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Wikipedia needs more articles. Yet of the hundreds that are created every day, about half end up being deleted or otherwise removed. Most of the deletions happen within a day of the article's creation. If you're thinking about adding an article to Wikipedia, this chapter will help you avoid having that article become instant roadkill. (This chapter also discusses when it's better not to write the article at all, or write it for another wiki or other website besides Wikipedia).
Even if you're not thinking about creating a new article, this chapter can be useful. You'll get a much better sense of what articles in Wikipedia should be like, which will help you when you want to improve existing articles. You'll also have some criteria to use when you come upon an existing article that you suspect might not belong in Wikipedia at all. ( Chapter 19: Deleting existing articles discusses the process for getting an article deleted.)
Before you even start thinking of writing a new article, you'll want to make absolutely, positively sure that Wikipedia doesn't already have an article on the same subject.
Wikipedia's internal search engine isn't the greatest, but it's the easiest place to start. Try searching for just part of what you think the article should be called (two or three words is plenty), and try any likely alternative names and spellings. (The page Wikipedia:Searching—shortcut WP:S—has more details. It also has links to other Wikipedia search tools.)
After you've done a reasonable amount of internal searching of Wikipedia, try an external search engine. For example, to use Google to find all Wikipedia pages with the word "Wyly," type Wyly site:en.Wikipedia.org into the Google search box. An external search engine could turn up a page that the internal search engine missed, since external search engines can be more tolerant of misspellings than Wikipedia's.
Parts of this help page (those related to The article wizard, article creation requirements) need to be updated. Please help update this help page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. |
If you're not a registered user (see Chapter 3: Setting up your account and personal workspace), you can't create new articles. Instead, you have to submit a proposed new article for review by other editors, using the Article wizard (Figure 4-1). That wizard is a five-step online interview that questions you about three things: the proposed article's motivation, notability, and sources. This section discusses all three issues, one by one. They're important for all new articles, no matter who creates them.
If you really know (and probably really like) an area of knowledge, doing a hit-or-miss search for articles to create probably isn't the best use of your time. Consider these two options instead:
The ideal starting point for creating an article is when you're surprised that Wikipedia doesn't already have an article on a particular subject. If you believe that the subject is suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia (what Wikipedia calls notability, as described in the section about notability), and that newspaper stories, magazine articles, publications in scientific journals, or public sources of information specifically focus on this topic, you have every reason to be surprised that no one's already written an article on the topic.
By contrast, if you're thinking about writing an article for one of the following reasons, then your chances of having your article deleted are high:
It's possible, of course, that even if you have the wrong motivation, there's a legitimate need in Wikipedia for the new article you're thinking about. But if your motivation falls into one of the previous three categories, think twice. If you ignore Wikipedia's rules and write articles that are only going to get deleted, you're wasting your time and that of the editors who have to delete them.
Conflicts of interest occur when editors add or delete information from Wikipedia articles with the intention of improving the image, interests, or visibility of the editors, their family members, employers, associates, or business or personal endeavors. Reshaping articles to be more positive about such personal interests stands in direct contradiction to Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy (shortcut: WP:NPOV).
If you have a possible conflict of interest, you're not barred from editing articles where such a conflict may exist, but you must be careful that your work maintains a neutral point of view. (Details are at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest; shortcut: WP:COI.) To be really careful, don't delete anything but obvious vandalism from articles. When you think the article should be changed, post to the article's talk (discussion) page (see the section about talk pages), asking other editors to make the changes. (You can add the {{ edit COI}} template to make sure your request gets attention.)
Creating a new article when you have a potential conflict of interest is particularly tricky. In step 8 of the tutorial on creating a new article, you will see how to move your article from your personal space (the draft) to mainspace, where actual articles reside. If there's any question of a conflict of interest, don't move your article. Instead, post a comment on the talk page of the most relevant WikiProject ( Chapter 9: WikiProjects and other group efforts) or at Wikipedia:Editor assistance (shortcut: WP:EA), asking other editors to review your draft, edit it if they want to, and—if they then consider it sufficiently neutral and meeting other criteria for Wikipedia articles—move it to mainspace themselves. Give the process a week or so. If no one moves your article, and no one objects strongly (or you feel you've addressed the objections), then move the article yourself.
