User talk:Ballycowan

Welcome!
Hello, Ballycowan, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:


 * Introduction and Getting started
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
 * Simplified Manual of Style

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Ian.thomson (talk) 22:31, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

How to write articles that won't be rejected or deleted
If you're going to write an article about anyone or anything that is not you or something you are connected to, here are the steps you should follow:
 * 1) Choose a topic whose notability is attested by discussions of it in several reliable independent sources.
 * 2) Gather as many professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources you can find. Google Books is a good resource for this.  Also, while search engine results are not sources, they are where you can find sources.  Just remember that they need to be professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources.
 * 3) Focus on just the ones that are not dependent upon or affiliated with the subject, but still specifically about the subject and providing in-depth coverage (not passing mentions). If you do not have at least three such sources, the subject is not yet notable and trying to write an article at this point will only fail.
 * 4) Summarize those sources left after step 3, adding citations at the end of them. You'll want to do this in a program with little/no formatting, like Microsoft Notepad or Notepad++, and not in something like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer.  Make sure this summary is just bare statement of facts, phrased in a way that even someone who hates the subject can agree with.
 * 5) Combine overlapping summaries where possible (without arriving at new statements that no individual source supports), repeating citations as needed.
 * 6) Paraphrase the whole thing just to be extra sure you've avoided any copyright violations or plagiarism.
 * 7) Use the Article wizard to post this draft and wait for approval.
 * 8) Expand the article using sources you put aside in step 3 (but make sure they don't make up more than half the sources for the article, and make sure that affiliated sources don't make up more than half of that).

Doing something besides those steps typically results in the article not being approved, or even in its deletion.

If you are writing about yourself, or someone or something you are connected with (such as a friend, family member, or your business), the following steps are different:
 * 0) If the subject really was notable, you wouldn't need to write the article. Remember that articles are owned by the Wikipedia community as a whole, not the article subject or the article author.  If you do not want other people to write about you, then starting an article about yourself is a bad idea.
 * 8a) If the article is accepted, never edit it again. Instead, make edit requests on the article's talk page.
 * 8b) If the article is rejected, there will be a reason given. Read it carefully and closely.  If there are links in the reason, open them and read those pages.

If you follow these steps exactly, they're guaranteed to work. The only reason why they'd ever fail is because they were or could not be followed exactly (e.g. there are no sources on the subject, the draft author ignored a step about paraphrasing or using neutral language, etc). Ian.thomson (talk) 22:31, 1 February 2020 (UTC)