Wikipedia:WikiProject WikiFundi Content/Help:How to write your first Wikipedia article
 | This page in a nutshell: New articles should follow some guidelines: the topic should be notable (i.e. it should have some detailed coverage in good references from independent sources). Wikipedia is an encyclopedia – not something else. Please respect copyright] law and avoid defamatory content. Feel free to be bold and create the article with a limited knowledge of norms here. |
Welcome to creating your first Wikipedia article on WikiFundi! You have probably already been reading Wikipedia for some time, but now you are ready to start your own article from scratch. Jump in! Be bold.
Introduction edit
This guide will help you to start your first encyclopedia article and keep you inside the guard rails. We will explain some of the DOs and DON'Ts, then show you how to create an article. When you're ready to start writing, the following should to help you create your first articles—it will walk you through these steps and help you understand the basics of creating a new wikipedia page.
- Keep in mind that once your article is transferred to the main online Wikipedia, if the article is not acceptable, it will be deleted quickly. Wikipedia has a new pages patrols where people check new articles shortly after creation.
- Articles that do not meet notability guidelines and do not cite reliable published sources are very likely to be deleted.
- Do not create: pages about yourself, your company, your band, or your friends; pages that advertise; personal essays; or other articles you would not find in an encyclopedia.
- Be careful about the following: copying things, controversial material, extremely short articles, and local-interest articles.
Here are some tips that can help you:
- Consider registering an account on the online Wikipedia first—you need only choose a username and password.
- Wikipedia covers certain kinds of subjects and not others. Wikipedia requires that subjects for articles be "worthy of notice"; this concept of notability serves to avoid the indiscriminate inclusion of new topics. If the topic is likely to be suitable for an encyclopedia, go ahead; if you're unsure, or the article is about yourself or something you are closely connected to, you can ask questions at the Wikipedia Baobab.
- Search Wikipedia first for your article's title or a similar subject, just in case an article already exists on the subject - perhaps under a different title. If the article already exists there are many articles that do not yet exist.
- Practice first. Before starting, try editing existing articles to get a feel for writing and for using Wikipedia's mark-up language.
- Gather references both to use as source(s) of the information you will include and to demonstrate the notability of your article's subject matter. Wikipedia requires the use of reliable published sources. Sources, particularly internet sources, should also be stable, meaning they should be high enough quality that they will continue to exist for future generations. There are many places to find reliable sources, including your local library, but if internet-based sources are to be used, start with http://books.google.com or https://news.google.com rather than a simple web search. Extra care should be taken to make sure that articles about living persons have reliable sources – articles about living people without reliable sources may be deleted, especially if they include negative or controversial content. References to blogs, personal websites, Facebook and YouTube are unsuitable and material obtained from them may be challenged and removed.
- Create the article from the Main_Page.
Search for an existing article edit
Wikipedia already has over 5 million articles. Before creating an article, try to make sure there is not already an article on the same topic, perhaps under a slightly different name. Search for the article when you are connected to the internet. If an article on your topic already exists, but you think people might look for it under some different name or spelling, it can be redirected.
If a search does not find the topic, consider broadening your search to find existing articles that might include the subject of your article. For example, if you want to write an article about a band member, you might search for the band and then add information about your subject as a section within that broader article.
Gathering references edit
Gather sources for the information you will be writing about. To be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia, a subject must be sufficiently notable, and that notability must be verifiable through citations to reliable sources.
As noted, the sources you use must be reliable; that is, they must be sources that exercise some form of editorial control and have some reputation for fact checking and accuracy. Print sources (and web-based versions of those sources) tend to be the most reliable, though some web-only sources may also be reliable. Examples might include (but are not limited to) books published by major publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, websites of any of the above, and other websites that meet the same requirements as a reputable print-based source.
In general, sources with no editorial control are not reliable. These include (but are not limited to) books published by vanity presses, self-published 'zines', blogs, web forums, usenet discussions, personal social media, fan sites, vanity websites that permit the creation of self-promotional articles, and other similar venues. If anyone at all can post information without anyone else checking that information, it is probably not reliable.
To put it simply, if there are reliable sources (such as newspapers, journals, or books) with extensive information published over an extended period about a subject, then that subject is notable and you must cite such sources as part of the process of creating (or expanding) the Wikipedia article. If you cannot find such reliable sources that provide extensive and comprehensive information about your proposed subject, then the subject is not notable or verifiable and almost certainly will be deleted. So your first job is to go find references to cite.
There are many places to find reliable sources, including your local library, but if internet-based sources are to be used, start with searches rather than a web search.
