Wikipedia:Writing Wikipedia articles backward
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Creating an article is much easier if you start with the sources. |
If you read pages like the Teahouse where experienced editors advise the less experienced about creating new articles, you'll see statements like these:
- "Writing an article is much more difficult than it looks."
- "Creating a new encyclopedia article in Wikipedia is one of the most difficult tasks there is for inexperienced editors."
and even:
- "Successfully creating a new article is the most difficult task to perform on Wikipedia."
Not necessarily so.
True, creating a new article isn't easy. It's harder than rewriting a clumsy sentence, or adding an image, or finding and adding a reference. Few experienced editors would recommend it to anyone who's made fewer than 300 constructive edits to existing articles. But it's easier than editing a large table or creating a template with parameters, let alone changing Wikipedia policy.
So why do experienced editors say such things?
They do so because they're used to seeing new editors try to create their first article backward. It's this that's extremely difficult.
How to create an article forward[edit]
- Find several reliable independent published sources with extensive discussion of the subject.[1]
- Choose the best three of these sources and create a draft using only these three. Base the draft entirely on what those sources say, citing them as you go.
- Check that your draft meets the notability guidelines for your subject. If your best three sources do not support a claim of notability, consider if other sources will help. If not, choose another subject to write about, or improve Wikipedia some other way.
- If the best three do support a claim to notability, submit your draft or move it to article space.
- Continue to work on the draft or article using your remaining sources. (Moving the article at the point you've proven notability shows you exactly which sources you used to do that, in case you end up with 40 sources and ever need to point to the three that proved notability.)
(For very full instructions, see Help:Your first article.)
How to create an article backward[edit]
- Write whatever you like. Base it on what you remember from school, or what the subject of the article told you, or what you read on a blog, or what your grandmother once told you; or just make stuff up.
- Use a search engine or a good library to find reliable independent published sources[1] that support everything you've written. Add references to those sources.
- Check that your draft meets the notability guidelines for your subject. Go back to 1) if it does not but there are more sources you could use.
This is much harder than doing it forward. Experienced editors would say at least 20 times as hard. Step 2 is of course the difficult bit.
"I've started creating an article backward, but I get what you're saying. What should I do now?"[edit]
Go through what you've written, looking for any reliable sources with extensive discussion of the subject[1] that you happen to have cited. Add references where you can. Everything that you cannot find references for, delete. Yes, everything else. Then switch to creating your article forward.
Many people who've started writing backward will be reluctant to do this. You'll suffer from the sunk cost fallacy, and place value on the words you've spent time typing in. But those words, if not supported by acceptable sources, are worse than useless. They'll distract you from the task you need to get on with. When you're creating an article, typing in the words isn't the difficult bit, finding sources is.