Help:Your first article

Writing an article
Learn how you can create an article.

Welcome to A2wiki! Please consider taking a look at our editing guide or reviewing the cheatsheet to learn the basics about editing. Working on existing articles is a good way to learn our protocols and style conventions; see the Task Center for a range of articles that need your assistance and tasks you can help out with.

The basics

First, please be aware that A2wiki is a wiki written by volunteers. Our mission is to share reliable knowledge to benefit people who want to learn. This not a social media page, a place to promote a company or product or person, nor to advocate for or against anyone or anything. Please keep this in mind, always.

Here are some tips that can help you with your first article:

• Register an account. All you need is to choose a username and password. This will give you various powers.

• Practice first. Before starting, try editing existing articles to get a feel for writing and for using A2wiki's mark-up language – we recommend that you first take a tour through the editing guide or review the cheatsheet to learn editing basics.
• Biographies of living people are among the most difficult articles to get right. Consider starting with something easier.
• Search A2wiki to see if an article already exists on the subject, perhaps under a different title. If an article already exists, feel free to make any constructive edits to improve it.
• No article on the subject exists? OK, now you need to try to determine if the subject you want to write about is whether it is related to A2. The question we ask is: is this topic relevant to Attempt2?

• Please be mindful of conflict of interest editing. If you have one, you will probably have a hard time writing a good enough A2wiki article (this is not about you, it is just human nature). However, if you insist on trying, you need to disclose your conflict of interest, and try very hard not to allow your "external interest" to drive you to abuse A2wiki. Please try hard to hear the feedback from independent people who review any draft you create before it is published and made available in the main encyclopedia.

These points are explained in further detail below.

If you are logged in, you can use this box below to create an article, by entering the article name in the box below and then clicking "Create page".

Search for an existing article

The A2wiki already has 11 articles. Before creating an article, try to make sure there is not already an article on the same topic, perhaps under a slightly different name. Search for the article, and review A2wiki's article titling policy before creating your first article. If an article on your topic already exists, but you think people might look for it under some different name or spelling, learn how to create redirects to alternative titles; adding needed redirects is a good way to help A2wiki. 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 the topic, 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.

Is it new? Type, then click "Go (try title)"

Things to avoid

Advertising

Please do not try to promote your product or business. Please do not post external links to your commercial website. We do have articles about in-server products and services such as Placeholder and Placeholder, but if you are writing about a product or business, try to be sure that you have no conflict of interest. Additionally, creating articles about services that are unrelated to A2 is absolutely forbidden and may result in your articles being deleted and/or your account being blocked.

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.

A single sentence or only a website link

Articles need to have real content of their own.

See also:

• List of bad article ideas

And be careful about...

Copyright

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.)

– Wikipedia:Copy-paste

Copying things. Do not violate copyrights!

Never copy-paste text into an A2wiki article unless it is a relatively short quotation, placed in quotation marks, and cited using an inline citation. Even material that you are sure is in the public domain must be attributed to the source, or the result, while not a copyright violation, is plagiarism. Also, note that most web pages are not in the public domain and that most song lyrics are not, either. In fact, most things published after 1929 and almost all works written since January 1, 1978, are automatically protected by Wikipedia:copyright under the Wikipedia:Copyright Act of 1976 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..."). For more information, see A2wiki:Copyrights (which includes instructions for verifying permission to copy previously published text) and our non-free content guidelines for text. Finally, please note that superficial modification of material, such as minor rewording, is insufficient to avoid plagiarism and copyright violations. See A2wiki:Close paraphrasing.

Articles that contain different definitions of the topic

Articles are primarily about what something is, not any term(s). If the article is just about a word or phrase and especially if there are very different ways that a term is used, it usually belongs in a dictionary. Instead, try to write a good short first paragraph that defines one subject as well as some more material to go with it.

Organization

Make sure there are incoming links to the new article from other A2wiki 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.

Editing on the wrong page

If you're trying to create a new page, you'll start with a completely empty edit box. If you see text in the editing box that is filled with words you didn't write (for example, the contents of this page), you're accidentally editing a pre-existing page. Don't use "Publish changes" to make your additions. See A2wiki:How to create a page, and start over.

Are you closely connected to the article topic?

A2wiki is a wiki that anyone can edit, but there are special guidelines for editors who are paid or sponsored. These guidelines are intended to prevent biased articles and maintain the public's trust that content in A2wiki has been added in good faith. (See A2wiki's conflict of interest (COI) guideline.)