Once you have references for your article, you can learn to place the references by Wikipedia:Citing sources. Do not worry too much about formatting citations properly. It would be great if you did that, but the main thing is to get references into the article, even if they are not perfectly formatted.
Things to avoid edit
- Articles about yourself, your family or friends, your website, a band you're in, your teacher, a word you made up, or a story you wrote
- If you are worthy of inclusion in the encyclopedia, let someone else add an article for you. Putting your friends in an encyclopedia may seem like a nice surprise or an amusing joke, but articles like this are likely to be removed. These things can be avoided by a little forethought on your part. The article may remain if you have enough humility to make it neutral and you really are notable, but even then it's best to submit a draft for approval and consensus of the community instead of just posting it up, since unconscious biases may still exist of which you may not be aware.
- Non-notable topics
- People frequently add pages to Wikipedia without considering whether the topic is really notable enough to go into an encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia does not have the space limitations of paper-based encyclopedias, our notability policies and guidelines allow a wide range of articles – however, they do not allow every topic to be included. A particularly common special case of this is pages about people, companies, or groups of people, that do not substantiate the notability or importance of their subject with reliable sources, so we have decided that such pages may be speedily deleted. This can offend – so please consider whether your chosen topic is notable enough for Wikipedia, and then substantiate the notability or importance of your subject by citing those reliable sources in the process of creating your article. Wikipedia is not a directory of everything in existence.
- Advertising
- Please do not try to promote your product or business. Please do not insert external links to your commercial website unless a neutral party would judge that the link truly belongs in the article; we do have articles about products like Kleenex or Sharpies, or notable businesses such as McDonald's, but if you are writing about a product or business be sure you write from a neutral point of view, that you have no conflict of interest, and that you are able to find references in reliable sources that are independent from the subject you are writing about.
- Personal essays or original research
- Wikipedia surveys existing human knowledge; it is not a place to publish new work. Do not write articles that present your own original theories, opinions, or insights, even if you can support them by reference to accepted work. A common mistake is to present a novel synthesis of ideas in an article. Remember, just because both Fact A and Fact B are true does not mean that A caused B, or vice versa (fallacies). If the synthesis or causation is true, locate and cite reliable sources that report the connection.
- A single sentence or only a website link
- Articles need to have real content of their own.
- Attacks on a person or organization
- Material that violates our biographies of living persons policy or is intended to threaten, defame, or harass its subject or another entity is not permitted. Unsourced negative information, especially in articles about living people, is quickly removed, and attack pages may be deleted immediately.
And be careful about... edit
As a general rule, do not copy-paste text from other websites. (There are a few limited exceptions, and a few words as part of a properly cited and clearly attributed quotation is OK.)
- Copying things. Do not violate copyrights
- Never copy and paste text into a Wikipedia article unless it is a relatively short quotation, placed in quotation marks, and cited using an inline citation. Even material that you are sure is in the public domain must be attributed to the source, or the result, while not a copyright violation, is plagiarism. Also note that most web pages are not in the public domain and most song lyrics] are not either. In fact, most things published after 1923, and almost everything written since January 1, 1978 are automatically under copyright even if they have no copyright notice or © symbol. If you think what you are contributing is in the public domain, say where you got it, either in the article or on the discussion page, and on the discussion page give the reason why you think it is in the public domain (e.g. "It was published in 1895..."). Finally, please note that superficial modification of material, such as minor rewording, is insufficient to avoid plagiarism and copyright violations.
1. have a reputation for reliability: they are reliable sources
2. are independent of the subject
3. are verifiable by other editors
- Good research and citing your sources
- Articles written out of thin air may be better than nothing, but they are hard to verify, which is an important part of building a trusted reference work. Please research with the best sources available and cite them properly. Doing this, along with not copying text, will help avoid any possibility of plagiarism. We welcome good short articles, called "stubs", that can serve as launching pads from which others can take off – stubs can be relatively short, a few sentences, but should provide some useful information. If you do not have enough material to write a good stub, you probably should not create an article. At the end of a stub, you should include a "stub template" like this: {{stub}}. (Other Wikipedians will appreciate it if you use a more specific stub template, like {{art-stub}}. Stubs help track articles that need expansion.
- Articles about living persons
- Articles written about living persons must be referenced so that they can be verified. Biographies about living subjects that lack sources may be deleted.
- Advocacy and controversial material
- Please do not write articles that advocate one particular viewpoint on politics, religion, or anything else. Understand what we mean by a neutral point of view before tackling this sort of topic.
