1 First Test

This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia articles follow certain guidelines: the topic should be notable and be covered in detail in good references from independent sources. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia – it is not a personal home page or a business list. Do not copy content from other websites even if you, your school, or your boss owns them. If you choose to create the article with only a limited knowledge of the standards here, you should be aware that other editors may delete it if it's not considered appropriate.

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New here?

Creating an article is one of the more difficult tasks on Wikipedia, and you'll have a higher chance of success if you help us out with other tasks first to learn more about how Wikipedia works. You can always come back to create an article later; there is no deadline!

Welcome to Wikipedia! Before starting a new article, please review Wikipedia's notability requirements. In short, the topic of an article must have already been the subject of publication in reliable sources, such as books, newspapers, magazines, peer-reviewed scholarly journals and websites that meet the same requirements as reputable print-based sources. Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable; if no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article. Please search Wikipedia first to make sure that an article does not already exist on the subject.

An Article Wizard is available to help you create an article through the Articles for Creation process, where it will be reviewed and considered for publication. Please note that the backlog is long (currently, there are 3,645 pending submissions; it often takes months). The ability to create articles directly in mainspace is restricted to volunteers with some experience. For information on how to request a new article that can be created by someone else, see Requested articles.

Please consider taking a look at our introductory tutorial or reviewing contributing to Wikipedia to learn the basics about editing. Working on existing articles is a good way to learn our protocols and style conventions; see the Task Center for a range of articles that need your assistance.

The basics

First, please be aware that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by volunteers. Our mission is to share reliable knowledge to benefit people who want to learn. We are not social media or a place to promote a company or product or person, or a place to advocate for or against anyone or anything. Please keep this in mind, always. (This is described in "What Wikipedia is not".)

We find "accepted knowledge" in high quality, published sources. By "high quality" we mean books by reputable publishers, respected newspapers, or literature reviews in the scientific literature. We summarize such sources in Wikipedia articles. That is all we do! Please make sure that anything you write in Wikipedia is based on such sources – not what is in your head.

Here are some tips that can help you with your first article:

Register an account. All you need is to choose a username and password. This will give you various powers. After a few days of editing articles, it will give you the power to create a new one.

Biographies of living people are among the most difficult articles to get right. Consider starting with something easier.

'Search' Wikipedia first in case an article already exists on the subject, perhaps under a different title. If the article already exists, feel free to make any constructive edits to improve it.

Nothing? OK, now you need to try to determine if the subject you want to write about is what we call "notable" in Wikipedia. The question we ask is: does this topic belong in an encyclopedia?

More than 200 articles are deleted from the English Wikipedia every day, mostly because of lack of notability. Please make sure your topic is notable by our definition before you spend time and effort on it. An article on a non-notable subject will be rejected or deleted. No amount of editing can overcome a lack of notability.

We generally judge this by asking if there are at least three high-quality sources that a) have substantial discussion of the subject (not just a mention) and b) are written and published independently of the subject (so, a company's website or press releases are not OK). Everything here is based on high-quality independent sources, and without them, we generally just cannot write an article. By far, the largest cause of frustration for a writer of a new article is caused by lack of notability. Anything else can be corrected by improving an article, but lack of notability means the article will not remain on Wikipedia, regardless of how well written it is. To avoid frustration, start by determining notability before you spend any effort on an article. If you are not sure if the subject you want to write about is "notable", you can ask questions at the Wikipedia Teahouse.

Please be mindful of conflict of interest. If you have one, you will probably have a hard time writing a good enough Wikipedia article (this is not about you, it is just human nature). However, if you insist on trying, you need to disclose your conflict of interest, and you need to try very hard not to allow your "external interest" to drive you to abuse Wikipedia. And you need to try hard to hear the feedback from independent people who review the draft before it is published and made available in the main encyclopedia. Your conflict of interest might lead you to believe something is "notable" when it isn't and to argue too hard for it to be published there.

Practice first. Before starting, try editing existing articles to get a feel for writing and for using Wikipedia's mark-up language—we recommend that you first take a tour through the tutorial or review contributing to Wikipedia to learn editing basics.

The Article Wizard will help you create your article in Draft space, and will put some useful templates into your draft, including the button to click when you are ready to submit the draft for review.