Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Acceptance criteria

The purpose of AfC review is to ensure that your draft meets Wikipedia standards and is therefore unlikely to be deleted when it is introduced into the encyclopedia. You don't want your hard work deleted, and we don't enjoy deleting your work. The Articles for creation process was introduced as an alternative to new users directly adding new material to the encyclopedia to help avoid these unpleasant experiences.

Why was my draft article declined?
The community uses specific policies and guidelines when deciding whether to delete articles. Reviewers are familiar with these policies and, if they believe your submission is likely to be deleted if accepted, they will decline the submission and give you the expected reason it would be deleted. A decline is an opportunity to improve your draft to meet our acceptance standards. If your article had been deleted, it is typically difficult to convince the community to allow you to recreate an improved version of the article.

Although there may be many reasons a reviewer will give when declining a submission, the following are, by far, the most common. If you find that the following does not address your situation, there are places to go for help listed in the decline message at the top of your declined draft.

Notability
The most common reason articles are declined or deleted is based on notability concerns. Although Wikipedia is electronic and so is not subject to space constraints associated with a printed encyclopedia, we are very quality focused in the work we do. Although we don't expect new articles to meet quality standards when first created, we need to be assured that a quality article can be written on any subject proposed for inclusion. Writing a quality article requires the availability of good sourcing. Wikipedia does not rely on the expertise of its editors to ensure accuracy of our articles, we rely on information published in reliable sources. The notability requirement assures us that quality sources exist to support the article. As a consequence, articles on niche topics, day-to-day businesses and less-prominent individuals are not typically suitable for Wikipedia.

If your submission has been declined for notability concerns, you may wish to review our notability guidelines. Improving the draft to address these concerns typically involves finding and citing more than one reliable source that has significant coverage of your subject. This sourcing requirement is central to Wikipedia and is our answer to life, the universe, and everything. If you are unable to satisfy it, you will need to abandon or postpone your efforts until more information about the subject is published and the requirement can be satisfied.

Promotion
Wikipedia strives to be a mainstream encyclopedia with a neutral point of view. We are aware that many new editors come here to submit an article about their employer, themselves or a family member. Though not strictly prohibited, such contributions are strongly discouraged.

If your submission was declined based on promotional concerns, your next step should be to review our conflict of interest policy. If, based on this, you identify a conflict of interest, you may need to make a declaration of that conflict. Getting this information out in front for your next reviewer will help you to receive a fair second review once your submission has been improved.

The most effective way to achieve a neutral point of view in a new article is to keep it very short. A submission with a couple of 'just-the-facts' paragraphs with citations to significant coverage in reliable sources is all a new article really needs. Once this stub article is accepted, it will be widely visible to many editors and readers who are likely to take it upon themselves to expand and improve the article.

Companies and other organizations
Every aspirational organization seems to want to have a Wikipedia entry. Unfortunately many of these organizations do not meet our notability requirements and so a quality article cannot be written on these topics. Editors working to improve the quality of Wikipedia content apply particular scrutiny to articles on these subjects because problems in this topic area often include both the notability and promotional concerns discussed above.

If your submission on a company or organization was declined, you have a particularly steep climb to getting your draft accepted. Many smaller companies garner some incidental coverage in friendly local press, they may put out widely-disseminated press releases and even receive routine coverage of business milestones. Unfortunately, the sourcing requirements in the topic area exclude local sources, regurgitation of press releases by industry journals and does not consider routine announcements to constitute the required significant coverage of the subject. To make your submission acceptable to reviewers and to Wikipedia, you need to find in-depth coverage in sources clearly independent of the subject.

Whenever you make an edit on Wikipedia you agree to the Terms of Use. Those terms include agreeing not to make paid contributions without disclosure. If you are writing about your own company, or the company you work for - perhaps in a sales or marketing role - then you must also comply with the policy on paid editing. This also applies if you work for a marketing or PR agency, or work as an SEO specialist, and a client is paying for you to help them market their company. You should disclose your connection now, before editing further.

Copyright
Every article on Wikipedia is made available under a licence that allows others to copy all or part of an article. If the copyright of the text you added belongs to someone else this can cause legal problems for Wikipedia.

Whenever you make an edit on Wikipedia you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You can agree to that if what you've written in your draft is in your own words. However, if instead you have copied and pasted some or all of the content from somewhere else then you probably can't agree to that statement.

If your draft has been declined because of copyright concerns then it is very likely to be deleted, in which case you'll need to start the article again, this time not copying from other sources.

What to do next
If your draft has been declined and you can't manage to improve it to satisfy these requirements, don't be discouraged. Wikipedia is now a mature project and has articles. An article has probably already been started on the topic you really want to write about. We encourage new editors to make improvements to existing articles before creating a new article. This gives you an opportunity to get a feel for the work. With some experience under your belt on existing material, you may find you are able to come back and bring your draft up to our acceptance standards.