- Articles that contain different definitions of the topic
- Articles are primarily about what something is, not any term(s). If the article is just about a word or phrase and especially if there are very different ways that a term is used, it usually belongs in Wiktionary. Instead, try to write a good short first paragraph that defines one subject as well as some more material to go with it.
- Organization
- Make sure there are incoming links to the new article from other Wikipedia articles (click "What links here" in the toolbox) and that the new article is included in at least one appropriate category). Otherwise it will be difficult for readers to find the article.
- Local-interest articles
- These are articles about places like schools, or streets that are of interest to a relatively small number of people such as alumni or people who live nearby. There is no consensus about such articles, but some will challenge them if they include nothing that shows how the place is special and different from tens of thousands of similar places. Photographs add interest. Try to give local-interest articles local colour. Third-party sources are the only way to prove that the subject you are writing about is notable.
- Breaking news events
- While Wikipedia accepts articles about notable recent events, articles about breaking news events with no enduring notability are not appropriate for our project. Consider writing such articles on our sister project Wikinews.
- Editing on the wrong page
- If you're trying to create a new page, you'll start with a completely empty edit box. If you see text in the editing box that is filled with words you didn't write (for example, the contents of this page), you're accidentally editing a pre-existing page. Don't save your changes.
Are you closely connected to the article topic? edit
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but there are special guidelines for editors who are paid or sponsored. These guidelines are intended to prevent biased articles, and maintain the public's trust that content in Wikipedia is impartial and has been added in good faith.
The official guidelines are that editors must be volunteers. That means Wikipedia discourages editing articles about individuals, companies, organizations, products/services, or political causes that pay you directly or indirectly. This includes in-house PR departments and marketing departments, other company employees, public relations firms and publicists, social media consultants, and online reputation management consultants. However, Wikipedia recognizes the large volume of good faith contributions by people who have some affiliation to the articles they work on.
Here are some ground rules. If you break these rules, your edits are likely to be reverted, and the article(s) and your other edits may get extra scrutiny from other Wikipedia editors. Your account may also be blocked.
| Things to avoid | Things to be careful about | Great ways to contribute |
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Note that this has to do only with conflict of interest. Editors are encouraged to write on topics related to their expertise: e.g., a NASA staffperson might write about planets, or an academic researcher might write about their field. Also, Wikipedians-in-residence or other interns who are paid, hosted or otherwise sponsored by a scientific or cultural institution can upload content and write articles in partnership with curators, indirectly providing positive branding for their hosts.
Create your draft edit
Click here: Main Page, read the brief introduction, enter your title into the field, and then click the big blue button to get started creating your article.
And then what? edit
Now that you have created the page, start writing! Once you have written up the structure and first parts of the article, be sure to press the Save button. Wikipedians generally save as they go along. They don't wait to finish the article before they press saving. Its a good idea to click on Save every time you finish a section.
Once you have finished your first draft, there are still several things you can do.
Keep making improvements edit
Generally, an article is nowhere near being completed the moment it is created. There is a long way to go. In fact, it may take you several edits just to get it started.
If you have so much interest in the article you just created, you may learn more about it in the future, and accordingly have more to add. This may be later today, tomorrow, or several months from now. Any time – go ahead.
Improve formatting edit
To format your article correctly (and expand it, and possibly even make it a featured article!), see
- Help:How to format a page to learn how to format your article
Others can freely contribute to the article when it has been saved. As the creator, you do not have special rights to control the content.
Don't get frustrated or offended about the way others modify or remove your contributions - it is how Wikipedia works.
Avoid orphans edit
An orphaned article is an article that has few or no other articles linking to it. The main problem with an orphan is that it'll be unknown to others, and may get fewer readers if it is not de-orphaned.
Most new articles are orphans from the moment they are created, but you can work to change that. This will involve editing one or more other articles. Try searching Wikipedia for other pages referring to the subject of your article, then turn those references into links by adding double brackets to either side: "[[" and "]]". If another article has a word or phrase that has the same meaning as your new article, but not expressed in the same words as the title, you can link that word or phrase as follows: "[[title of your new article|word or phrase found in other article]]." Or in certain cases, you could create that word or phrase as a redirect to your new article.
One of the first things you want to do after creating a new article is to provide links to it so it will not be an orphan. You can do that right away, or if you find that exhausting, you can wait a while, provided that you keep the task in mind.
Read a traditional encyclopedia edit
Try to read as many Wikipedia articles and traditional paper encyclopedia articles as you can, to get the layout, style, tone, and other elements of encyclopedic content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create an up-to-the-moment encyclopedia on every notable subject imaginable. Pretend that your article will be published in a paper encyclopedia.