activities/Creating an Account/Benefits

Everyone is welcome to read or use WikiEducator content, regardless of whether they choose to register. However, you must have a registered username in order to edit articles, including your user page.

The free registration gives you many benefits, including increased editing options and user preferences. One handy feature is the Watchlist, which makes it easier for you to track changes to pages you are interested in. Another is the ability to create, move or rename pages.

Registration also provides you with a detailed history of all your amazing work in WikiEducator by associating all your edits to your User name. This is partly for reasons of accountability but it is also helpful from a copyright perspective: if someone wants to use your contributions in a way not allowed under the WikiEducator copyright, they can ask you on your Talk page, for example. Also, the Creative Commons license used on WikiEducator encourages giving appropriate credit to authors, and your username is used to give that credit.

In the next section we will go through detailed step-by-step instructions on how to create your WikiEducator account.