Wikipedia:WikiProject Romance/Guidelines/Creating a new article

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Welcome to the WikiProject Romance Guidelines - Creating a new article

This is a high-level overview on how to create a new article for those not as familiar with creating one. For advice on how to format your article, see Style guidelines

You can create new articles about either an author, a book, the book's series, a book's character, a publisher, or even about a concept, like paranormal romance. However, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Notability guidelines are strict. Book series articles are for series on the level of Black Dagger Brotherhood and note that its characters are in that article and do not have their own. Book characters would be household names like Mr. Darcy.

There are others that patrol new articles for notability and can either:

1. put a notice on the article questioning its notability and ask for sources
2. recommend the article for deletion, in which you'll need to not only argue for its notability but also persuade others to keep it.
3. if the article is only a couple of lines long and has no inkling of how it meets notability, an admin can speedy delete it.

To avoid any of this from happening, become familiar with the notability guidelines for creative professionals for articles on authors, and with notability guidelines for books before deciding whether to create a new article. Right now (May 2015), there is a proposal up for consensus to add being on a major bestseller list as another supporting factor in notability, so the fact that it's absent gives you an idea that not only does publishing a book with a major publisher not count for notability, neither does making the New York Times (yet). Winning a major professional award does, along with reviews in major outlets (not Goodreads or Amazon).

So with that, absent of clear cut specifics for authors (book guidelines are much clearer), the following criteria could be helpful in deciding whether to create an article for an author:

1. Has the author won a major award like the RITA or RoNA? and,
2. Has the author received at least two reviews in a major newspaper or magazine like the New York Times, USAToday, Publishers Weekly, etc?
3. Also helpful if there are articles in independent sources (not the author or publisher's websites) about the author and their work, which shows that people in the industry find them notable enough to talk about them.
4. Also helpful if they are mentioned in another Wikipedia article already

Please note that this does not guarantee that another won't question its notability and you can't point to this when making your case if it ends up being speedy deleted or nominated for deletion. However, if you can show the above, with sources cited inline for 1-3, you have a much better chance of this not happening.

Creating a new article

Be aware that the moment you create a new article, it goes into a queue that admins see and patrol constantly and within minutes it will be 'patrolled', which means that person could do one of those three things mentioned at the top, or simply mark as having been patrolled. This means you don't want to post half-completed efforts just to see how it's coming along. You can still write what's called a 'stub', but make sure that that stub has why that person is notable on the page with sources.

Steps to making an article

1. Make sure you are a registered user and are logged in
2. Gather your sources to make sure you have what you need to justify the inclusion in Wikipedia
3. Click on Sandbox in the top of your browser
4. Start creating your article there, saving as you go. This way you can save and see how it looks before you publish it. For help on how to organize your article, see our Style guidelines. For help on how to cite your sources, see our References page. See How to edit a page to understand the basics of the wiki markup language.
5. Once you have it as solid as you can make it at the time, copy the article code and go to the Wikipedia page that mentions the author or book (like [[RITA Award) and click on it, and then paste in your content and save. If there are no redlinks in Wikipedia to click on, you can go to our Project Page where you can list newly created articles and click on Edit, and add Article Name, save and then click on it from there. If this is too confusing, you can submit your article from the sandbox and have it go through Wikipedia's channels, but that takes a while for approval.
6. Click on the Talk tab, then click on Edit and add {{WikiProject Romance}} to the page
7. Congrats, you created an article! You might want to click on the Watch tab near the top so you can add it to your Watchlist