Welcome to Wikipedia! This is a guide to some things you should know before creating your first encyclopedia article.

1. Sign in with your account. If you do not have an account, you should create one. (Unregistered users can write articles using the Wikipedia:Articles for creation process, but users who register and sign in can create articles much more easily.)
2. Please don't create pages about yourself or your friends, pages that advertise, or personal essays.
3. Be careful about the following: copying things, controversial material, redundant articles, extremely short articles, and local-interest articles.
4. List the source(s) of your information. Articles that do not cite reliable published sources are likely to be deleted.

In the search box to the left, type the title of your article, then click Go or press Enter. If the Search page reports "No page with that title exists" then you can click the "create this page" link to start editing your article. But please read the rest of this article before you create your article.

The very first thing you should write in your article is a list of the source(s) for your information. For now, just enter them like this:

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html

(2) http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/space/space_shuttle.html

Later, you'll learn how to format them to appear as footnotes.

After you have entered your article, click Show preview to check for errors, then click Save page.

• Before creating an article, please search Wikipedia first to make sure that an article does not already exist on the subject, perhaps under a different title.

• Be aware of Wikipedia's policies about notability and verifiability. A subject must be sufficiently notable to be worth including in the encyclopedia and that notability must be verifiable through references to reliable sources.

Put simply, if there are newspaper articles with enough information to write about a subject, then that subject is notable and those articles can verify the information in the Wikipedia article.

If you cannot find newspaper web sites that provide information for an article, then the subject is not notable or verifiable and almost certainly will be deleted. So your first job is to go find references.

• Consider taking a tour through the Wikipedia:Tutorial so that you know how to properly format your article.

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, which can be avoided by a little forethought on your part. So, just don't do it, please. The article might 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 as 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 any topic to be included. A particularly common special case of this is pages about people, companies or groups of people that do not assert the notability or importance of their subject, 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 assert (or preferably show!) the notability or importance of your article's subject if you decide it is notable enough. Wikipedia is not a directory of everything in existence.

Advertising

Please don't try to promote your product or business. Please don't 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 and have no Conflict of interest.

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 single sentence or only a website link

Articles need to have real content of their own.

See also:

• List of bad article ideas
• Avoiding common mistakes

• Copying things. Do not violate copyrights. To be safe, do not copy 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.
• Good research and citing your sources. Articles written out of thin air are better than nothing, but they are hard to verify, which is an important part of building a trusted reference work. Please research with the best sources available and cite them properly. Doing this, along with not copying large amounts of the text, will help avoid any possibility of plagiarism.
• Advocacy and controversial material. Please do not write articles that advocate one particular viewpoint on politics, religion, or anything else. Understand what we mean by a neutral point of view before tackling this sort of topic.
• Redundant articles. Wikipedia already has a lot of articles. Before creating an article, try to make sure there isn't already an article, perhaps under a slightly different name; you can search for it here; check the Wikipedia naming conventions. 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.
• Extremely short articles that are just definitions. Try to write a good short paragraph that says something about the subject. We welcome good short articles, called "stubs", that can serve as launching pads from which others can take off. If you don't have enough material to write a good stub, you probably should not create the article. At the end of a stub, you should include a "stub template" like this: {{stub}}. (Other Wikipedians will appreciate it if you use a more specific stub template, like {{art-stub}}. See the list of stub types for a list of all specific stub templates.) Stubs help track articles that need expansion. Definitions belong on Wiktionary.

• Organization. Make sure there are incoming links to the new article from other Wikipedia articles (click "What links here" in the toolbox) and that the new article is included in at least one appropriate category (see help:category). Otherwise it will be difficult for readers to find the article.
• Local-interest articles. These are articles about places like schools, or streets that are of interest to a relatively small number of people such as alumni or people who live nearby. There is no consensus about such articles, but some will challenge them if they include nothing that shows how the place is special and different from tens of thousands of similar places. Photographs add interest. Try to give local-interest articles local colour. Third-party references are good!