The official guideline is that editors should be volunteers. That means A2wiki discourages editing articles about individuals, companies, organizations, products/services, or political causes that pay you directly or indirectly. This includes in-house PR departments and marketing departments, other company employees, Wikipedia:public relations firms and publicists, social-media consultants, and online reputation management consultants. However, A2wiki recognizes the large volume of good-faith contributions by people who have some affiliation to the articles they work on.

Here are some ground rules. Note that this is not necessarily a full list, so use common sense when applying these rules. If you break these rules or game the system, your edits are likely to be reverted, and the article(s) and your other edits may get extra scrutiny from other A2wiki editors. Your account may also be blocked.

Things to avoid	Things to be careful about	Great ways to contribute
Don't add promotional language Don't remove negative or critical text from an article Don't make a "group" account for multiple people to share Don't neglect to disclose your affiliation on the article's talk page	Maintain a neutral, objective tone in any content you add or edit	Make minor edits/corrections to articles (e.g., typos, fixing links, adding references to reliable sources) If you are biased, suggest new article text or edits on the article talk page (not on the main article page). Disclose your relationship to the client/topic. Edit using personal accounts. Recruit help: Seek out a sponsor (volunteer editor) who has worked on similar articles, or submit ideas for article topics via Requested articles.

Note that this only covers conflicts of interest. Editors are encouraged to write on topics related to their expertise.

Create your draft

For an alternative way of creating a new A2wiki article, without creating a draft first, see A2wiki:How to create a page.

It's always a good idea to draft your article before adding it to the main article space.

Prior to drafting your article, it's a good idea look at several existing A2wiki articles on subjects similar to yours to see how such articles are formatted. The quality of our existing articles varies, so try to pick good ones.

When you feel that the article is ready, you can submit it for review by an experienced editor. If there isn't already a "Submit for review" button on the draft, you can add {{subst:submit}} to the top of the draft to submit it. A reviewer will then look at your draft and move it to the main article space or give you feedback on how to improve it. You can always edit the page, even while waiting for a review.

Registered users can publish their drafts to mainspace as A2wiki articles via a page move.

And then what?

Now that you have created the page, there are still several things you can do:

Keep making improvements

A2wiki is not finished. Generally, an article is nowhere near being completed the moment it is created. There is a long way to go. In fact, it may take you several edits just to get it started.

If you have so much interest in the article you just created, you may learn more about it in the future, and accordingly, have more to add. This may be later today, tomorrow, or several months from now. Any time – go ahead.

Improve formatting

Others can freely contribute to the article when it has been saved. The creator does not have special rights to control the later content. See A2wiki:Ownership of articles.

Also, to avoid getting frustrated or offended about the way others modify or remove your contributions, remember that you shouldn't feel ashamed if your edits are reverted or edited themselves.

Avoid orphans

An orphaned article is an article that has few or no other articles linking to it. The main problem with an orphan is that it'll be unknown to others, and it may get fewer readers if it is not de-orphaned.

Most new articles are orphans from the moment they are created, but you can work to change that. This will involve editing one or more other articles. Try searching A2wiki for other pages referring to the subject of your article, then turn those references into links by adding double brackets to either side: "[[" and "]]". If another article has a word or phrase that has the same meaning as your new article that is not expressed using the exact same words as the title, you can link that word or phrase as follows: "[[title of your new article|word or phrase found in other article]]." Or in certain cases, you could create that word or phrase as a redirect to your new article.

One of the first things you want to do after creating a new article is to provide links to it so it will not be an orphan. You can do that right away, or, if you find that exhausting, you can wait a while, provided that you keep the task in mind.

See A2wiki:Drawing attention to new pages to learn how to get others to see your new articles.

Add to a disambiguation page

If the term is ambiguous (meaning there are multiple pages using that or a similar title), see if there is a disambiguation page for articles bearing that title. If so, add a link to your article to that page.

Still need help?

Help desk

• For a list of informative, instructional and supportive pages, see Help directory.
• The best places to ask for assistance are at the Info Center and at the main Help desk.
• Click here to ask for help on your talk page. A volunteer will visit you there shortly!
• For a list of the services and assistance that can be requested on Wikipedia, see Request departments.
• Alternately you can ask a question through the A2 Forums or on the A2 Discord, linked at the bottom of the Main Page.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Wikipedia:Your first article, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).