Folks new to Wikipedia frequently see it as a place for information on everything. After all (so this mistaken impression goes), Wikipedia's the first place most people turn to for information on any possible topic, so logically it should have complete coverage of all new and interesting topics. If a topic isn't yet covered, then that's an open invitation to write a new article.
In fact, Wikipedia is by design not a publisher of initial reports. As the main notability guideline says: "A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject." If that sentence sounds familiar, it's because you read about No original research in Chapter 2: Documenting your sources (see the section about content guidelines).
You can find specialized Wikipedia guidelines for a number of areas, including books, music, and organizations and companies, at the main Notability guideline page (shortcut: WP:N). For example, a musical band would qualify as notable if it met any of a dozen different criteria, including, "Has had a record certified gold or higher in at least one country." Or, for example, a film is notable if it's been widely distributed and received full-length reviews by two or more nationally known critics.
If you write an article that doesn't state, at the very beginning, why something is notable, you've significantly increased its roadkill potential. And if you also fail to provide any good sources (see the section about reliable sources), then you've backed other editors into a corner. They'll use an external search engine to do a quick search of the subject, but it's a matter of luck whether they'll find acceptable sources, such as newspaper articles, that indicate that a subject is important. If they don't, your article is probably toast.
Despite very specific guidelines for notability, many editors think notability is subjective—who's to say what's notable? Experienced editors focus on the presence or absence of reliable sources (discussed in the next section). Still, the concept of notability, as defined by Wikipedia's guidelines, helps ensure that articles are relevant and interesting to a wide audience of readers.
I know everything there is to know about custom golf clubs, a subject that's woefully neglected on Wikipedia. But since I've come up with a lot of the innovations myself, I can't provide sources that Wikipedia considers reliable. Isn't there some way I can share what I know?
Sure there is. First of all, if you have a conflict of interest (for example, you have your own custom golf club business), see the box about conflicts of interest. You can enlist other editors' help in publishing your article.
But any time Wikipedia's rules don't allow the type of new article that you have in mind, remember you don't have to fight the system. Instead, find a place elsewhere that's more welcoming.
Wikipedia is nothing more than a wiki—a collection of pages written by a group, collaboratively. But it's hardly the only wiki out there. If you've written something uniquely your own (a theory, an argument, a how-to) another wiki might be the perfect fit. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has a page about alternatives to Wikipedia (the shortcut is WP:NOTWP). Another good place to check is http://wikiindex.org/, which has thousands of pages about wikis that aren't—let's face it—as obsessive-compulsive as Wikipedia about keeping out original writing.
Just as you must cite reliable sources when you add text to an article, as discussed in depth in Chapter 2: Documenting your sources (and at WP:RS), you must fully cite new articles you write. For new articles, here are the general guidelines:
It may seem counterintuitive, but good sources are more important than the words in your article. Yes, you want to write an article that has all the right parts (see the section about the parts of an article) and reads well. But if you include reliable sources in your new article, particularly online sources (in English), other editors will find it credible, no matter how poorly written. By contrast, if you write an article that doesn't cite independent sources, it doesn't matter that what you've written is elegant, thoughtful, and interesting. If other editors judge your article to be original research or about a non-notable subject, they'll just delete it.
Ideally, when you write a new Wikipedia article, you footnote every sentence (or paragraph, if the entire paragraph is from one source). It sounds like a lot of work, and it is, if you're looking for sources for an article you've already written. A better approach is to start by finding reliable sources for the article you want to write, and then write the article from those sources.
A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text. A stub is usually long enough to serve as a quick definition, but too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject (see Figure 4-2). Stubs are common. The last time someone counted, Wikipedia had roughly a hundred thousand articles with fewer than 200 characters. The most important thing to know about stubs: Don't contribute new ones. If you have a good idea, but only a little material, create a user subpage (see the section about personal subpages) and work on the article until it's ready for prime time.
