User:Archivisticus/Manual

Adding Articles to Wikipedia

Note: When reading the instructions below, all text taken directly from Wikipedia is in quotation marks.

Why Wikipedia?

Why create articles for Wikipedia? For those responsible for an official website, why create an alternate site for information if you want users to come straight to your site? Wikipedia is another, different form of outreach. It provides information in an encapsulated form such as one would find in any encyclopedia, not spread out on multiple pages as is typical on official web sites. This is useful for people who want to get a quick overview of the topic. The language used in Wikipedia is a more casual, straightforward language that the general public can understand and appreciate. People use Wikipedia who might not go to an official web site. They also come to Wikipedia through different linking and searching than would bring up an official web site.

General Principles

There are three, possibly surprising, tenets of Wikipedia:

• “‘Neutral point of view (NPOV)’: articles must be neutral;
• ‘Verifiability’: articles must employ published or publically available sources;
• ‘No original research’: there must not be original research used in the articles.”

Overall Guidelines

Here’s the link to overall guidelines, not easily found: Wikipedia:List of guidelines

There’s a tutorial, reachable from the main page: Wikipedia:Tutorial

Establish Your Identity

In order to edit other articles already in Wikipedia, or to create your own articles, you must create an identity and a password and login every time you enter it as a creator/editor. Editors caution you to create as strong a password as you can to ensure security, for example they suggest creating a password 12 to 14 characters long with letters, numbers and symbols.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup

Does an Article Already Exist?

Search for the article to see if anyone has already created a page for it. Try Google first, since the search capabilities in Wikipedia are somewhat rigid. Enter both the search term and the name “Wikipedia” in the Google search box. If that doesn’t bring anything up, try searching for the article through the search box on the left-hand side of any Wikipedia page. Try every alternative you can think of, because quite often people don’t know how to put alternatives in that will refer you to the current page. Use natural word order.

Let’s use “Janet Doe” as an example. If the article does not exist, you will come to a search results page that tells you: “You searched for Janet Doe (all pages starting with "Janet Doe" | all pages that link to "Janet Doe") Jump to: navigation, search.” The page gives you helpful tips on searching and if after all alternatives have been exhausted you don’t find an article on the topic you’re interested in, you can create your own article in your Sandbox. Then, when you are ready to upload the article, click on the name highlighted in red on the search results page and bring up a creation page where you will enter your article and its formatting.

Your Sandbox

“Sandboxes” are where you experiment. Establish your own sandbox page by typing in “User:[YourName]/Sandbox”. You can also type out your text in Microsoft Word or in a text editor and copy it into your Sandbox page and click on “show preview” or “save” near the bottom of page. If you’re in your Sandbox area, no one will see your saved pages until you upload them to the appropriate site as long as you put the categories inside the <pre> </pre> tags. That way you can direct other editors to your Sandbox to show them what you have done but not show the world. Do not copy the text and save the page at the appropriate location until you are certain of your text as this will immediately launch the article on Wikipedia! Remember, don’t use any Word formatting if you use that program. It won’t translate into the correct formatting in Wikipedia. When you are ready to make your article live, you can move into the creation stage.

Writing your Article

A good place to start is: Wikipedia:Your first article

Do not use any copyrighted material in writing your article except under the normal provisions such as brief quotations. Be especially vigilant about not using text from another website, even your own. A bot roams around Wikipedia that will catch the duplication and reject your article as not being “unique” enough. You should employ references for all critical points of information and you should be rigorous in citing your sources. How those citations should look varies. Again, pick an example and be consistent. In line sourcing is encouraged. The tone of your article should be formal. Put enough detail to make the article interesting without weighing it down. Make sure your writing is as clear and succinct as possible. Poorly written prose or common errors will immediately attract the attention of editors.

