User:Proteins/Practical Wikipedia tutorial
This tutorial surveys the practical steps of writing a new Wikipedia article and developing it into a Featured Article, the highest level of Wikipedia articles. This tutorial is 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 "tutorial 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.
Let's add 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...
- by adding letters after the closing double brackets of the link. Thus, "[[proteasome]]s" produces proteasomes.
- 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 an article on 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. Enter “mitochondrion” in the box and click the Go button.
- Conduct a Google search restricted to Wikipedia. Enter “mitochondrion site:en.wikipedia.org” in the search box for Google.
A third, more serendipitous, technique is to identify a related article, and click on the most appropriate Category at the bottom of that article. That will take you to a list of all Wikipedia's articles under that category. For example, Golgi apparatus is categorized under Category:Organelles; going to the latter link reveals all of Wikipedia's articles on organelles.
Regardless of the method, 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 an article on your topic exists on Wikipedia under one name but is missing an key synonym. For example, the “Krebs cycle” article may exist, but a “citric acid cycle” article may not. To introduce the synonym, you can create a redirect page. Click on the red link for the synonym, type the words #redirect [[article name]] and save this text. After that, any visitor to Wikipedia who searches for your synonym will be taken to the correct article. More details on how to create an article are given in the next section.
Redirect pages are also useful for smaller topics that might not merit their own article. You can create a redirect to a specific sub-section of a larger article using a pound sign "#". For illustration, clicking on the link Golgi_apparatus#Vesicular_transport takes the reader to the "Vesicular transport" section of the Golgi apparatus 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 red link 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. Many unusual characters, such as Å or μ or ±, can be found at the bottom of the editing screen, under the Save page button; clicking on the desired character adds it to the text at the cursor position.
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 kilobytes 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 kilobytes 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 one image.
You will likely have company in writing the article; other Wikipedians may join in and try to help you. Often their help will be as simple as correcting typos, categorizing the article, or formatting the article to give it a consistent "look and feel" with related articles. With other editors, you may wish to discuss the article's scope, organization or emphases on its talk page, which is found under the "discussion tab at the upper left of the article. More detailed suggestions for collaborative writing are given at the end of this tutorial.
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
Links are called "internal" if they point to another Wikipedia article, and "external" otherwise. Wikipedia encourages internal links for relatively unknown topics mentioned in the article. If readers don't understand a given term in a sentence, they may click on the link to get a quick overview before returning to the original article. This is one reason for making the lead section of an article a quickly understood summary of the whole article.
Wikipedia articles typically end with a few standard sections. The first of these is the “See also” section, which links to other articles in related fields, especially articles that weren't mentioned frequently in the main body of the article. This section is usually followed by the Notes or References section.
The final section of a typical Wikipedia article is the “External links” section. These external links are generally not those cited in the References section; rather, they are often online tutorials or other educational resources that complement the Wikipedia article, or extend its scope. There are usually between 5 and 15 external links, although fewer and more numerous sections are sometimes seen.
Images: Illustrating the article
Wikipedia articles are generally well-illustrated, even when the text is relatively poor. Many articles have one image for every few paragraphs of text.
To include an image in an article, you edit the article add the image file name between double square brackets, preceded by the word “Image:”, e.g., “[[Image:Proteasome.jpg]]". Captions are desirable, and can be added using the "thumb" option as follows: “[[Image:Proteasome.jpg|thumb|A three-dimensional image of the proteasome.]]" The image can be aligned with the right or left margin using those words as arguments, as in “[[Image:Proteasome.jpg|right|thumb|A three-dimensional image of the proteasome.]]" Right alignment is the default. Finally, the image can be scaled by specifying a size in pixels, e.g., “[[Image:Proteasome.jpg|right|250px|thumb|A three-dimensional image of the proteasome.]]", which appears at the right.
Providing references and footnotes for the article
A full set of instructions for adding references to Wikipedia articles can be found here.
Wikipedia's authority as a reference source derives mostly from its citations to the scholarly literature; hence, accurate references are essential for the quality of Wikipedia's articles. 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.
A review of Wikipedia's Featured Articles shows that the prevailing form of referencing in Wikipedia are so-called "inline citations", which are small numerical superscripts that link within the page to the reference section at the bottom of the page.[1] Such references may be added at a point in the article using an HTML-like tag
<ref>...text of the reference...</ref>
To make the text appear at the bottom, you must add a "references" tag to the References section near the bottom of the article, e.g.,
==References==
{{reflist|1}}
Using this approach, the references are automatically numbered in order of their appearance within the text.[2]
In some cases, you may wish to cite a reference more than once. This can be done by giving the reference a name at any of the places it is cited
<ref name="Thompson">...text of the reference...</ref>
At the other positions where this reference is cited, the whole reference need not be written out; instead, you can write[1]
<ref name="Thompson" />
- Citation templates
Several citation templates have been developed to ensure a uniform format for references across articles. These templates have the form
{{cite journal
| author= [[David Baltimore|Baltimore D]]
| year = 1970
| title= RNA-dependent DNA polymerase in virions of RNA tumour viruses
| journal= [[Nature (journal)|Nature]]
| volume= 226
| number= 5252
| pages= 1209-11
| pmid= 4316300
}}
which appears as
- Baltimore D (1970). "RNA-dependent DNA polymerase in virions of RNA tumour viruses". Nature. 226 (5252): 1209–11. PMID 4316300.
Different templates are used for different types of sources, such as journal articles, book chapters, books, etc. Such templates can be written automatically using the freely available Zotero software or this server. Zotero has the advantage of maintaining a database of references, similar to the proprietary software EndNote or Reference Manager, and can be used to format for scientific journals.
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 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, which 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.