One of the most common complaints from authors of just-deleted stubs is that they expected their article to be left in place for a while, so that other editors could contribute to it, eventually expanding it into a real article. In fact, there's no such policy of mercy for new stubs: The stubbier a new article is, the more likely it is to be deleted. If you think a topic is important enough to deserve a new article, then you should be willing to spend enough time finding information—from reliable sources—so that the article doesn't begin life as a stub. Otherwise, the article will quite possibly reach the end of its short life being a stub, and you'll have wasted your time and the time of the editors who deleted it.
So far, this chapter has shown you what a Wikipedia article needs: appropriate intentions on your part, notability of the subject, and reliable sources. Even with all these factors in place, your article idea may not be right for Wikipedia. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is a compendium of useful information, but not all useful information. Some kinds of information just don't fit in.
To judge whether an article belongs in Wikipedia, take a look at what kinds of articles don't belong there. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not (shortcut: WP:NOT) is the definitive policy on this. Much of that policy you've already heard about: "Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought," "Wikipedia is not a soapbox," for example. But there are several more guidelines worth noting:
Suppose you've found a topic that isn't covered in Wikipedia—say a nonprofit group called the International Development and Improvement Organization for Theoretical Scientificality. The organization's Web site has a number of detailed pages about the history, goals, mission, and executive leadership of the organization—perfect for a detailed article. Add links to a few reliable sources, and, presto!—instant article.
This, of course, is a massive copyright violation. Even if you're the head of that organization (a conflict of interest, but that's another matter), you can't somehow waive normal copyright requirements just for Wikipedia. If the article isn't instantly deleted, it's highly likely to go into copyright lockdown (with a huge banner across the top of the page, telling editors to leave it alone until it's been fully reviewed).
With that in mind, you can copy, more or less verbatim, from a few places. You probably don't want to copy lots of text from these sources, because it's likely to be inconsistent in tone from the rest of the article, or too detailed, or quite possibly just boring. Still, if you really want to, you can copy:
Preventing copyright violations, and fixing them as quickly as possible, are major concerns at Wikipedia. And you as an individual editor are liable, not Wikipedia, as long as the violation gets removed as soon as an editor detects it.
In this tutorial, you'll see a new article created from scratch. If you want to practice creating your own new article as you follow along with the tutorial, you can do one of two things:
Zeo works at a public relations firm. One client, though quite young, is creating innovative international events. A Wikipedia article about her, Zeo thinks, would be ideal free publicity, and she would be appreciative. Creating the article is a breeze, using text from old press releases, with links to various Web sites about the client, her organization, and her events.
The next day, Zeo notices that his article is gone. Strange, but no problem—he'd saved a copy. He creates it again. Three hours later, the article is gone again, and there's a warning on Zeo's user talk page about blatant advertising.
But Zeo is persistent. He's figured out this "reliable sources" thing. He does the article again, toning down the rhetoric and adding links to a few news articles about the events and their creator. Five hours later, he logs into Wikipedia and sees a notice on his talk page that the article is up for discussion at " Articles for deletion" (with a link).
At the AfD discussion, the regulars have already posted a lot of "Delete" recommendations. Zeo defends his article's notability, providing links to a few more newspaper articles. But he's at a disadvantage: He's new, he hasn't contributed anything else to Wikipedia, and this is the third time he's created the article. (Right or wrong, many editors see repeatedly recreating deleted articles as either fanaticism or spammer's zealotry). Of the editors commenting on the proposed deletion, almost all think that the young promoter isn't that notable: Sure, the events exist, but are they important? The article goes down for the count for a third time.
Zeo waits a week, and then tries again. This time, the article's deleted within an hour, the topic name is locked down (meaning an administrator needs to approve its creation), and Zeo is blocked from editing for 24 hours.
End of story? Not necessarily, but Zeo—or, better yet, Zeo, working with another, more established editor—is going to find more articles, build a new Wikipedia article solely from news stories and other reliable sources, footnote every single sentence, and then go through the deletion review process (DRV) (see the section about appealing deletion). As long as the article, as rewritten, makes a reasonable case for notability, it's likely that DRV will approve it. But it would have been easier for everyone if Zeo had done it right the first time.