Formatting Your Article

There are some quick buttons on the top of the creation page to supply the code for often used commands. The easiest way to do things however is to find an article similar to the one you want to create and copy the code from that article. What do I mean by code? If you’re at all familiar with HTML, the code for Wikipedia has a similar feel. References for example are: <ref> put the reference here </ref> But italics use two single quotes, as in: Free Press, so don’t be fooled and use curly quotation marks. I often use “Walt Whitman” as an example for a variety of codes. If you go to his page by searching “Walt Whitman,”you can click on the “edit this page” tab on the top. This will allow you to see a copy of the code you will likely need. Another thing to watch for is how to quote something from inside another Wikipedia page. Follow this example: Gracy Title Company where the title of the Wikipedia page is Stewart Title of Austin, but you want to quote the Gracy Title company that is referred to on that page.

There’s also a “cheatsheet” of the most popular codes on the Tutorial page: Wikipedia:Cheatsheet

The Creation Page

Search for the name of your article. Watch for capitalization; it matters! A note will come up that the page does not exist (if such is truly the case) and that you can click on the name to create the page. This is where you will enter all of your information plus codes to format the information. Save the page when you are done and it will immediately appear on Wikipedia.

After you’ve created your page, you might consider whether you need to redirect searchers from other variations of the name. Check Mark Twain's page for directions regarding redirects.

Don’t forget to categorize your article. Check out possible categories under the code: “Category:Living people” for example, or “Category:1939 births.” Again, the best way to find appropriate categories beyond guessing, is to find other articles on a similar topic and use the ones the other editor has used. The more connections you make, the better chance your article will float to the top, even in Google.

Are you finished? Probably not. You may find other items of information that you wish to add. Fortunately you (and anyone else) can go back and edit your article as many times as you need to polish it up. One of the greatest strengths of Wikipedia is that all articles are created collaberatively. You may start an article but others will build on it and hopefully add more material, images and references.

Naming Conventions

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people) “The name of an article should be ‘the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things’.” This boils down to the two central ideas in Wikipedia article naming:

1. The name that is most generally recognisable
2. The name that is unambiguous with the name of other articles

Several general and specific guidelines further indicate that article names preferably:

• Do not have additional qualifiers (such as "King", "Saint", "Dr.", "(person)", "(ship)"), except when this is the simplest and most NPOV way to deal with disambiguation
• Are in English

Articles with the Same Name

First, determine if the name of the person/thing you would like to write about could apply to a similarily named but different person/thing, i.e. Jane Doe If so, you have three choices of what to do:

• You could start the new article under the person's full name, say "Jane Emilia Doe"
• You could add a professional or other qualifier and title the new article "Jane Doe (archivist)" or something similar and add a redirection at the top of the “Jane Doe” article.
• You could move the existing article to "Jane Doe (actress)" or "Jane Sarah Doe" or something appropriate and then rewrite the existing "Jane Doe" page to become a disambiguation page.
• Just click on the “edit this page” tab and copy the text from a sample and then change it as required to suit the new subject and then create your new "Jane Emilia Doe" or "Jane Doe (archivist)" article as per above.
• “Disambiguation pages are solely intended to allow the user to choose from a list of Wikipedia articles, usually when searching for a term that is ambiguous.”

See: Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)

Keeping Track of Your Article

You can see the history of the edits made to your article by clicking on the “history” tab at the top of the article. You can keep track of edits and changes by clicking the tab “watch” at the top of the desired article. Be sure to "watch" the article to ensure it doesn't get vandalised.

How is Your Article Doing?

This site gives you statistics by month on any articles you specify, or by shortening the URL you can see what the top articles were. This is a beta service that could disappear at any time.

Beta Stats

Experiment!

It’s best to experiment and see what others are doing. Read around. There are lots of pages of instructions on Wikipedia. Unfortunately the instructions are dispersed, as might be expected with something that has been growing from a lot of different input. It’s very gratifying to add to Wikipedia once you begin and well worth it. Of course no one knows how long Wikipedia will keep going, but with nearly 3 million articles in English alone, it’s not likely to completely disappear.