This is my personal guide to writing good articles in Wikipedia. I'm afraid I don't guarantee that your article will be able to achieve "Good Article" status if you follow it, but I hope that it'll help you to have a fair shot at it!
The guide assumes that you are a registered user of Wikipedia and know a bit about writing Wikipedia articles using Wikitext. If you need some help with this, see "Help:Wikitext examples", "Wikipedia:Cheatsheet" and "Wikipedia:Formatting".
Creating the article edit
Jumping right in? Wait! edit
If you're intending to create an article from scratch rather than to expand an existing one, you should simply start an article with a name that you've chosen and type away, right? Well, not necessarily. If you're interested in publicizing your article by getting an interesting fact from the article highlighted in the "Did You Know?" section on the Main Page (see "Publicizing the article" below), be aware that only articles that have at least 1,500 characters in the main text (ignoring infoboxes, categories, references, lists, and tables) and are no more than five days old may be nominated. Therefore, if you don't think you'll be able to get the article to at least 1,500 characters or complete it to your satisfaction within five days, you may wish to create the article in a sandbox first. To create your own sandbox, start an article called "User:YourUsername/sandbox".
Research edit
I like to start working on an article by doing research on the subject.
Internet edit
- Do an Internet search using a search engine such as AltaVista or Google or both – sometimes websites pop up using one search engine rather than another. Note down websites that contain useful information. You may wish to do so in a text file created using a text editor such as Notepad. To find suitable articles, you may have to look through about 10 to 20 pages of search results.
- For news articles, do searches using the search boxes on the websites of newspapers and broadcasters such as those listed below. Such articles aren't always picked up by search engines.
- Consider the reliability of websites. It is better to rely on information on the websites of established companies and organizations, and newspapers, rather than unofficial fansites or personal blogs.
Library edit
Wherever possible, don't just use the Internet for your research but visit your local library to look up books and reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopedias. For instance, if you're working on a biographical article you may find useful information in works like the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (UK) and Who's Who, and art- and music-related articles may benefit from a glance through the Grove Dictionary of Art and Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Formatting edit
- Are you the copyright owner of the photograph of Chua in the infobox? If not, you can't license it to Wikipedia under a Creative Commons licence. Only the copyright owner can do so. You must either contact the Straits Times and request that they license the image to Wikipedia (unlikely to happen, I believe), or provide a justification for fair use of the image that satisfies the non-free content criteria. Let me know if you need help with this.
- Individual years ("1947") need not be Wikilinked. However, full dates ("[[8 February]] [[2008]]") should be linked. This is to ensure that full dates display according to the date preferences selected by users (people from the US usually want dates to be displayed like this: "February 8, 2008").
- Infobox
- In the "Notes" section, use {{reflist|2}} rather than {{reflist|4}}.
- Separate quotation sections are generally deprecated. Also, {{cquote}} is only to be used for pull quotes. For ordinary quotations, use {{quote}}. I've incorporated the quotations into the main article text.
- "Wikipedia:Persondata" should be added to biographical articles.
- I've removed the category "Category:Singaporean people", because the article has already been categorized under "Category:Singaporean painters". An article should generally be placed in the most specific category that it fits into, and should not be included in both a category and a sub-category of that category.
Images edit
- See if you can find a free image that can be used in the article. Check the Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.com (images that are tagged with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) and Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) licences can be imported to the Commons using a tool called Flinfo). Or can an old image that is out of copyright be used?
- Failing that, consider who you can contact to try and obtain permission for an image to be licensed to Wikipedia. Often, the owner of a website on which an image appears is the person to contact. If the photograph that you wish to use is of an individual, does he or she have an agent, manager or publicist? What about the company or organization that the person owns or works for? See "Wikipedia:Example requests for permission" and "commons:Email templates" for sample e-mails that you can use. I've had some success with this before.
- Otherwise, consider whether the article really needs to have the particular non-free image that you wish to include. If so, as I mentioned above, upload the image and provide a detailed fair-use rationale complying with "Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline" for each article that the image is used in, and a suitable copyright tag on the image description page. What you must do is explain why the image is important to the article and why the copyrighted image cannot be replaced by a free alternative (perhaps because it is of a deceased person, captures an unrepeatable historical moment that is important to the article, or because it is unique – logos and book covers, for instance). For an example, see "Image:Coxford Singlish Dictionary.jpg". However, be aware that non-free images uploaded with fair-use justifications may be deleted by administrators if they do not feel that fair use of the images has been made out.