1. Choose a name for the article.
2. Do a search (or several) to find out what Wikipedia already has on the topic.
In Wikipedia articles, any controversial statement (whether positive or negative) about a living person must be properly sourced. If it's not, you and all other editors are authorized to—and supposed to—take it out immediately, as it's a major violation of Wikipedia policy.
When it comes to privacy violations, Wikipedia's standards are even stricter. Wikipedia biographies should not include addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, or other contact information for living persons. If the birthday of the person is not widely publicized, only the birth year should be included. These kinds of information may even be removed from prior versions of that article. (Prior versions are available via the "history" tab. You can also read about the concept in Chapter 5: Who did what: Page histories and reverting.) You can find full detail in the " Presumption in favor of privacy" section of Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons (shortcut: WP:BLP).
3. If you find an existing Wikipedia article that contains a mention of the topic you searched for, do two things:
4. As shown in the steps in the section about creating a personal sandbox, create a user subpage for the article.
5. Find independent, reliable sources. Add them to the subpage.
6. Create a first draft of the article, with section headings and footnotes for every sentence (or, at minimum, every paragraph, if everything in the paragraph came from a single source).
This chapter can't describe everything that would go into a perfect article, but that's okay. A perfect article isn't your goal. Rather, you want to start what could at some point be a really good article. Make sure to establish notability, cite a number of reliable sources, and create something that you and other editors can use as a base to expand and improve over time.
Still, you should aim for a certain minimal number of sections in your new article:
For more guidance, take a look at the pages Wikipedia:Layout ( WP:GTL), Wikipedia:Writing better articles ( WP:BETTER), and Wikipedia:Annotated article ( WP:ANAR). In Chapter 18: Better articles: A systematic approach, you'll find a comprehensive discussion of how to take a poor article and make it a much better one.
7. Do your final edits to the lead section.
8. Build the web: Go through the article and create internal links (wikilinks) that point to other articles (this is part of what is called wikification).
9. Save the subpage one last time by pressing the blue 'Publish changes' button. Now it's time for you to move the article from your personal user space (as a subpage) to Wikipedia mainspace (where the real articles are):
10. You should now see a page that says the move was successful (Figure 4-7).
11. Click the bolded link that says "check" (it's in the second sentence in Figure 4-7) to see if there are any double redirects.
The steps in this chapter didn't say anything about adding categories to your new article. While adding categories isn't difficult, if you're a new editor, it's something to approach with care. If you do want to add a category or two, you can make sure you're doing so correctly by finding similar articles, and then copying any relevant categories to your newly created article. Or you can jump way, way ahead to Chapter 17 and learn about categories.
But you don't even have to add any categories yourself. Just add an uncategorized template to your article. That template (which looks like this: {{ uncategorized|date=April 2024}}) will attract the attention of experienced editors who specialize in adding categories to new articles, and your uncategorized article won't stay that way long. Furthermore, you're free to add more categories yourself, later, when you're more familiar with categorization.
If you're not sure whether Wikipedia would welcome an idea you have for a new article, consider asking for early feedback, before you spend a lot of time.
If you're looking for a topic for a new article, you'll find lists of needed topics in a number of places:
It's amazing what resources are available online today, from your home computer. In addition to regular search engines, you have Google Scholar and Google Book Search. The New York Times has made its entire archives available online for free, and more and more newspapers are deciding that advertising is now more profitable than trying to collect a fee every time someone wants to read an old article.
If that's not enough, almost every town has the perfect resource for researching Wikipedia articles. That's right—a public library. That library card languishing in your wallet may even let you go online, from your home computer, and do research via the library's connections to various databases with indexes and often full-text sources. Research librarians are also happy to help you find whatever the library has to help you write a really good new article (or improve an existing one).
You'll find that the " Research" section of Wikipedia:Article development (shortcut: WP:DEV) has some useful information on researching in general, including online databases to which your library might give you access. Wikipedia also has a number of pages with links to research resources. In addition to the pages for public domain and GFDL resources mentioned in the section about copyright, these include:
Wikipedia also has a central place where you can get help from other editors: Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange (shortcut: WP:WRE). That page includes a number of resources offered by other editors (" Shared Resources") and a section to ask for help getting copies of difficult-to-find things (" Resource Request").
