Wikipedia:How to write Wikipedia pages for children’s picture books

This is a how-to guide for creating new pages for children's books. The information can also apply to writing general book pages.

Getting Acquainted with Wikipedia

Before you start to edit Wikipedia, create an account and login. Logins may not be shared.

You may want to create your own Userpage. Click on your username in the upper right-hand corner to create your userpage. Enable Visual Editor--click on the pencil icon on the upper right-hand corner and select “visual editing.” Write a sentence or two about yourself so that other users know you’re not a vandal or a robot.

Now click on the “sandbox” from the user drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner. This is a place where you can draft your page before it goes live. Click “edit” to start writing.

The “cite” button will add a citation where your cursor is. You will need to paste in a URL, ISBN, DOI, or manually input fields. The “link” icon is for links to other Wikipedia pages called wikilinks. People, places, and companies can often be wikilinked, and only need to be linked at their first occurrence on a page.

About children’s book pages

A typical Wikipedia page for a book has a lead section and information about the content of the book (synopsis), background about how the book was created, a summary of critical reviews, awards, and references. Not every book page will have every section--it depends on what information you can find. I created a page for I See the Rhythm so you can see what a basic book page looks like.

Lead section

It’s okay to write this section last, since it will be a summary of the other sections. Start with a few sentences about the book. Put the title of the book in bold italics, followed by its author, illustrator, publisher, and year it was published. For example, on the page for Where the Wild Things Are, the first sentence in the lead is

Where the Wild Things Are is a 1963 children's picture book by American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, originally published by Harper & Row.

This section does not need in-line citations for information that is cited in the body of the page.

Synopsis

Here’s where you get to read the picture book and summarize it in your own words. State the content of the book factually without evaluating its content. This section does not need to be cited, since you are simply describing the subject of the page. If you have chosen a chapter or YA book, find another synopsis online, summarize it in your own words, and cite it (not ideal, but better than nothing!).

Here’s the synopsis of Chika Chika Boom Boom:

The lower-case letters climb a coconut tree in alphabetical order, until the tree bends so much, causing all 26 letters to tumble out of the tree. Capital letters (the older relatives of the letters climbing the tree) come to help them. Again alphabetically, it describes each letter's injury. At night, "a" comes back out and climbs up the coconut tree, daring the other letters to catch him.

Background or Development

If you find information on inspiration for the book or anything unusual leading to its publication, put it in this section, including in-line citations to where you found the information. It is also appropriate to describe the medium and style of illustrations (mixed media, watercolors, etc.). If there is extensive information about the illustrations, they may have their own section called “Illustrations.”

Reception

Briefly summarize what book reviewers said about the book, highlighting evaluative statements. Here’s the first paragraph of the reception section for Crown: An Ode to a Fresh Cut:

Reception

The book was well-received. Its starred review in The Horn Book Magazine praised both the illustrations' portrayal of the protagonist and how "Barnes's descriptions make each page a serendipity." Kirkus awarded it a starred review and a 2018 Kirkus Prize for children, saying, "One of the best reads for young black boys in years, it should be in every library, media center, and, yes, barbershop." Additional starred reviews came from Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal. Elizabeth Bird, writing for School Library Journal, noted how "the interchange between the art and the words lights the very pages on fire"; several other critics also praised the complementary nature of the text and illustrations. The book appeared on several best of 2017 lists including those of NPR, Huffington Post, where contributor Minh Le noted its "flawless delivery" in calling it the most charming picture book of 2017, the Los Angeles Times, whose book editor Carolyn Kellog called it, "a real standout... it also does something important" and the Chicago Public Library ("Best Picture Books of 2017").

References

Each quote has a separate in-line citation, and direct quotes are no longer than a sentence. For statements from critics about the work, the statement is in the past but the description of the work is in the present. Statements about the author’s writing process are in the past.

For books that have been published recently, an internet search on the title of the book may give good results. For books that have been published more than ten years ago, it’s helpful to go directly to a database of book reviews. Only use reviews from professional organizations and publications (don’t use blog entries, Goodreads reviews, or similar material). School Library Journal, Booklist, Horn Book, and Kirkus are the top review publications for children’s books.

Sites like Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Booklist Online have reviews of children’s books that are freely available. Horn Book has a few reviews from recent years available online.

Also mention the awards the book has received--they are important to include to establish notability and prevent the page from being deleted.

References

If you’ve been adding in-line citations using Visual Editor, your reference section will be automatically compiled, but you need to tell Wikipedia where to show them. To do this, create a new section called “references,” and then insert>template. Type in “reflist” and select it from the list and push the “add template” button. After you save, your list of references should appear.

Infobox

This is an optional, but very official-looking box of information you can add to your page. To add an infobox, find another book page with an infobox and edit the source of the page. You may have to click to switch. You will see something like “{{infobox book” with a bunch of information in it. Copy the whole thing until you find the “}}”. Open your book page in source editor and paste the infobox there, and change the information to be about the book you’re working on. Adding an image of the book is possible, but beyond the scope of this guide.

Going live - moving your page to the mainspace

Your page is ready to go live if it has at least three sources. Save your most recent edit, and then click on “page”>”move page.” If you have recently created your account, you may not be able to move the page. Ask another user for help, or submit it as a draft for review.

The new title will be in the (Article) namespace. The name of the page should be the title of the book with appropriate capitalization. For some titles, it may be necessary to add a parenthetical statement to disambiguate the title. For example, if you’re creating the page for the book Nelson Mandela, the name of the Wikipedia page should be Nelson Mandela (book).

Under “reason” you can state that you are “moving page to mainspace.” The mainspace of Wikipedia is the place where the encyclopedia articles are. In contrast, the user namespace is where your user page and sandbox live, and they don’t appear in normal Wikipedia searches.

After you create the page in the article namespace, you can add categories and link to the page from other pages.

Categories

Add a new page to a few categories to help improve its discoverability. Other users are often happy to help add categories. If you want to do it yourself, enable the “hotcat” widget under your preferences>gadgets>editing. Then go back to your page and scroll to the bottom to the “Categories” box. Press the plus sign to add an existing category. A book published in 2017 could be added to the “2017 children’s books” category. Look at the Wikipedia page of a similar book to help you decide what categories to add.

Links from other pages

Create a link from another page to your book page. If the author has their own Wikipedia page, that would be a good place to link to the book page from. This will prevent your page from being an “orphan” with no links to it.