User:Brachy0008/How to survive Wikipedia

Wikipedia editing may be hard to grasp at first, especially for newcomers who have little to no experience editing. Aside from the difficulties of editing Wikipedia, there are also people that vandalise Wikipedia for unknown reasons. So, I written a guide to help you survive your time on Wikipedia.

Basics for Newcomers

Newcomers would be a term I’d refer to people that just entered Wikipedia, so stick with me if you want to use another term.

Edit what you know

When you start off in Wikipedia, it’s best to edit what you already know. Scrolling “Random Page” can get you to pages that seem unfamiliar to you, though it can be what you know. Search up stuff that you know and check for what you can’t find that you know. Once you get the hang of it, you can move on to other pages (and possibly Recent Changes)

Cite Your Sources

See also: Help:Citation and Wikipedia:Citing sources

When you find a missing piece of information that you know about, you then have to remember where you found it. It could be a YouTube video you might have watched before, or a website you scrolled. But BEWARE! The source can be unreliable (or worse, deprecated or abused so much they get blacklisted). The source is best a secondary source, though Tweets or primary sources can work sometimes.

Basics of Articles

Article Creation

See also: Wikipedia:Article creation

If you can’t find an article that talks about what you know, then feel free to create it (if you have an account, that is). You can either take a risk and create it directly (don’t click the red link, there’s no point creating this), or do it the risk-free (and hard) way and get that article wizard to create a draft for you.

Creating a draft

Once you created a draft, all you have to do is find sources, ensure it passes WP:GNG and closely follow the manual of style for that WikiProject. Then, when you feel it’s time to submit it, you can sumbit it and add its appropriate tags, and patiently wait from a few hours to a month or worse, two. What can possibly go wrong? Either a reviewer approves it or rejects it (or worse, declines it).

Yay, I created an article

An example of an AfD discussion

Good for you! If you created it the risky way, your article is most likely to get AfD’d (,surprise). When your article is nominated for deletion, you have to argue that your article passes WP:GNG in a discussion, and thus should be kept. It is either you VS the world or keep VS delete (VS redirect VS merge, if applicable).

Good Articles and Featured Articles

Once you improved the article you wrote (or someone else wrote), you can nominate it for Good Article status.

Nominating an article for Good Article status

See also: Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Instructions

1. Make sure it follows the GA criteria
2. Add Template:GAnominee to the talk page (if its a User talk page, then the user of that talk page may find it a joke edit or worse, vandalism)
3. Wait and pray that your nomination makes it in. The reviewer may give you some stuff that should help you bring it to GA status.
   • If it gets in, you can celebrate it all you want, or continue improving it
   • If it doesn’t, either cry like a baby or improve it further, who knows, maybe it actually moved up in the quality scale.

Nominating an article for Featured Article status

1. Make sure it follows the FA criteria
2. I don’t know what to do about it, but yeah.
3. Hopefully two reviewers find it suitable to be a FA.

Article Improvement

Found an article you like to improve, or a potential GA/FA? Try improving it as much as you want.

Peer reviews

Main page: Peer review

Don’t know what to do about an article? Don’t worry! There’s always a helpful tool called peer reviews. Just add {{subst:PR}} to the talk page and do some stuff and a more experienced editor should suggest some ways to improve it. It’s best to do that for potential FAs.

Sourcing

Yes, there must be a section for sourcing. Basically, find reliable sources. There are lists of stuff right here: WP:RSP, WP:VG/S, WP:ALBUMSOURCES

Commonly used sources that are UNRELIABLE.

1. Land Transport Guru (Yes. Stop using Land Transport Guru as a source for citation. See User:ZKang123/Improving Singapore MRT station articles)
2. Fandom/Wikia. (User generated source.)
3. Wikipedia. Yes, we have many reasons why we are unreliable.
4. Sportskeeda.

Now What?

Congrats! You reached the end. Note that this isn’t a comprehensive guide to survive Wikipedia, and if you get banned because of this essay, maybe you should have read the disclaimer struck through.