This help page needs to be updated. The reason given is: this manual may contain out of date images. Please help update this help page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. (February 2020) |
Wikipedia needs more articles. Yet of the hundreds that are created every day, about half end up being deleted or otherwise removed. Most of the deletions happen within a day of the article's creation. If you're thinking about adding an article to Wikipedia, this chapter will help you avoid having that article become instant roadkill. (This chapter also discusses when it's better not to write the article at all, or write it for another wiki or other website besides Wikipedia).
Even if you're not thinking about creating a new article, this chapter can be useful. You'll get a much better sense of what articles in Wikipedia should be like, which will help you when you want to improve existing articles. You'll also have some criteria to use when you come upon an existing article that you suspect might not belong in Wikipedia at all. ( Chapter 19: Deleting existing articles discusses the process for getting an article deleted.)
Before you even start thinking of writing a new article, you'll want to make absolutely, positively sure that Wikipedia doesn't already have an article on the same subject.
Wikipedia's internal search engine isn't the greatest, but it's the easiest place to start. Try searching for just part of what you think the article should be called (two or three words is plenty), and try any likely alternative names and spellings. (The page Wikipedia:Searching—shortcut WP:S—has more details. It also has links to other Wikipedia search tools.)
After you've done a reasonable amount of internal searching of Wikipedia, try an external search engine. For example, to use Google to find all Wikipedia pages with the word "Wyly," type Wyly site:en.Wikipedia.org into the Google search box. An external search engine could turn up a page that the internal search engine missed, since external search engines can be more tolerant of misspellings than Wikipedia's.
Parts of this help page (those related to The article wizard, article creation requirements) need to be updated. Please help update this help page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. |
If you're not a registered user (see Chapter 3: Setting up your account and personal workspace), you can't create new articles. Instead, you have to submit a proposed new article for review by other editors, using the Article wizard (Figure 4-1). That wizard is a five-step online interview that questions you about three things: the proposed article's motivation, notability, and sources. This section discusses all three issues, one by one. They're important for all new articles, no matter who creates them.
If you really know (and probably really like) an area of knowledge, doing a hit-or-miss search for articles to create probably isn't the best use of your time. Consider these two options instead:
The ideal starting point for creating an article is when you're surprised that Wikipedia doesn't already have an article on a particular subject. If you believe that the subject is suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia (what Wikipedia calls notability, as described in the section about notability), and that newspaper stories, magazine articles, publications in scientific journals, or public sources of information specifically focus on this topic, you have every reason to be surprised that no one's already written an article on the topic.
By contrast, if you're thinking about writing an article for one of the following reasons, then your chances of having your article deleted are high:
It's possible, of course, that even if you have the wrong motivation, there's a legitimate need in Wikipedia for the new article you're thinking about. But if your motivation falls into one of the previous three categories, think twice. If you ignore Wikipedia's rules and write articles that are only going to get deleted, you're wasting your time and that of the editors who have to delete them.
Conflicts of interest occur when editors add or delete information from Wikipedia articles with the intention of improving the image, interests, or visibility of the editors, their family members, employers, associates, or business or personal endeavors. Reshaping articles to be more positive about such personal interests stands in direct contradiction to Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy (shortcut: WP:NPOV).
If you have a possible conflict of interest, you're not barred from editing articles where such a conflict may exist, but you must be careful that your work maintains a neutral point of view. (Details are at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest; shortcut: WP:COI.) To be really careful, don't delete anything but obvious vandalism from articles. When you think the article should be changed, post to the article's talk (discussion) page (see the section about talk pages), asking other editors to make the changes. (You can add the {{ edit COI}} template to make sure your request gets attention.)
Creating a new article when you have a potential conflict of interest is particularly tricky. In step 8 of the tutorial on creating a new article, you will see how to move your article from your personal space (the draft) to mainspace, where actual articles reside. If there's any question of a conflict of interest, don't move your article. Instead, post a comment on the talk page of the most relevant WikiProject ( Chapter 9: WikiProjects and other group efforts) or at Wikipedia:Editor assistance (shortcut: WP:EA), asking other editors to review your draft, edit it if they want to, and—if they then consider it sufficiently neutral and meeting other criteria for Wikipedia articles—move it to mainspace themselves. Give the process a week or so. If no one moves your article, and no one objects strongly (or you feel you've addressed the objections), then move the article yourself.
