Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Tutorial: Creating a New Article

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:

• Find a real topic (for example, using the information in the box on Ideas for New Articles, concerning articles that are needed or requested).

• Write a pretend article, and don’t do the very last few steps, which involve moving the article into mainspace, where real Wikipedia articles exist.

  Before you start the tutorial, you might want to review Chapter 1 through Chapter 3, or take a look at Wikipedia:Your first article (shortcut: WP:YFA) to reinforce what you need to know about choosing new articles to write, and working in Wikipedia’s edit window.

Word to the Wise: A New Article Creator Gets It Very, Very Wrong

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) (After an Article is Deleted). 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.

   In general, use the topic’s most commonly used name. Using a search engine to compare the total number of hits for each version of the name is a good way to determine which name is the most popular. Once you have a couple of ideas, check the rules: Wikipedia has lots and lots of details about proper naming of articles. You’ll find these at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (shortcut: WP:NC).

   In this tutorial, the new article is a biography, Sam Wyly. A search engine check shows that this is much more common than “Samuel Wyly.”

2. Do a search (or several) to find out what Wikipedia already has on the topic.

   You can read about search techniques in the box on Chapter 4. Don’t search for “Sam Wyly”; that Wikipedia article was already created as an example for this book. Rather, search for the name of the real article that you want to create, or use one of the topics identified as missing in Wikipedia (see Ideas for New Articles).

   Up to Speed: Biographical Information: Two Caveats

   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.) 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:

   • Change that mention into an internal link (wikilink), if it’s not already, by editing the page, by adding two square brackets on each side: “[[Sam Wyly]]”. After you save your change to that article, you see that the link you created is a red link, since it points to an article that doesn’t yet exist. Adding such wikilinks is called, in Wikipedia, building the web.

   • Copy the name of the page, and possibly useful details about the topic that are on the page, to a temporary place (for example, Windows Notepad). Figure 4-3 lists the Wikipedia articles that mentioned Sam Wyly before the Sam Wyly article was created.

     

     Figure 4-3. Five articles that mentioned Sam Wyly were found during the process of creating a new article about him. Information from those articles was copied (in this illustration, to the Windows Notepad) because it’ll be used in the article. Part of building the web is creating outgoing links from a new article, pointing to existing Wikipedia articles.

4. As shown in the steps starting on Creating Your Personal Sandbox, create a user subpage for the article.

   Typically, you give the this user subpage the same name that the article will have. In this tutorial, though, the subpage is just called “New article.”

5. Find independent, reliable sources. Add them to the subpage.

   Note

   You can read about finding copyright-free sources on Don’t Repeat Someone Else’s Words at Length. Also, Resources for Writing Articles has a discussion about finding reliable sources from which you can take facts and limited amounts of text in accordance with fair use laws.

   Figure 4-4 shows the results of searching for sources for “Sam Wyly.” If you use a search engine, a lot of results are going to be links to bloggers, forums, or other unacceptable sources. Don’t ignore these—they may have a link to a reliable source or ideas for keywords you can use to search for good sources.

   

   Figure 4-4. Here are a number of reliable sources for the planned article. There isn’t any standard way to put them on the subpage (the top of which is shown here), but it’s a good idea to start building the format for full citations (The Three Ways to Cite Sources). On the other hand, don’t put the full text of long articles on the page—that’s a copyright violation the moment you save the page with all the text on it, even though you’re doing the work on a user subpage, rather than on an article page.

   Note

   If you’re coming up dry in Web searches for reliable sources, you may have picked a non-notable topic for a new article. Or it may mean that you need to tap into other resources (see Resources for Writing Articles).

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).

   Whatever writing approach works for you, use it. Regardless of how you create the article, keep three points in mind:

   • Work from the sources to the article, rather than writing the text of the article and then looking for sources.

   • Don’t copy and paste large chunks of text; that’s a copyright violation.

   • When you add text to the article, add the source of that information, right then, as a footnote.

   Up to Speed: Parts of an Article

   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:

   • A lead section of a couple of sentences (see Lead Section for more details).

   • At least three sections in the body of the article, well footnoted. If you’re having trouble figuring out how to divide the information you’ve found into sections, take a look at other Wikipedia articles on similar topics. If your article is a biography, look at biographies for other people in the field; if it’s a company, look at larger competitors; if it’s an annual event, look at larger events of a similar nature.

   • A “References” section (for footnotes), and an external links section, at the bottom. The external links section should contain official Web sites related to the topic, even if already cited in footnotes. Otherwise, generally avoid duplicating links. (You’ll find specific guidance via the shortcut WP:EL.)

   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, you’ll find a comprehensive discussion of how to take a poor article and make it a much better one.

