User:Theonesean/sandbox/AfC Mentoring/Introduction/Welcome to Articles for Creation!
Welcome to WikiProject Articles for Creation! A WikiProject is a collection of editors all working towards a collective goal. Most WikiProjects are focused on improving coverage of articles on Wikipedia. There's probably even a Wikiproject for your city. Take a minute and search for WikiProject Your City. If you don't find anything, that's fine, some small towns don't have projects. But maybe later you could spend some more time searching. Maybe there's one for your state or province. Maybe for your country. But there's only one WikiProject that you should focus on during this course, and that's the Articles for Creation WikiProject (or AfC for short).
Over the course of this article, you will learn why the AfC project got started, what our goals are, and the many ways that people are involved in it.
History of AfC[edit]
Back in 2005, an anonymous editor created a slanderous page about John Seigenthaler, an aide to Robert Kennedy, saying that he had been a suspect in the assasinations of President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a patently false statement. The page remained largely untouched for months on Wikipedia, until a close friend of Seigenthaler's brought the article to his attention. Seigenthaler wrote of his experience in USA Today, calling it "internet character assassination." [1] The incident, after raising questions about the reliability of Wikipedia, ended in Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales barring anonymous users from creating articles. [2]This led to the creation of the Articles for Creation process by Creidieki (talk · contribs). The first page created was a redirect: Fox Latin America requested by 140.247.23.58 (talk · contribs · WHOIS). The first article created was The first article created was Horsea Island by Chemstud (talk · contribs).Following huge backlogs on the page, Alexandria (talk · contribs) and others started WikiProject Articles for creation on 2 June 2007.
If you are interested and want to read more about this, try the following articles:
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation#Brief history - a very brief overview of the start of AfC
- Seigenthaler incident - the Wikipedia page about the incident, focuses mostly on the repercussions and media response
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-12-05/Seigenthaler - a Signpost article about the incident
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-12-05/Page creation restrictions - another Signpost article, mostly about the restriction of article creation
Goals of AfC[edit]
shamelessly copied from the AfC Wikiproject main page
- Promote awareness of the WikiProject.
- Review requests at
- Promote, monitor and improve the articles and images created through the project.
Getting involved[edit]
Taking a look at the above categories, you can see that there are 2,717 pending articles. Reviewing all those articles is no small task. So that's why we want you to help us out. This course will prepare you for the many aspects of article reviewing that you will run into as an active AfC-er.
Discussion[edit]
Have any questions for your mentor? Ask them here!
Ready?[edit]
When you're ready to move on, click here to get an overview of this course.