Folks new to Wikipedia frequently see it as a place for information on everything. After all (so this mistaken impression goes), Wikipedia's the first place most people turn to for information on any possible topic, so logically it should have complete coverage of all new and interesting topics. If a topic isn't yet covered, then that's an open invitation to write a new article.
In fact, Wikipedia is by design not a publisher of initial reports. As the main notability guideline says: "A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject." If that sentence sounds familiar, it's because you read about No original research in Chapter 2: Documenting your sources (see the section about content guidelines).
You can find specialized Wikipedia guidelines for a number of areas, including books, music, and organizations and companies, at the main Notability guideline page (shortcut: WP:N). For example, a musical band would qualify as notable if it met any of a dozen different criteria, including, "Has had a record certified gold or higher in at least one country." Or, for example, a film is notable if it's been widely distributed and received full-length reviews by two or more nationally known critics.
If you write an article that doesn't state, at the very beginning, why something is notable, you've significantly increased its roadkill potential. And if you also fail to provide any good sources (see the section about reliable sources), then you've backed other editors into a corner. They'll use an external search engine to do a quick search of the subject, but it's a matter of luck whether they'll find acceptable sources, such as newspaper articles, that indicate that a subject is important. If they don't, your article is probably toast.
Despite very specific guidelines for notability, many editors think notability is subjective—who's to say what's notable? Experienced editors focus on the presence or absence of reliable sources (discussed in the next section). Still, the concept of notability, as defined by Wikipedia's guidelines, helps ensure that articles are relevant and interesting to a wide audience of readers.
I know everything there is to know about custom golf clubs, a subject that's woefully neglected on Wikipedia. But since I've come up with a lot of the innovations myself, I can't provide sources that Wikipedia considers reliable. Isn't there some way I can share what I know?
Sure there is. First of all, if you have a conflict of interest (for example, you have your own custom golf club business), see the box about conflicts of interest. You can enlist other editors' help in publishing your article.
But any time Wikipedia's rules don't allow the type of new article that you have in mind, remember you don't have to fight the system. Instead, find a place elsewhere that's more welcoming.
Wikipedia is nothing more than a wiki—a collection of pages written by a group, collaboratively. But it's hardly the only wiki out there. If you've written something uniquely your own (a theory, an argument, a how-to) another wiki might be the perfect fit. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has a page about alternatives to Wikipedia (the shortcut is WP:NOTWP). Another good place to check is http://wikiindex.org/, which has thousands of pages about wikis that aren't—let's face it—as obsessive-compulsive as Wikipedia about keeping out original writing.
Just as you must cite reliable sources when you add text to an article, as discussed in depth in Chapter 2: Documenting your sources (and at WP:RS), you must fully cite new articles you write. For new articles, here are the general guidelines:
It may seem counterintuitive, but good sources are more important than the words in your article. Yes, you want to write an article that has all the right parts (see the section about the parts of an article) and reads well. But if you include reliable sources in your new article, particularly online sources (in English), other editors will find it credible, no matter how poorly written. By contrast, if you write an article that doesn't cite independent sources, it doesn't matter that what you've written is elegant, thoughtful, and interesting. If other editors judge your article to be original research or about a non-notable subject, they'll just delete it.
Ideally, when you write a new Wikipedia article, you footnote every sentence (or paragraph, if the entire paragraph is from one source). It sounds like a lot of work, and it is, if you're looking for sources for an article you've already written. A better approach is to start by finding reliable sources for the article you want to write, and then write the article from those sources.
A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text. A stub is usually long enough to serve as a quick definition, but too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject (see Figure 4-2). Stubs are common. The last time someone counted, Wikipedia had roughly a hundred thousand articles with fewer than 200 characters. The most important thing to know about stubs: Don't contribute new ones. If you have a good idea, but only a little material, create a user subpage (see the section about personal subpages) and work on the article until it's ready for prime time.
