User:Proteins/Practical Wikipedia tutorial
This tutorial surveys the practical steps of writing a new Wikipedia article and developing it into a Featured Article or Good Article, the highest levels of Wikipedia articles. This tutorial was designed for the 2008 workshop at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology]], and is aimed at primarily at scholars.
Step 0: Create a user account
If you haven't done this already, you should create a user account. This will help in keeping track of your editing, and give you access to editing tools that are unavailable to non-users. Scholars are encouraged to create a user account under their name, which lends some authority to their writing.
[[Wikipedia:Why create an account?|Why create an account?]]
[[Wikipedia:Username_policy#Choosing_a_username Factors in choosing a username]]
To create a user account, simply click on the link in the upper right corner labeled “Log in / create account”. You will be asked for the username and a password; the optional e-mail address allows you to recover your password in case you forget it. Wikipedia is scrupulous about anonymity, so you will not get more spam by creating a user account. Scientists and other scholars are encouraged to use their real names when choosing a username.
Step 1: Check whether your topic exists already
You're the world's authority on a topic and you'd like to share your expertise and research with the world - great! But before you create a new article on your topic, you should check whether it exists already. There are two simple ways to do that:
- Wikipedia has its own built-in search box, e.g., “mitochondrion”
- a Google search restricted to Wikipedia, e.g., “mitochondrion site:en.wikipedia.org”
Your search will reveal one of three possibilities: your topic has its own article (possibly under a different name), your topic is covered as a subsection of another article, or your topic isn't mentioned at Wikipedia. In the first two cases, you can improve the article, whereas in the latter two cases, you may wish to create a new article.
You may find that your topic exists on Wikipedia under an alternative name but is missing an key synonym; for example, “Krebs cycle” may exist but “citric acid cycle” may not. To introduce the synonym, you can create a so-called redirect page. Redirect pages are also useful for smaller topics that might not merit their own article; you can redirect to the pertinent sub-section in a larger article.
You may also find that your chosen article meaning has an alternate meaning in an entirely different fields, e.g., “primer”. For such cases, Wikipedia has “disambiguation” pages, which are like way-stations that direct the reader to the relevant article. Usually, the field of a term is specified in parentheses.
Step 1b: Creating an article
Creating a new article is relatively easy on Wikipedia, although uncreating them is not. Wikipedia has two types of internal links, blue links to another article and red links that point to nothing. Clicking on a red link and beginning to edit is the simplest way to create an article. You may get a redlink from the search in Step 1, or by simply editing another article to add one. The latter method is useful when the article has unusual characters not found on an ordinary keyboard.
If your topic has its own article already, you should generally work on improving that rather than creating a new article. However, if you create a redundant article inadvertently, this can be fixed by merging the two articles. Merging is best done with the help of a friendly WikiProject and an administrator.
Step 2: Writing the article
Wikipedia articles have two parts: a lead section of 1-4 paragraphs and a body or main article section that follows. The lead section resembles an abstract, but written to be understood by a broad audience; technical details, caveats and the like are usually omitted. The body of the article is written as a mini-review article, almost always less than 50 kB in readable prose; for scientific or other scholarly topics, the writing is typically aimed at junior-level undergraduates.
A Wikipedia article differs from a mini-review in two key ways. First, Wikipedia does not allow speculation or original syntheses of the data; assertions must be citable to the literature. Second, Wikipedia articles are not aimed at fellow experts, but rather at interested lay-readers, e.g., high-school students who might join the field someday, college students taking their first course, adults trying to educate themselves and citizens whose taxes support scholarly research. This means that authors/editors cannot assume an extensive background knowledge. To supply that background, the wiki-author can either include it themselves, or include a wiki-link to another article that explains the topic. A wiki-link is created by enclosing a concept in double square brackets, e.g., writing [[mitochondrion]] produces mitochondrion.
For some topics, the length restriction of 50 kB may seem too short, especially when writing out explanations for the lay-reader. However, Wikipedia wishes that its articles be readable in one sitting. To reach this goal, it is useful to spin off daughter articles and use a “summary style”.
Wikipedia articles make liberal use of sections and subsections. At the lowest level, most sections have a few paragraphs and typically 1 image.
Examples of Featured Articles from biology
Links, images, and references
Aside from the text, three elements are important in improving a Wikipedia article: links, images and references.
Other internal and external links
The “See also” section of a Wikipedia article gives the chance to link to other articles in related fields, articles that weren't mentioned too often in the main body of the article. Usually, this section comes before the reference section.
The final section is usually the “External links” section of the article.
Images: Illustrating the article
Wikipedia articles are generally well-illustrated, even when the text is relatively poor. Featured articles often have one image for every few paragaphs of text.
To include an image in an article, you need only add the image file name between double square brackets, preceded by the word “Image:”, e.g., “[[Image:Proteasome.jpg]]".
Providing references and footnotes for the article
Wikipedia's authority as a reference source derives mostly from its citations to the scholarly literature; hence, accurate references are essential. The density of citations in the best Wikipedia articles (Good Articles and Featured Articles) is typically 3 citations per kilobyte of readble text, which is roughly equivalent to that found in scientific review articles.
Assessing the article
The English Wikipedia provides a mechanism for internal assessment of its articles.
Collaborative writing
If the article topic is rather technical, you may find few Wikipedians who are able to help you with the content. Instead, most will help with correcting typos and other formatting mistakes; or they may alert you to places in the prose that are unclear or insufficiently referenced.