Featured articles are considered to be some of the best articles Wikipedia has to offer, which makes writing them not an easy task.
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 Wiki'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 essay could benefit from being converted into a how-to-guide. It contains some non-opinionated instructional content related to the processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. |
This page in a nutshell: There are many resources to improve articles of all quality levels. |
This essay is a one stop shop of valuable resources, whether you are seriously aiming to write a featured topic or just tweaking a shabby vital article. Each section is designated for an assessment category outlined in Wiki: Content assessment for easy navigation.
A stub is an article deemed too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, usually only a few sentences long. This is one of the most common types of article on Wikipedia, with a good example being Crescent Falls in May 2018. Such article can be tagged with {{stub}} or its variant for easy identification. Some articles will always be a stub due to a lack of reliable source about the topic, but some is just not notable enough to exist and will be nominated for deletion. Because there is so little content available, the usual best course of action is to just add more content via sources, which this topic is discussed thoroughly at the reliable source guideline.
For new editors, Help:Your first article can be useful as an all-in-one guide. There are some essays that express viewpoints of extremely short or undeveloped stubs, such as Wiki: Don't hope the house will build itself, Wiki: Don't demolish the house while it's still being built, and Wiki: An unfinished house is a real problem. A word of caution: please use your own words – directly copying other sources without giving them credit is plagiarism, and may in some cases be a violation of copyright.
A good stub contains:
A Start-class article provides some meaningful content but is still weak in many areas. A good example of such an article being ring-tailed cardinalfish in June 2018. Some sectioning is attempted to categorize new information in the article. Even though the definition of a Start-class article can vary between editors, Wiki: Content assessment defined it as an article that "should [not] be in any danger of being speedily deleted." This means that the article must follow very basic policies about content, such as having a neutral point of view, verifiable, and contains no original research. In some cases, they also need to satisfy article title, biographies of living persons, image use, and "what Wikipedia is not" guidelines.
Most Start-class articles are sourced, though usually to questionable ones. Therefore, a good way to improve the article is to add more content, clean up the layout, and reformat the article to be up to standards. Grammar, spelling, jargon use and writing style can also be improved via copyediting, though the latter should never be based on personal preferences. Since Wiki is a work in progress, not all article must be better than Start-class, though it is generally agreed that any Start-class article has a potential to be a B-class or even a good article. Collaboration between editors happens much more often starting from this stage.
Finding a Start-class article is easy as it is the most numerous on Wiki English. Therefore, the most problematic ones can be found at Wiki: Cleanup, Template:Opentask, Category:Wikipedia pages with to-do lists, and Category:Articles needing attention. Some Start-class articles can be merged to have enough content, though this practice is controversial to many editors.
A good Start-class article contains all of the above criteria and:
A C-class article is defined as "still missing important content or contains much irrelevant material" by Wiki: Content assessment, and usually considered to be an "average" article quality by many editors. An example of a C-class article being wing in June 2018.
A B-class article is generally considered to be comprehensive by casual readers, like human in April 2019. This is generally an advised end goal for an article that is about a very obscure topic. Unlike prior assessments, B-class has six concrete criteria:
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is optional.A good article is reviewed by an impartial editor, like discovery of the neutron article in April 2019 and its review. For a reader, the article is of very high quality with no obvious omissions. It must satisfy the following criteria:
An A-class article is often considered as a transition between good article and featured article status. It was originally created to serve as a buffer between B-class and featured article, though now it saw limited use by some large Wikiprojects. An example is the Battle of Nam River and its review in June 2014.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. |
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. |
This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article Wiki:How to write a featured article, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
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