User:PlanespotterA320/Welcome new editor!

There are many, many policies on Wikipedia, all with accompanying multi-paragraph essays. It can be overwhelming at first and it may seems like often-held precedents don't always align with the word-for-word policies. However, once you "dip your toes in the water" you will realize things aren't nearly as difficult as they seem. Here we will go over some of the core policies that confuse newbies the most.

Copyright
With some very few specific exceptions (that we will cover later), items on Wikipedia, both text and images, must be under a free license; ALL items on Commons are under free licenses. By "free license", the Wikimedia foundation means that commercial use and derivative works of the item are allowed. Specifically, you may come across text from public-domain sources such as the CIA world factbook or an NTSB accident report incorporated into an article once in a while (if you are incorporating public-domain text, it MUST be specified that the text is reused, where is it from, and what license it is under). For the vast majority of articles we write, we compose the text ourselves by learning about the topic, and providing in-line citations to reliable sources.

The main reasons to have a fair-use item in an article are portraits of deceased people who do not have a photo under a free license; an image of the cover of a book in an article about the book, etc. See the full fair-use policy here) English Wikipedia allows the use of low-resolution portraits for articles about deceased people; however, such images cannot be used in lists, and many Wikipedias, like Spanish Wikipedia, do not allow the use of such portraits at all; that is why finding, recovering, and creating images under licenses allowed on Wikimedia Commons is vital to the existence of Wikipedia.

Wikietiquette
Some old users tend to "bite the newbies" (wiki slang for hounding new editors with deletion tags, redirects over their articles, and various warnings, sometimes in a not-very-civil way. It is best to be civil with those people, no matter how difficult it may be.

I got bit by Jytdog, Jetstreamer, Lemongirl942, SwisterTwister when I was a newbie, and I left for a while before I came back. I made the mistake of giving up. Upon return I wrote some articles, and over one year and one hundred articles later I found out that two of them were blocked for unrelated reasons (violating a topic ban and sockpuppeting) If you get bitten, it does not mean that you are a bad editor. It means the biter is a bad editor.

If anyone ever "bites", ping me and I will take care of all of it; Awareness of a few major wikipedia policies significantly reduces the risk of being bitten - most commonly the rule against making three reverts on a page within 24 hours. Some policies are more public than others; One of the most infamous lesser-known policies is the ban on using websites "blacklisted" by Wikipedia (The bigs ones are the Daily Mail, Planespotters.net, and websites that are mirror-sites of Wikipedia like wiki2.org. For more information, see the list of sources rated by Wikipedia)

Common misconceptions
1. Redlinked item = notable. (Many redlinked items are notable, but many are not)

Many editors tend to redlink stuff that doesn't qualify to have an article, so do not assume that writing redlinks from articles are safe. Notability guidelines also vary from wiki to wiki - an article on Russian Wikipedia or Spanish Wikipedia may or may not qualify as notable (ie, not deletable) on English Wikipedia. So those bot-generated lists that derive from articles that exist on other wikis but not on English Wikipedia are not fullproof.

2. Policy or guideline on some other Wikipedia = Policy or guideline on English Wikipedia (While major policies like civility and do not create hoaxes are universal, formatting guidelines vary significantly)

Some formatting rules that are standard operating procedures on one wiki are highly discouraged or banned on English Wikipedia. For example, while it is common practice to include ribbon racks of awards received by a person in their biography infobox on many Wikipedias, the general consensus on English Wikipedia is to list in plain word (without icons) the highest one or two awards a person has received in their infobox, and to write the fuller award list in a later part of the article. Listing individual commemorative/jubilee medals is strongly discouraged. For an example or such formatting differences, see the article Kamil Yashin and the corresponding Russian Wikipedia version.

Do:

 * Write from a neutral point of view
 * Include an infobox in the article
 * Include categories the article articles
 * Draft an article in your sandbox before publishing it
 * Include citations to reliable (non-blacklisted) published sources

Do not:

 * Sockpuppet (ie, edit using multiple accounts without disclosing that they belong to you)
 * Editwar
 * Make personal attacks
 * Include your own original/unpublished research (i.e., do not use unpublished sources)
 * Wikilink years, dates, and numbers
 * Violate copyright policies

Basic wikitext

 * Bold text = text
 * Italic text = text
 * Linked item = blue text
 * Your signature = --~
 * to add a category, insert at the bottom of the page
 * For a more detailed explanation of wikitext, see this page.

Your userpage
Your userpage should at least contain userboxes indicating your language skills. If you are a native speaker of English, insert the text of in your userpage. If you have a near-native understanding of English, use the text of, as well as indicating your native language. For example, if you are a native speaker of Spanish and with a near-native understanding of English. For more information, see Babel.

Writing
Before writing your first article, try getting some practice first. Try expanding a few stubs, add infoboxes to few articles without them, learn how to add citations, and write correctly-formatted headings. Once you've gotten a good idea of of how you should write a Wikipedia article, begin drafting it in your sandbox. The "backbone" of the article should probably look something like this:

Biography
The infobox can be more specific, ex, Infobox military person, Infobox scientist, etc from the people infobox templates category Full Name (Language of native name: name in native language ; date of birth – date of death) was information. ==Heading== Text ==Heading== Text ==References==

Good resources

 * List of Wikipedia policies
 * Missing Russian biographies – a list of missing articles I have pre-screened for notability
 * goskatalog.ru – Great place to find fair-use portraits nowhere else on the internet. Also has lots of postage stamps (which are in the public domain) and many historically important images.
 * Detailed wikitext explanation – for most things, it is easier to use the Visual Editor