User:Rotideypoc41352/Fulfilled requests/Archives/2007/June

Please excuse the long answer, but writing new articles is deceptively complex, and so is an answer to "how do I make my draft pass?".

Inline citations allow readers to verify what you have written. Yet, the crux of the matter is if your father meets the criteria for a standalone article on the English-language Wikipedia (enwp), which is rather confusingly called notability. I'll just call it "this criteria" or "the criteria" in this answer.

Many pages that do not meet this criteria are stopped at AfC (Articles for Creation, the draft submission process you're going through) or deleted at AfD (Articles for Deletion). Many slip through the cracks because enwp has over six million articles but maybe only thousands of editors and even fewer regular patrollers, who are doing this for free in their spare time between other offline obligations. It doesn't make the articles OK; it simply means that when someone finally notices, they should be improved or if that doesn't work, a discussion opened at AfD on what should happen to that article.

All this makes using existing articles as examples a common trap, so much so an essay called WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS has been written about it. Good and featured articles tend to be better examples because they have definitely been reviewed (albeit many years ago in some cases).

So better examples would be Larry Itliong or Margaret Bondfield. Taking Itliong as an example, scroll down to the references section and take a look. Though he has children, one of whom is even quoted in the enwp article, the article is based on multiple sources that are independent from Itliong, that is subject to editorial oversight, and that discuss him in-depth (beyond a passing mention).

If you don't have those kind of sources yet, the only thing you can do is wait. This happens a lot: subjects that don't meet the criteria at one point may do so later. A rather (in)famous example is Donna Strickland, who didn't have an article until she had won the Nobel and all the news outlets started writing about her.

To go back to the other example, the sourcing on Bondfield's article is much the same way as Itliong's: multiple sources that are independent from her, that is subject to editorial oversight, and that discuss her in-depth (beyond a passing mention). Her article also illustrates a concept people forget when they're rushing to push an enwp article: you don't control it, and everything goes on there, good or bad. Bondfield's article discusses her accomplishments and her shortcomings and failures.

Your documentary and your book are controlled by you, but anybody can edit Wikipedia. You will have zero control over the enwp article. If the idea that someone could pull up an old (or some far future) newspaper article criticizing your father, add it to his enwp article, while you can do nothing but watch is extremely unpleasant, you should consider how much you really want enwp to have an article about him.

Focus on sources that prove your father meets the criteria. If you have them, cite them inline, so people can see what information comes from where. If not, you can only wait. Thanks for reading this long answer, and hope it helped.