Wikipedia: The Missing Manual Sneak Preview: Five Tips and Tricks -- missingmanuals.com

1. Edit one section at a time whenever possible - that's what the "edit" link to the right of section headings is for. It makes it much less likely that what you're doing will conflict with an edit being done by someone else, and it makes it easier for other editors looking at an edit if it's only to one section.

2. Get a user account. It gives you a lot of benefits, including more privacy than if you edit without logging in. It's free, and Wikipedia requires you to provide absolutely no personal information. (In fact,the next three tips don't apply unless you're a registered editor.)

3. You can even edit just the top ("lead") section of the article - if you're a registered user, go to "my preferences", then the "Gadgets" tab, and select "Add an [edit] link for the introduction section of a page".

4. When you're editing only one section, you normally can't see the footnotes from that section when you preview your edit. If you add "<preferences/> at the bottom of the section, temporarily, you can see the footnotes in that section; you just need to remember to delete this temporary tag before you save your edit.

5. Sign up to get the weekly Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia's internal weekly newsletter. For inexperienced editors, a lot of the information will be irrelevant or difficult to understand, but you're not going to get quizzed about its contents, so it's not a problem to just skip over anything that isn't interesting.