User:Vpiskunov/sandbox
-->
If you would like to check it out, please visit LifeStrike.Net or our About LifeStrike page. To actually create an article, try the Article Wizard.
Welcome to my page!
Here, in this article you will find the most recent information on myself such as personal achievements etc., as well as the updated information about the progress of my new social network, which I have named LifeStrike, and it is available for all of you to see, use and enjoy out there! We will explain some of the DOs and DON'Ts, then show you how to create an article. When you're ready to start writing, consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles — it will walk you through these steps. Here are some tips that may help you along the way:
- Wikipedia covers certain kinds of subjects and not others. If the topic is likely to be suitable for an encyclopedia, go ahead; if you're unsure or the article is about you or something you are closely connected to, you can read more on and ask questions about what makes a topic suitable here.
- You can create a new article once you've registered an account — you need only to choose a username and password. If you don't want to register for an account, registered and unregistered users alike may submit their article for review and publishing at the Articles for Creation project.
- Before starting, try editing existing articles to get a feel for writing and for using Wikipedia's mark-up language. Also 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.
- Gather references both to use as source(s) of the information you will include and also to demonstrate notability of your article's subject matter. References to blogs, personal websites, MySpace and YouTube don't count — we need reliable sources. The best advice for a relevant source of information is to find information that was from a site that includes something with a .gov, .org, or .edu ending to it or a reliable news article. Extra care should be taken to make sure that articles on living persons have sources — articles about living people without sources may be deleted.
- Consider requesting feedback. You can request feedback on articles you would like to create in a number of places, including the talk page of a related WikiProject or the Drawing Board.
- Consider creating the article first in your user space. As a registered user, you have your own user space. You can start the new article there, on a subpage; you can get it in shape, take your time, ask other editors to help work on it, and only move it into the "live" Wikipedia once it is ready to go. To create your own subpage, see here. When the new article is "ready for prime time", you can move it into the main area. (Notes. The Article Wizard has an option to create these kinds of draft pages. Even in user space, unacceptable articles (see below) are liable to be nominated for deletion.)
- Remember that if the article is not acceptable, it will be deleted quickly. Wikipedia has a new pages patrol division where people check your new articles shortly after you create them.
- Articles that do not meet notability guidelines and do not cite reliable published sources are likely to be deleted.
- Do not create pages about yourself, your company, your band or your friends, nor pages that advertise, nor personal essays or other articles you would not find in an encyclopedia.
- Be careful about the following: copying things, controversial material, extremely short articles, and local-interest articles.
Search for an existing article
[edit]Wikipedia already has 6,980,545 articles. Before creating an article, try to make sure there is not already an article, perhaps under a slightly different name. Search for the article, and check the Wikipedia naming conventions before creating your first article. If an article on your topic is there, but you think people are likely to look for it under some different name or spelling, learn how to add a redirect with that name; adding needed redirects is a good way to help Wikipedia. Also, remember to check the article's deletion log in order to avoid creating an article that has already been deleted.
If a search does not find your article, consider broadening your search to find existing articles that might include the subject of your article. For example, if you want to write an article about a band member, you might search for the band and then add information about your subject as a section within that broader article.
Gathering references
[edit]Gather sources to the information for your article. To be worth including in the encyclopedia, a subject must be sufficiently notable, and that notability must be verifiable through references to reliable sources.
These sources must be reliable; that is, they must be sources that exercise some form of editorial control. Print sources (and web-based versions of those sources) tend to be the most reliable, though many web-only sources are also reliable. Examples might include (but are not limited to) books published by major publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, websites of any of the above, professional bloggers, and other websites that meet the same requirements as a reputable print-based source.
In general, sources with no editorial control are not reliable. These include (but are also not limited to) books published by vanity presses, self-published zines, blogs, web forums, usenet discussions, BBSes, fan sites, vanity websites that permit the creation of self-promotional articles, and other similar venues. If anyone at all can post information without anyone else checking that information, it is probably not reliable.