One of the most common complaints from authors of just-deleted stubs is that they expected their article to be left in place for a while, so that other editors could contribute to it, eventually expanding it into a real article. In fact, there's no such policy of mercy for new stubs: The stubbier a new article is, the more likely it is to be deleted. If you think a topic is important enough to deserve a new article, then you should be willing to spend enough time finding information—from reliable sources—so that the article doesn't begin life as a stub. Otherwise, the article will quite possibly reach the end of its short life being a stub, and you'll have wasted your time and the time of the editors who deleted it.
So far, this chapter has shown you what a Wikipedia article needs: appropriate intentions on your part, notability of the subject, and reliable sources. Even with all these factors in place, your article idea may not be right for Wikipedia. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is a compendium of useful information, but not all useful information. Some kinds of information just don't fit in.
To judge whether an article belongs in Wikipedia, take a look at what kinds of articles don't belong there. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not (shortcut: WP:NOT) is the definitive policy on this. Much of that policy you've already heard about: "Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought," "Wikipedia is not a soapbox," for example. But there are several more guidelines worth noting:
Suppose you've found a topic that isn't covered in Wikipedia—say a nonprofit group called the International Development and Improvement Organization for Theoretical Scientificality. The organization's Web site has a number of detailed pages about the history, goals, mission, and executive leadership of the organization—perfect for a detailed article. Add links to a few reliable sources, and, presto!—instant article.
This, of course, is a massive copyright violation. Even if you're the head of that organization (a conflict of interest, but that's another matter), you can't somehow waive normal copyright requirements just for Wikipedia. If the article isn't instantly deleted, it's highly likely to go into copyright lockdown (with a huge banner across the top of the page, telling editors to leave it alone until it's been fully reviewed).
With that in mind, you can copy, more or less verbatim, from a few places. You probably don't want to copy lots of text from these sources, because it's likely to be inconsistent in tone from the rest of the article, or too detailed, or quite possibly just boring. Still, if you really want to, you can copy:
Preventing copyright violations, and fixing them as quickly as possible, are major concerns at Wikipedia. And you as an individual editor are liable, not Wikipedia, as long as the violation gets removed as soon as an editor detects it.
In this tutorial, you'll see a new article created from scratch. If you want to practice creating your own new article as you follow along with the tutorial, you can do one of two things:
Zeo works at a public relations firm. One client, though quite young, is creating innovative international events. A Wikipedia article about her, Zeo thinks, would be ideal free publicity, and she would be appreciative. Creating the article is a breeze, using text from old press releases, with links to various Web sites about the client, her organization, and her events.
The next day, Zeo notices that his article is gone. Strange, but no problem—he'd saved a copy. He creates it again. Three hours later, the article is gone again, and there's a warning on Zeo's user talk page about blatant advertising.
But Zeo is persistent. He's figured out this "reliable sources" thing. He does the article again, toning down the rhetoric and adding links to a few news articles about the events and their creator. Five hours later, he logs into Wikipedia and sees a notice on his talk page that the article is up for discussion at " Articles for deletion" (with a link).
At the AfD discussion, the regulars have already posted a lot of "Delete" recommendations. Zeo defends his article's notability, providing links to a few more newspaper articles. But he's at a disadvantage: He's new, he hasn't contributed anything else to Wikipedia, and this is the third time he's created the article. (Right or wrong, many editors see repeatedly recreating deleted articles as either fanaticism or spammer's zealotry). Of the editors commenting on the proposed deletion, almost all think that the young promoter isn't that notable: Sure, the events exist, but are they important? The article goes down for the count for a third time.
Zeo waits a week, and then tries again. This time, the article's deleted within an hour, the topic name is locked down (meaning an administrator needs to approve its creation), and Zeo is blocked from editing for 24 hours.
End of story? Not necessarily, but Zeo—or, better yet, Zeo, working with another, more established editor—is going to find more articles, build a new Wikipedia article solely from news stories and other reliable sources, footnote every single sentence, and then go through the deletion review process (DRV) (see the section about appealing deletion). As long as the article, as rewritten, makes a reasonable case for notability, it's likely that DRV will approve it. But it would have been easier for everyone if Zeo had done it right the first time.
