User:Farang Rak Tham/How to create a good article on a Buddhist topic

Define your topic

 * When writing for an online encyclopedia, you need to use secondary reliable sources, which are mostly books and articles from scholars and reports from news outlets. If you think that you are not going to agree with such sources on a particular topic, don't pursue it. You can't avoid reliable sources, and you can't cherry-pick sources either.
 * Please note that, while searching for sources, the subject may be spelled differently by scholars, e.g. Mahākāśyapa (Sanskrit) and Mahākassapa (Pāli) are both used.

Read tertiary and general sources first
Tertiary sources like encyclopedias and study books can also be used on Wikipedia, but are considered less valuable than secondary sources. However, it is sometimes good to start with tertiary sources, in order to establish what subject matter or scholarly opinions should be covered and to what extent. These sources often have useful information about Buddhist topics, many of which can easily be found and downloaded.

Websites
Some websites list entries in many different reference works. You might call these "quaternary sources", as they list tertiary sources:
 * Encyclopedia.com
 * Oxford Index, very similar to Oxford Reference

Online encyclopedias:
 * Ancient History Encyclopedia
 * BBC - Buddhism
 * Encyclopedia Brittanica
 * Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Religion
 * Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Books

 * (2 volumes)
 * Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions, Greenberg
 * (very old, should only be used for uncontroversial scholarship that hasn't been changing the last 100 years. Still, very useful and many high-profile contributors; 13 volumes)
 * The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts, ISBN 9780199759996
 * (very old, should only be used for uncontroversial scholarship that hasn't been changing the last 100 years. Still, very useful and many high-profile contributors; 13 volumes)
 * The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts, ISBN 9780199759996
 * (very old, should only be used for uncontroversial scholarship that hasn't been changing the last 100 years. Still, very useful and many high-profile contributors; 13 volumes)
 * The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts, ISBN 9780199759996
 * The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts, ISBN 9780199759996


 * (14 volumes)
 * (8 volumes)
 * (3 volumes)
 * (8 volumes)
 * (3 volumes)
 * (8 volumes)
 * (3 volumes)
 * (3 volumes)
 * (3 volumes)
 * (3 volumes)

Classics, sources with a wide scope
There are also general scholarly books on Buddhism, which do contain novel insights and original research and are therefore not tertiary. But they cover so many subjects, that they often contain information on any given Buddhist topic:


 * Buddhism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, Berkwitz
 * The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, Cozort & Shields
 * The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, Cozort & Shields
 * The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, Cozort & Shields
 * The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, Cozort & Shields
 * The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, Cozort & Shields


 * (8 volumes)
 * (8 volumes)

Google Scholar

 * Search for keywords on Google Scholar
 * Download the sources from the links there. If there is no clickable link, search on Google Books for books, or on sites that allow you to download books like B-ok, Library Genesis or Edpf.pub. A Google Book that mentions your subject more than four times is bound to have something interesting to say about it. As Google Books have limited page views, you should try to avoid skimming through pages continuously, but rather skip to the pages you need using the search function.
 * For articles, search for the doi number and download using that number, from Scihub or Library Genesis. Please note that most of these are not endorsed by Wikipedia due to copyright violations, and they are blocked in some countries. Please note that Google Scholar sometimes gives multiple websites that host the article (e.g. "all three versions"), and some may provide a download whereas others do not. Also, Google Scholars doesn't always link to Open Source journals, and you might have to find the journal's website and download from there. Some Asian journals put their entire volumes on Google Books, and old journals can sometimes be found on archive.org. Lastly, register for free academic services like Academia and JSTOR to download articles easily from those sites.
 * Avoid primary sources like Dharma books which are aimed at edification. These are great books in themselves, but they are not suitable for an encyclopedia, because an encyclopedia is supposed to present fact and notable opinion, not edify people in the eightfold path or something like that. Whether people will be inspired by a good Wikipedia article about Buddhism to practice the eightfold path is, of course, another matter. And also, avoid Master theses as these are hardly ever allowed on Wikipedia. PhD theses are mostly allowed, though.
 * Save the sources per year of publication, which will help later, when starting to write. Save PhD theses separately, and foreign-language sources as well. These we use after we run through our English sources.
 * List sources that you cannot access, so you can later choose the most cited ones and ask for them from other editors at WP:RX.
 * Continue until the sources found on Google Scholar are no longer relevant. Depending on the subject, this may be 5–50 pages of sources.

Other

 * Then continue to do separate keyword searches on the aforementioned B-ok, which supports searching inside books. Books and articles can also be searched on the websites Diva Portal, www.encyclopedias.biz, the National Taiwan University Library, Research Gate, Kham Koo, Frogbear, A Handful of Leaves, Academia, Repository of the Cambridge University and Citeseerx. Please note you need to use Google Search with the site parameter (site:example.com "example keyword") to search inside these latter sites for e-books and articles. Though some of these sites have internal search engines, they are no match for Google Search, and some like Academia are intentionally limited.
 * For French-language articles on Buddhism, see Persée. For old articles (until the 1930s) in German, see Journals of the German Oriental Society at the library of Sachsen-Anhalt. Both have excellent internal search engines.
 * Google Scholar and most of the mentioned websites are not very good at finding chapters in books. These do, however, register well on Hollis, the library database of Harvard. It has a very good internal search engine, with even more detail than Google Scholar.
 * PhD theses can be found on several websites: British, American, and French-language. Some are free, some require a fee.

Mine your sources and write well

 * For how to mine your sources most effectively, see WP:SOURCEMINE.
 * After we have acquainted ourselves with our sources, we may come across other sources cited therein, that we had not found yet. These may be foreign-language sources, open source articles, chapters in conference reports, etc. We can then attempt to find those sources, and continue with those. Using sources cited in sources is also known as citation chaining.