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: Edit in your sandbox
If you are viewing this page for the first time, the following link User:Proteins/Tutorial_sandbox should be colored red, meaning that Wikipedia has no article under that name. Click on that link, type in a few characters, and click on the Save page button near the bottom. Your "sandbox" page should have been created and your text should have been saved there. Congratulations — you're a Wikipedian! You can return to this sandbox repeatedly to write drafts for articles, to try out new editing methods, or simply to experiment.
Now let's try adding a link to another article on Wikipedia. Edit your sandbox and add the text "[[mitochondrion]]". After saving, you should see mitochondrion highlighted in blue. Clicking on that blue link will take you to the Wikipedia article by that name.
By custom, topics on Wikipedia are usually given in the singular, e.g., mitochondrion rather than mitochondria, or proteasome rather than proteasomes. Plurals and other variations on the article name can be made in two ways.
- Letters added after the closing double brackets with no space are added to the link. Thus, "[[proteasome]]s" produces proteasomes.
- For more drastic renamings, a completely different name can be given to a link using a vertical bar within the double brackets. For example, "[[chloroplast|random cellular organelle]]" will appear as random cellular organelle.
Step 1: Checking 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 on Wikipedia already. Here are two ways to do that:
- Use Wikipedia's own search box in the left column, e.g., “mitochondrion”
- Conduct 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 synonym),
- 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 (type the words #redirect [[article name]] and save this text). 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 direct the reader to the relevant article. Usually, the field of a term is specified in parentheses, e.g., primer (paint), primer (gasoline engine) and primer (molecular biology).
Step 2: Creating an article
Creating a new article is relatively easy on Wikipedia. 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 creates an article. You may get such a redlink from the Wikipedia search in Step 1, or by editing another article to add the link, e.g., "[new article name]]". 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 3: 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.
- Wikipedia does not allow speculation or original syntheses of the data. Assertions must be citable to the literature.
- Wikipedia articles are not aimed at fellow experts, but rather at interested lay-people. Examples of such readers include 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. Consequently, authors 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.
For some topics, the length restriction of 50 kB may seem too short, especially when writing out explanations for the non-scientifically trained readers. However, Wikipedia wishes that its articles be readable in one sitting. To keep the article length short, major sections may have to be spun off as daughter articles and and replaced with a 1-2 paragraph summary.
Wikipedia articles make liberal use of sections and subsections to organize the article. The section and subsection titles are collected at the top of the article in the Table of Contents of the article, giving an outline of the article. To create a section, place the section name enclosed by at least two equal signs at the beginning of a line, e.g., "==History==". Subsections are created by adding an equal sign on either side, e.g., "===Medieval conceptions===". At the lowest level, sections typically have a few paragraphs and typically 1 image.
Step 4: Adding links, images, and references
Aside from the text, three elements are important in improving a Wikipedia article: links, images and references.
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.
Inline references are the hardest part of article writing to master.
Step 5: Developing the article into a Featured Article
The highest level of Wikipedia article is the Featured Article. In principle, these articles have been vetted by the active Wikipedia community for excellent writing, accurate and complete coverage, and for consistency with Wikipedia's customary style guidelines. A complete list of the criteria can be found Wikipedia:Featured article criteria\here. Each candidate for Featured Article undergoes a detailed scrutiny, often lasting weeks, before it is certified as Featured — or not. Only Featured Articles may appear on the Main Page of Wikipedia, whcih gives them vast exposure to the world at large (typically 5 million page views per day) with commensurate impact for scientific outreach.
To reach this level, the first step is to write a complete, well-written, well-referenced and well-illustrated article. The topic can be quite specialized, such as a single organism, single organelle or even a single type of enzyme; it is not necessary to write only on general topics such as bird or dinosaur. The requirement for excellent writing is a common stumbling block, but many Wikipedians are willing to assist experts in making their prose flowing and accessible to non-experts, while maintaining its accuracy. Another common stumbling block is the requirement for consistency with Wikipedia's style guidelines; again, Wikipedians have formed groups such as the FA-Team to assist in this.
The instructions for nominating an article as a featured Article can be found here. During an article's candidacy for Featured Article status, Wikipedians can express their opinion whether the article meets the criteria or not, by indicating Support, Neutral, or Oppose. However, approval as a Featured Article is not a vote; rather, the directors must be satisfied that all valid objections have been overcome.