Help:Introduction to editing with Wiki Markup/5

{{intro to| Wikipedia already has {{#expr:{{formatnum:{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}|R}}/10^6 round1}} million articles, so most of the time you'll likely be updating and improving existing pages. Sometimes, however, you may want to create a completely new article! Before you do so, there are three criteria you need to know:

Notability
Is the topic notable? Topics need to be sufficiently important to be included in Wikipedia. This means that the subject must have received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, such as newspapers, magazines, scholarly journal articles, and books.

Reliable sources
Are there reliable and verifiable sources to back up any claims? Before you start writing an article, you should gather a set of independent, reliable, verifiable sources to cite as references. These are essential for ensuring that the contents of Wikipedia remain accurate, verifiable, and trustworthy.

Conflicts of interest
Do you have a conflict of interest (COI)? It is best to avoid writing articles about yourself, your company, or someone you know personally. This is because it is difficult to avoid bias and achieve a neutral point of view on these topics. Even if you cannot write the article yourself, you can always request that someone else write it and provide them with reliable sources to use.

Where to create a new page
It is typically best to create a new article as a Draft (e.g. "Draft:Example"). This allows you to write and develop your article before it gets moved to Wikipedia's mainspace.

The Article Creation Wizard will walk you through the steps of creating a new draft article and notify experienced editors to review the article and provide feedback.

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