User:Enochlau/Signpost tutorial series/Writing an article from scratch



Signpost Tutorial
 * By Jeepday, 10 April, 2008

Step one - Review the GFDL and GNU Free Documentation License so you will understand what what it means to contribute to Wikipedia, you are contributing to your work to the world.

Step two - Find a missing article with a subject that interests you
 * WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles
 * Most wanted articles

Step three - Search Wikipedia to make sure the article does not already exist (check common and scientific or technical names as well). Check for alternate spellings and alternate capitalizations, if the article does exist you may need to build a rediret. You can improve the article as needed before going back to step 2 to find another missing subject.

Step four - Find and review several references for the article. You can find books at the library or use a web search engine. Google Book Search can be a great resource for some topics as many books and government publications are fully accesable on line

Step five - Search Wikipedia for some of the key topics that will be in the article, this is will help plan how to fit the new article into Wikipedia, which content may need to be included in the new article if not addressed some place else.

Step six - Open a new article page, and write your article. This can be done in the article main space or as a user subpage. New users should seriously consider making their first article attempt as a user subpage, then move the article to main space when it is ready.
 * Artcicle Mainspace - to create an article in the mainspace you can click on a red link in an article or from WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles. Alternately use the search box and click "Go" (or Enter on keyboard), if the article does not exist it will return search results for the word(s) and offer you a link to "Create the page including your references"
 * User Subpage - for User:Example to create a user sub page for a new article they would use User:Example/NEW ARTICLE NAME

ARTICLE SUBJECT NAME HIGH LEVEL OVER VIEW. SOME TEXT.

SOME MORE TEXT WITH REFERENCES ON THE WEB.

SOME DIFFERENT TEXT WITH REFERENCE IN A BOOK.