   You can work offline, if you want to, writing a rough draft in your favorite word processor, with notes about where each sentence or paragraph came from. You can also do your work iteratively within Wikipedia: Edit the article draft in your user subpage, preview, edit some more, preview, and so on.

   Note

   As discussed on Dealing with an Edit Conflict, if you keep an article open in edit mode too long, you risk an edit conflict when you try to save it, because another editor has done and saved an edit in the meantime. You don’t have to worry about this with your own user subpage, so you can be leisurely about saving your changes. Just save your work every hour or so; computers have been known to crash.

   Figure 4-5 shows the wikitext for one section of the Sam Wyly article, partway through the process of creating a final draft. The article-building method illustrated here first starts out with less-detailed sources (typically, short articles) to construct a set of points that you or other editors can fill out later with more general sources and additional sources. Ideally, editors will replace the initial footnotes with others that better support lengthier information in each part of this section. Your approach can be different, but remember that your goal is to footnote every sentence (or, at the very least, every paragraph).

   

   Figure 4-5. A section of the Sam Wyly article in rough draft form. Sections in the body of articles normally consist of prose paragraphs, not bullet points or lists as shown here, but that’s because the article is still in very rough form. You should at least turn the bulleted sentences into bulleted paragraphs.

7. Do your final edits to the lead section.

   It’s okay to do a draft of the lead section early on, but it’s best to wait to finalize it until the article is pretty close to done. The lead section, after all, is supposed to be a relatively brief summary that just touches on the highlights of why the topic is notable.

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).

   Now’s the time to review the list of articles you put together earlier—the ones that that’ll link to the new article (see Figure 4-3). You want your new article to contain internal (wiki)links pointing back to those articles, whenever mentioning the topics of those articles in your new article makes sense.

   Don’t limit yourself, however, to this list. Almost certainly your new article should link to more than just the articles you found earlier. Add more wikilinks and check their validity (but don’t overlink; see the box on How to Create Internal Links).

   Note

   The fastest way to check new wikilinks is to put the double brackets around the words or phrases to be linked, and then do a preview and see if the links are red or blue. Follow each blue link via a new browser tab or page. If it leads (via a redirect or disambiguation page) to an article with a different name than you thought was the case, change the wikilink to point directly to the article of interest (using a piped wikilink if you want). For each red link, either change the wording and try again, or do a search from a separate window. You can leave a red link in the article if you decide that there’s no article to link to but that Wikipedia should have an article on that topic.

9. Save the subpage one last time. 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):

   • At the top of the article, click the “move” tab. (If you can’t see the tab, you’re not in normal/reading mode.) You’ll see something like Figure 4-6.

     

     Figure 4-6. The standard page for moving (renaming) a page gives you information and warnings. Use the “Measure twice, cut once” rule: Check your spelling and capitalization carefully before you move your article to its new home. It’s not the end of the world if you misspell or otherwise err with the title of your new article (you can always move the page again), but it’s embarrassing.

   • In the “To new title” box, change the old name of the page (in this case, “User:Your username goes here/New article”) to the new name of the page (in this case, “Sam Wyly”); enter a reason (typically, “Creating new article”); and click the “Watch this page” box (more on watching pages on Adding Pages to Your Watchlist).

   • Click the “Move page” button.

   Warning

   Don’t move the page if you have a conflict of interest in publishing the article. If you do, or aren’t sure whether you do, read the box on The Right Motivation for advice on how to handle such conflicts. Basically, you should get help from non-conflicted editors to create the article.

10. You should now see a page that says the move was successful (Figure 4-7).

    Moving a page always leaves a redirect in place—that way, anyone clicking on a link to the old location of the page will end up at the new location. (Redirects are covered in detail in Chapter 16.) Now you just have to check for, and fix, any double redirects—where one redirect sends the reader to a second redirect rather than to a final destination. You’ll check for these in the final step.

    

    Figure 4-7. There’s one more step after you’ve moved a page—fixing any double redirects. A double redirect is where article A has a link to page B; page B is a redirect that immediately takes the reader to page C; and page C is also a redirect that points to page D.

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.

    Double redirects for new articles are exceedingly rare. Still, you want to get into the habit of checking whenever you move a page. When you click “check”, the result is Figure 4-8, which shows all the pages that link to the article.

    

    Figure 4-8. There are nine direct links to the new Sam Wyly article. The last of the nine is a redirect (which is fine). If there were any double redirects; you’d see a double indentation underneath the redirect. (For more information on redirects, including fixing them, see Fixing Double Redirects.)

    Congratulations! You now know how to create new articles, and how to do it right.

Word to the Wise: Categorize with Caution

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: {{uncat|date=January 2008}}) 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.