To put it simply, if there are reliable sources (such as newspapers, journals, or books) with extensive information published over an extended period about a subject, then that subject is notable and you must cite such sources as part of the process of creating (or expanding) the Wikipedia article. If you cannot find reliable sources (such as newspapers, journals, or books) that provide extensive and comprehensive information about your proposed subject, then the subject is not notable or verifiable and almost certainly will be deleted. So your first job is to go find references.
Once you have references for your article, you can learn to place the references into the article by reading Wikipedia:Citing sources. But do not worry too much about formatting them properly. It would be great if you do that, but the main thing is to get references into the article even if they are not well formatted.
Things to avoid
[edit]- Articles about yourself, your friends, your website, a band you're in, your teacher, a word you made up, or a story you wrote
- If you are worthy of inclusion in the encyclopedia, let someone else add an article for you. Putting your friends in an encyclopedia may seem like a nice surprise or an amusing joke, but articles like this are likely to be removed. In this process, feelings may be hurt and you may be blocked from editing if you repeatedly make attempts to re-create the article. These things can be avoided by a little forethought on your part. The article may remain if you have enough humility to make it neutral and you really are notable, but even then it's best to submit a draft for approval and consensus of the community instead of just posting it up, since unconscious biases may still exist of which you may not be aware.
- Non-notable topics
- People frequently add pages to Wikipedia without considering whether the topic is really notable enough to go into an encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia does not have the space limitations of paper-based encyclopedias, our notability policies and guidelines allow a wide range of articles — however, they do not allow every topic to be included. A particularly common special case of this is pages about people, companies, or groups of people, that do not substantiate the notability or importance of their subject with reliable sources, so we have decided that such pages may be speedily deleted under our WP:SPEEDY policy. This can offend — so please consider whether your chosen topic is notable enough for Wikipedia, and then substantiate the notability or importance of your subject by citing those reliable sources in the process of creating your article. Wikipedia is not a directory of everything in existence.
- Advertising
- Please do not try to promote your product or business. Please do not insert external links to your commercial website unless a neutral party would judge that the link truly belongs in the article; we do have articles about products like Kleenex or Sharpies, or notable businesses such as McDonald's, but if you are writing about a product or business be sure you write from a neutral point of view, that you have no conflict of interest, and that you are able to find references in reliable sources that are independent from the subject you are writing about.
- Personal essays or original research
- Wikipedia surveys existing human knowledge; it is not a place to publish new work. Do not write articles that present your own original theories, opinions, or insights, even if you can support them by reference to accepted work. A common mistake is to present a novel synthesis of ideas in an article. Remember, just that both Fact A and Fact B are true does NOT mean that A caused B, or vice-versa (fallacies). If that is true, reliable sources will probably report that connection, and you should cite those sources.
- A single sentence or only a website link
- Articles need to have real content of their own.
- Attacks on a person or organization
- Material that violates our biographies of living persons policy or is intended to threaten, defame, or harass its subject or another entity is not permitted. Unsourced negative information, especially in articles about living people, is quickly removed, and attack pages may be deleted immediately.
- See also:
And be careful about...
[edit]As a general rule, do not copy-paste text from other websites. (There are a few limited exceptions, and a few words as part of a properly cited and clearly attributed quotation is OK.)
- Copying things. Do not violate copyrights
- To be safe, do not quote more than a couple of sentences of text from anywhere, and document any references you do use. You can copy material that you are sure is in the public domain, but even for public domain material you should still document your source. Also note that most Web pages are not in the public domain and most song lyrics are not either. In fact, most things written since January 1, 1978 are automatically under copyright even if they have no copyright notice or © symbol. If you think what you are contributing is in the public domain, say where you got it, either in the article or on the discussion page, and on the discussion page give the reason why you think it is in the public domain (e.g. "It was published in 1895...") If you think you are making "fair use" of copyrighted material, please put a note on the discussion page saying why you think so. For more information: Copyrights (which includes instructions for verifying permission to copy previously published text) and our non-free content guidelines for text.
1. have a reputation for reliability: they are reliable sources
2. are independent of the subject
3. are verifiable by other editors