User:Timtrent/A good article

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This page in a nutshell: This is an essay, intended for new editors, to help them to understand things at Wikipedia

If you are to have an enjoyable time here adding articles and editing articles you need to understand how the place works. It doesn't matter about how it, perhaps, ought to work, nor about how you want it to work. What matters is how it works. Once you understand this then you will be able to add new articles to your heart's content, confident that they will survive.

I'm afraid this means a bit of reading for you. Look at Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not first. Look especially at Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Once you understand this then you have pretty much the entire trick to it.

It means that just adding a new article is insufficient. Wikipedia does require some work from its contributors. Creating an article with minimal information, providing no other citations, and doing no other work is doomed to failure.

To create a successful article there really should be:

• notability of the topic that is the subject matter of the article. This is non-negotiable. Read Wikipedia:Notability.
• citations to the topic from reliable sources. Check the definition of reliable sources, and learn how to use the CITE facilities in the edit window. You can add a parameter |quote= to the cite before you save it and use a relevant snippet of the item you are citing, too.
  • We require references from significant coverage about the entity, and independent of it, and in WP:RS please. See WP:42
  • For a living person we have a higher standard of referencing. Every substantive fact you assert, especially one that is susceptible to potential challenge, requires a citation with a reference that is about them, and is independent of them, and is in WP:RS
• Do not forget a section for References ==References== and put in it the text {{Reflist}} to receive the things you cite.
• wikilinks to other articles. An article that is a dead end is sometimes reasonable, but usually there are useful places to link to. Check that the destination is the article you expect, do not just create a wikilink and hope for the best.
• wikilinks to the article you have created from other articles. This means that the article is not "orphaned" and that others will find it.
• inclusion of the article in the most relevant category (or categories). Read Wikipedia:Categorization.
• If a short article, deploy {{Stub}} in the article, or, better, deploy the best possible stub tag. Read Wikipedia:Stub.

One very important thing is to "let go" once you have posted the article. The only time it is "yours" is when it's in your head. The moment you place it on Wikipedia it becomes "everyone's" Letting go of your baby is hard. Read Wikipedia:Ownership of articles. On Wikipedia we don't mother articles, we father them. Or we do that if we want to stay sane. Don't wrap the article in warm towels, send it out to graze its knees! Edit it further, yes, of course, but you have released your child to go and play outside. Watch it from a distance and just correct things when absolutely essential.

Please never, not ever, confuse the truth that you know and are 100% certain about with verifiable facts. Even if you know{{OR}} the colour black to be{{cn}} black, unless there is a citation for it, the obvious{{cn}} truth that it really{{cn}} is black still has no place here. Indeed a statement that Black is White^[1][2][3] with a citation in a reliable source that this is so takes absolute precedence over the truth, Wikipedia is based upon citations and citable, verifiable facts, not upon truth, because it is an encyclopaedia, and, rightly or wrongly, that is what an encyclopaedia does.