User:GRuban/Article checklist

Title
The title of the article goes in the first sentence if at all possible, usually starting the sentence, and gets bolded with 3 apostrophes per side, so:
 * Jameson Schmoe was a Norwegian lobster fisherman and vuvuzela enthusiast.

For people, often the title is the most common name used for them, while the first sentence contains their full name, as you can see in the article Bill Clinton:
 * William Jefferson Clinton (né Blythe III) is an American politician...

That article isn't a bad one to use as a general model or reference, you'll see it's got a little green + in the upper right corner meaning it's been evaluated as a good article, and you can guess it has survived a lot of people who like or don't like the subject, so I'm fairly sure any issues have been scoured away by fire.

Sections
Section headings are on separate lines and begin and end with = signs, 2 on each side for main sections, 3 for subsections, etc. Don't just bold lines as pseudo section headings, use actual section headings. That way they show up in the table of contents, and can be linked to. Spaces between the title and the = signs are a matter of taste, as are single blank lines after the section headings. Some people add or remove them, but as best as I can tell they don't make any difference in the visible product.

==Section==

=== Subsection ===

====Subsubsection====

For biographies, common sections are:
 * Early life
 * Family
 * Education (Those three are often combined as Early life.)
 * Career (Usually the largest section for a person notable for their work achievements, often with subsections named after jobs or companies.)
 * Personal life (Generally relationships and non-work life as an adult, but sometimes Family or even Early life is put here.)
 * References (Add reflist and your references will show up here.}
 * External links (For a biography, one or two company profile or personal pages. Other editors can get upset if there are too many.)

The rule on when to make a separate section or combine is a judgement call, but one of the most important factors is length. If the content is one or a few sentences, see if it can be reasonably combined into another section, if it is more than a few paragraphs, see if it can make a separate section or subsection.

Links

 * Wikilink (with before and  after) things that a reader might reasonably want to read about when coming across, the first time you mention them in an article, and sometimes later, if the earlier mention is far above. These generally include names of companies, people, sources (especially in references), uncommon or important places or words. (London is pretty widely understood, so generally doesn't need to be linked if it's a casual mention about a person not really connected with it; but if you're talking about Jack the Ripper or Christopher Wren, for whom the city is very important, you need to link it. Or if you're talking about London, Kentucky, which is not a commonly known place.)
 * When you do make a link, click on each, check to make sure the link goes to the right place. (Where do you think New York goes? Almost certainly not where you wanted; did you mean New York (city) or New York State?) You can used piped links ( pretty words you want to use instead ) but think hard if you really need to, in general the article name has been debated by multiple people, and is usually the best name for the concept. You don't need to capitalize the first letter, president and President go to the same place.
 * Embedded in-article external links, that go outside Wikipedia ( some external website ) work, but are often frowned upon outside the External links section.