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Welcome to Wikipedia! This is a guide to some things you should know before creating your first encyclopedia article. We will explain some of the DOs and DON'Ts of writing an article, then we'll tell you how to create your article. When you're ready to start writing, consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles – it will walk you through these steps. Here are some tips that may help you along the way:
- You must be a registered user to create a new article. Unregistered (anonymous) users can request new articles at our Articles for Creation department.
- Try editing existing articles to get a feel for writing and for using the mark-up language in use at Wikipedia.
- Search Wikipedia first to make sure that an article does not already exist on the subject, perhaps under a different title. If the article already exists, feel free to make any constructive edits you feel are necessary.
- Gather references both to use as source(s) of your information and also to demonstrate notability of your article's subject matter. References to blogs, personal websites and MySpace don't count—we need reliable sources.
- Consider requesting feedback. You can request feedback on articles you would like to create in a number of places, including the talk page of a related WikiProject or the Drawing Board.
- Consider creating the article first in your user space. As a registered user, you have your own user space. You can start your new article there, on a subpage; you can get it in shape, take your time, ask other editors to help work on it, and only move it into the "live" Wikipedia once it is ready to go. To create your own subpage, see here. When your new article is ready for "prime time", you can move it into the main area. (Note: the Article Wizard has an option to create these kind of draft pages.)
- Remember the article you create will be deleted quickly if it is not acceptable. Wikipedia has a new pages patrol division where people check your new articles shortly after you create them.
Search for an existing article
Wikipedia already has 3,115,661 articles. Before creating an article, try to make sure there is not already an article, perhaps under a slightly different name; you can search for it here; check the Wikipedia naming conventions. If an article on your topic is there, but you think people are likely to look for it under some different name or spelling, learn how to add a redirect with that name; adding needed redirects is a good way to help Wikipedia. Also, remember to check the article's deletion log in order to avoid creating an article that has already been deleted.
If a search does not find your article, 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 to that broader article.
Gathering references
Gather sources to the information for your article. To be worth including in the encyclopedia, a subject must be sufficiently notable and that notability must be verifiable through references to reliable sources.
These sources must be reliable; that is, they must be sources that exercise some form of editorial control. Print sources (and web-based versions of those sources) tend to be the most reliable, though many web-only sources are also reliable. Some examples 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 also not limited to) books published by vanity presses, self-published zines, blogs, web forums, usenet discussions, BBSes, 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 those sources as part of the process of creating (or expanding) the Wikipedia article. If you cannot find reliable sources (such as newspapers, journals, or books) 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.
Once you have references for your article, you can learn to place the references into the article by reading Wikipedia:Citing sources. But do not worry too much about formatting them properly. It would be great if you do that, but the main thing is to get references into the article even if they are not well formatted.
Things to avoid
- Articles about yourself, your 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. In this process, feelings may be hurt and you may be blocked from editing if you repeatedly make attempts to re-create the article. These things can be avoided by a little forethought on your part. The article might 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, as 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 under our WP:SPEEDY policy. 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 that is true, then reliable sources will probably report that connection, and you should cite those sources.
- A single sentence or only a website link
- Articles need to have real content of their own.
- See also:
And be careful about...
| Copyright |
| 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.) |
| - Wikipedia:Copy-paste |
- Copying things. Do not violate copyrights
- To be safe, do not quote more than a couple of sentences of text from anywhere, and document any references you do use. You can copy material that you are sure is in the public domain, but even for public domain material you should still document your source. Also note that most Web pages are not in the public domain and most song lyrics are not either. In fact, most things 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...") If you think you are making "fair use" of copyrighted material, please put a note on the discussion page saying why you think so. For more information: Copyrights (which includes instructions for verifying permission to copy previously published text) and our non-free content guidelines for text.
| Good sources |
1. have a reputation for reliability: they are reliable sources
2. are independent of the subject
3. are verifiable by other editors |
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- Good research and citing your sources
- Articles written out of thin air are 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 large amounts of the 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. If you do not have enough material to write a good stub, you probably should not create the 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}}. See the list of stub types for a list of all specific stub templates.) Stubs help track articles that need expansion.
- 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 then 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 (see help: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 references are very useful to prove that the subject you are writing about is notable.
- Editing on the wrong page
- If you're trying to create a new page, then 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), then you're accidentally editing a pre-existing page. Don't save your changes. See #How to create a new page below, and start over.
How to create a page
Only logged in users can create an article. If you have written an article but have no account you can request your article be created at Articles for Creation.
Title for your new article
In the search box below, type the title of your article, then click Go. If the Search page reports "You may create the page" followed by the article name in red, then you can click the red article name to start editing your article.
Is it new?
Type, then click "Go (try title)" | |
There may or may not be an article with the same title as the one you wish to create.
If there is no article with the exact title, this does not necessarily mean such an article does not exist. As mentioned above, a search can help reveal this.
Resolving clashes
Sometimes there is already an article under your chosen title, but on a different topic. In this case, the titles must be distinguished from one another. The process of distinguishing identical or similar titles with distinct meanings is called "disambiguation." This can be confusing for newcomers: if necessary, create your page as a userspace draft, then ask at the new contributors' help page for help on sorting out the disambiguation.
There are three main ways disambiguation is done, depending on how many topics there are and whether there's one which is much more important than the rest:
- Disambiguation page. For example, when you enter the word "Salsa," you will be brought to a page known as a disambiguation page that will list all the subjects named "Salsa," including Salsa (sauce), Salsa music, and several other meanings of the word Salsa.
- Primary usage. In some cases, the title by itself will be used for the most common meaning of the term (the "primary usage"), and all other uses will be found on a disambiguation page. For example, when you enter Mouse, you will be brought to the article about the animal. All other uses, such as Mouse (computing), are listed on the disambiguation page.
- Just two topics. Or in some cases, if there are only two meanings of a title, the plain title will be used for one meaning (the more common one), and a message on the top of that page, known as a hatnote, will be used to direct readers to the other. For example, if you enter Avocado, you will be brought to the article about the plant. A hatnote will direct you to a town called Avocado, California.
Entering references
The very first thing you should write in your article is a list of the source(s) for your information. For now, just enter them like this (and they will automatically turn into links):
- (1) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html
- (2) http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/space/space_shuttle.html
Later, you'll learn how to format them to appear as footnotes.
If you know that it will take you a few edits to properly list references, put the template {{newpage}} on top of the page to signify to other editors that you are working on it. Even better is to create your article in a subpage of your user page, take as long as you need to make it a good article, then move it to the main article space. You can create your personal sandbox for article development by clicking this link.
Final step
After you have entered your article, click Show preview to check for errors, then click Save page.
And then what?
Now that you have created the page, there are still several things you can do.
Keep making improvements
Wikipedia is not finished. 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 much more about it in the future, and therefore, have more to add. This may be later today, tomorrow, or several months from now. Anytime, go ahead.
Improve formatting
To format your article correctly (and expand it, and possibly even make it featured!), see the following links:
Others can freely contribute to the article when it has been saved. The creator does not have special rights to control the later content. See Wikipedia:Ownership of articles.
Also, before you get frustrated or offended about the way others modify or remove your contributions, see Wikipedia:Don't be ashamed.
Avoid orphans
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 few if any 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 have in mind to get it done.
See Wikipedia:Drawing attention to new pages to learn how to get others to see your new articles.
Still need help?
The best place to find help as a new contributor is at Wikipedia:New contributors' help page. Alternately you can ask a question through the Wikipedia help channel on IRC chat.
