Opening the editor
How to activate editing mode
Toolbar basics
The tools at your disposal
Links and wikilinks
Connect pages up to each other
Publishing changes
Make it so
Creating new articles
Building a page from scratch
Summary
Review of what you've learned
Wikipedia already has 7 million articles, so most of the time you'll likely be updating and improving existing pages. Sometimes, however, you may want to create a completelynew article! Before you do so, there are three criteria you need to know:
Is the topicnotable? Topics need to be sufficiently important to be included in Wikipedia. This means that the subject must have received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, such as newspapers, magazines, scholarly journal articles, and books.
Try it! Take a quiz on notability
Are therereliable and verifiable sources to back up any claims? Before you start writing an article, you should gather a set of independent, reliable, verifiable sources to cite as references. These are essential for ensuring that the contents of Wikipedia remain accurate, verifiable, and trustworthy.
Do you have aconflict of interest (COI)? It is best to avoid writing articles aboutyourself, your company, or someone you know personally. This is because it is difficult to avoid bias and achieve aneutral point of view on these topics. Even if you cannot write the article yourself, you can alwaysrequest that someone else write it and provide them with reliable sources to use.
It is typically best to create a new article as aDraft (e.g. "Draft:Example"). This allows you to write and develop your article before it gets moved to Wikipedia'smainspace.
TheArticle Creation Wizard will walk you through the steps of creating a new draft article and notify experienced editors to review the article and provide feedback. |
