User:LauraHale/Creating new articles on Wikipedia

Writing new articles on Wikipedia is often a challenge for beginners. The easiest way to learn how to create new articles is to use the WikiProject Articles for creation process. This system gives feedback to let you know what to improve. This essay provides some general advice on how to write an article to assist in getting through the process as easily as possible.

Fot most new articles, especially when writing about companies, musicians and sporting competitors, the major issue is proving the notability of the topic. Articles need to be able to pass Wikipedia's general notability guidelines. Another major issue is writing with a neutral point of view. The last major issue is copyright violations. For many new contributors, notability, point of view and copyright go hand in hand. This guide provides an "ass backwards" approach to the typical way to write a Wikipedia article.

When starting to write an article in AfC, do the following three things:
 * 1) Find a relevant information box that you can use on your article.  Information boxes can provide an idea of the type of information that should probably appear in the actual article.  Finding this information can help with notability by finding media sources that provide this information and help with neutral point of view because the type of information found in infoboxes tends to be neutral.  Some infoboxes that might be useful to you include Template:Infobox sportsperson, Template:Infobox album, Template:Infobox book, Template:Infobox company, Template:Infobox film, Template:Infobox magazine, Template:Infobox musical artist, Template:Infobox organization, Template:Infobox person and Template:Infobox school.  If none of these infoboxes are relevant to your topic, find an article similar to the one you want to create that has an infobox and use that one.  Put this infobox in your article draft.  As you find sources to write this information into the text of your article, add the information to the infobox.
 * 2) Find newspapers, magazine sources, books and academic journals that discuss the topic you are writing about. Newspapers, magazine and academic journals give a topic notability.  You generally need between 5 to 10 total newspaper, magazine and academic journal references, with two to three of them discussing your topic exclusively to be clear that your topic passes general notability guidelines.  This means, you should cite these sources before all other source types so there is no question of notability.  The general approach tends to be write the text, then find sources. Finding sources first to cite and then adding those facts flies in the face of conventional Wikipedia wisdom but it is the best solution when trying to prove notability of new articles. If you do not know where to find newspaper, magazine and academics sources, try using Google News, Yahoo News, Trove @ National Library of Australia, Historical Jewish Press @ National Library of Israel, Newspaper digitization @ National Library of Latvia, « eLuxemburgensia » @ National Library of Luxembourg, Papers Past @ National Library of New Zealand , India Times. You can also use offline versions of newspapers, magazine sources, books and academic journals. Try to use as many facts as you can from these sources to write your articles. Avoid using press releases, blogs, sources created by the subject and related organizations until you have used as many newspaper, magazine and academic sources as you can. By forcing yourself to use these sources, you often need to worry less about neutral point of view as most newspapers write factual reporting from a neutral point of view.  Citation templates provides information on how to format citations in an article. Help:Citation tools links to some tools to make formatting sources easier.
 * 3) Do not copy paste anything into an article unless it is a proper name or a number and cite where facts come from. Try to use at least 8 to 10 sources.  If you copy and paste, you can get into trouble for violating copyright or plagiarism and your article will not get out of incubator.  You need to reword all the facts you include in an article.  If you need to rely on multiple sources to write, it often requires creating a different form of organising the article which makes it harder to copy and paste because sources often include different types of information.  If you are not sure if you have plagiarised, duplication detector may help.  Compare your article with the source you used.  If if finds a string of eight or more words in a row that are the same, you want to consider rewriting.  See Close paraphrasing for help.