1. Choose a name for the article.
2. Do a search (or several) to find out what Wikipedia already has on the topic.
In Wikipedia articles, any controversial statement (whether positive or negative) about a living person must be properly sourced. If it's not, you and all other editors are authorized to—and supposed to—take it out immediately, as it's a major violation of Wikipedia policy.
When it comes to privacy violations, Wikipedia's standards are even stricter. Wikipedia biographies should not include addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, or other contact information for living persons. If the birthday of the person is not widely publicized, only the birth year should be included. These kinds of information may even be removed from prior versions of that article. (Prior versions are available via the "history" tab. You can also read about the concept in Chapter 5: Who did what: Page histories and reverting.) You can find full detail in the " Presumption in favor of privacy" section of Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons (shortcut: WP:BLP).
3. If you find an existing Wikipedia article that contains a mention of the topic you searched for, do two things:
4. As shown in the steps in the section about creating a personal sandbox, create a user subpage for the article.
5. Find independent, reliable sources. Add them to the subpage.
6. Create a first draft of the article, with section headings and footnotes for every sentence (or, at minimum, every paragraph, if everything in the paragraph came from a single source).
This chapter can't describe everything that would go into a perfect article, but that's okay. A perfect article isn't your goal. Rather, you want to start what could at some point be a really good article. Make sure to establish notability, cite a number of reliable sources, and create something that you and other editors can use as a base to expand and improve over time.
Still, you should aim for a certain minimal number of sections in your new article:
For more guidance, take a look at the pages Wikipedia:Layout ( WP:GTL), Wikipedia:Writing better articles ( WP:BETTER), and Wikipedia:Annotated article ( WP:ANAR). In Chapter 18: Better articles: A systematic approach, you'll find a comprehensive discussion of how to take a poor article and make it a much better one.
7. Do your final edits to the lead section.
8. Build the web: Go through the article and create internal links (wikilinks) that point to other articles (this is part of what is called wikification).
9. Save the subpage one last time by pressing the blue 'Publish changes' button. Now it's time for you to move the article from your personal user space (as a subpage) to Wikipedia mainspace (where the real articles are):
10. You should now see a page that says the move was successful (Figure 4-7).
11. Click the bolded link that says "check" (it's in the second sentence in Figure 4-7) to see if there are any double redirects.
The steps in this chapter didn't say anything about adding categories to your new article. While adding categories isn't difficult, if you're a new editor, it's something to approach with care. If you do want to add a category or two, you can make sure you're doing so correctly by finding similar articles, and then copying any relevant categories to your newly created article. Or you can jump way, way ahead to Chapter 17 and learn about categories.
But you don't even have to add any categories yourself. Just add an uncategorized template to your article. That template (which looks like this: {{ uncategorized|date=April 2024}}) will attract the attention of experienced editors who specialize in adding categories to new articles, and your uncategorized article won't stay that way long. Furthermore, you're free to add more categories yourself, later, when you're more familiar with categorization.
If you're not sure whether Wikipedia would welcome an idea you have for a new article, consider asking for early feedback, before you spend a lot of time.
If you're looking for a topic for a new article, you'll find lists of needed topics in a number of places:
It's amazing what resources are available online today, from your home computer. In addition to regular search engines, you have Google Scholar and Google Book Search. The New York Times has made its entire archives available online for free, and more and more newspapers are deciding that advertising is now more profitable than trying to collect a fee every time someone wants to read an old article.
If that's not enough, almost every town has the perfect resource for researching Wikipedia articles. That's right—a public library. That library card languishing in your wallet may even let you go online, from your home computer, and do research via the library's connections to various databases with indexes and often full-text sources. Research librarians are also happy to help you find whatever the library has to help you write a really good new article (or improve an existing one).
You'll find that the " Research" section of Wikipedia:Article development (shortcut: WP:DEV) has some useful information on researching in general, including online databases to which your library might give you access. Wikipedia also has a number of pages with links to research resources. In addition to the pages for public domain and GFDL resources mentioned in the section about copyright, these include:
Wikipedia also has a central place where you can get help from other editors: Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange (shortcut: WP:WRE). That page includes a number of resources offered by other editors (" Shared Resources") and a section to ask for help getting copies of difficult-to-find things (" Resource Request").