Wikipedia:Starting an article
Welcome to Wikipedia! This is a guide to some important things you should know before creating your first encyclopedia article. 1) Be bold. 2) But please don't create vanity pages, advertising, or personal essays. 3) And be careful about: copying things, controversial material, extremely short articles, and local-interest articles.
Be bold
- We want new people to write new Wikipedia articles. Don't worry about making mistakes; they can be corrected. If you're not sure what to do—then go ahead. If other Wikipedians think it seriously violates our guidelines, be aware that your article will be edited and may even be removed. However, Wikipedians love to fix and improve articles and rarely remove them, so do not be shy of contributing to The Free Encyclopedia.
But please don't create...
- Vanity pages
- articles about yourself. 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 the process, feelings may be hurt, and this can be avoided by a little forethought.
- Advertising
- Please don't try to promote your product or business. Please don't 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 like Wal-Mart, but if you are writing about a product or business be sure you write from a neutral point of view.
- 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.
- A single sentence or only a website link
- Articles need to have more content and should not merely reference another website.
And be careful about:
- Copying things. Do not violate copyrights. To be safe, do not copy 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 about 1976 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.
- 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.
- Extremely short articles that are just definitions. Try to write a good short paragraph that says something about the subject. We welcome good short articles, called "stubs", that can serve as launching pads from which others can take off. If you don't 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}}. It helps track articles that need expansion. Definitions belong on Wiktionary.
| Questionable | Better |
| A close-up is a shot in a movie taken with the camera close to the actors. | A close-up is a shot in a movie taken with the camera close to the actors. Close-ups are typically brief, and are used to draw attention to the actor's expression. Closeups are an important part of film grammar. D. W. Griffith invented the close-up as we know it. {{stub}} |
- 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 color.
| Questionable | Better |
| The University of Notre Dame is located near South Bend, Indiana. It has an undergraduate enrollment of 8000. Its president is Edward A. Malloy. Its school colors are gold and blue. | The University of Notre Dame is a Catholic university located near South Bend, Indiana. It has an undergraduate enrollment of 8000. Its president is Edward A. "Monk" Malloy. It is famous for its football team, the "Fighting Irish," and for its landmark Golden Dome. |
| Canal Street is a street in New York. | Canal Street is a major street in lower Manhattan. It is a ramshackle but bustling commercial district. Tourists and locals pack the Canal Street sidewalks every day to frequent its open-air food stalls, and its bare-bones stores selling items such as perfume, purses, hardware, industrial plastics, and pirated DVDs. |
| Louis' Lunch makes the best darn hamburgers in New Haven. | Louis' Lunch is a restaurant famous in New Haven for its hamburgers. The proprietors claim that Louis' Lunch was, in 1895, the first place in the United States to serve hamburgers as we know them today. The Library of Congress has material apparently supporting this claim. |
Superlove-A powerful tool used to zap occurences of hatred, heal unhealthy bodies and bring simple love to any average soul. The ability to harness the power of Superlove and pay it forward lies in all but it first must be believed in faithfully.
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