User:Ian.thomson/Guide

• Different pages are like different rooms. Articles are like displays in a museum, article talk pages are like the backstage areas where the displays are worked on. Your user page is like the front door to your office. You can decorate it up to a point, just make sure that the material there has something to do with the site. Your user talk page is like your office (so posting there is like talking to yourself).
• The Teahouse is like a reception area. The Help Desk is like, well, a help desk. The Reference Desks are supposed to be a place to find sources for articles.
• Administrator intervention against vandalism is where you report vandals. Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring is where you report someone who has made more than 3 reverts in under 24 hours. Requests for Page Protection is where you request that a page be locked (make sure there's a good reason for it). They all have templates for reports, use them.
• Administrators Noticeboard/Incidents is like the front room for the security office where incidents can be brought to administrator attention, while Administrators Noticeboard is like the back office where the admins sort out admin matters. Make sure you don't need to go to one of the above areas first.

• Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. All we do here is cite, summarize, and paraphrase professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources, without addition, nor commentary. We're not a directory, nor a forum, nor a place for you to "spread the word".
• Almost all actions on the site are public record. You can see someone's contributions by putting Special:Contributions/username into the search bar.
• Almost everyone is here to help the site or else they would not be here.
• Vandalism is deliberately trying to mess up the site. Lots of things that people call "vandalism" are not really vandalism.
• Do not revert changes to a page more than 3 times within a 24 hour period (except in cases of clear-cut vandalism). This is one of the most common definitions of "edit warring," which we don't approve of.
• Don't be an asshole, don't attack people. You don't have to act like you're in an audience with the Queen but you should comment on content instead of contributors. If you must comment on behavior, comment on actions and how they effect others, instead of what you think about the other person. Pointedly telling a specific person "don't be an asshole" (instead of leaving a general warning to no one in particular) can be considered an attack.
• If you are being paid to edit, you must put this template (filled out) on your user page {{paid|user=InsertName|employer=InsertName|client=InsertName}} . Refusal to do so is a violation of our terms of service.
• If you make a claim, it's on you to back it up. For claims that belong in articles, you do this with sources. For claims about other user's actions, you use "diffs" that show their action taking place.
• Any statement about a living or recently deceased person, positive or negative, on any part of the site, must be backed up by a source and properly attributed.
• Do not upload anything that might be copyrighted. Even if you own the copyright, we don't. You could donate material you own to us, but it's just easier to paraphrase.
• We're not affiliated with Google or any government. We're mostly bound just to US laws (but don't try to make legal threats based on those, it's the Wikimedia Foundation's lawyers' jobs to keep us in line, not yours). This site is secular so we don't apply any religions' laws (nor reject an editor just because they follow a religion). (...Ok, we will will topic ban people who are clearly only here to push strong views about Scientology and do automatically block any IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology... But we're not going to stop someone just for being a Scientologist if they're otherwise helping). Likewise, we largely do not restrict any user based on their politics as long as they are not disruptive about those views. That said, fuck Nazis. They distinguish themselves from other fascists by their support for the Holocaust (even in denial of its reality, they do not repudiate its evil) and also their racism inherently denies this site's fundamental assumptions that everyone (regardless of their demographics) deserves free access to knowledge and can contribute to that noble goal. Thus, Nazism (broadly construed) is inherently disruptive, so their choices on this site are to go to hell or stop being Nazis.

Google is your friend. Don't cite the search page, cite the address for specific results. Google Books, Google scholar, and Google News are especially useful, just make sure that the publisher is reputable.

We try to avoid a definitive list of what sources always are good because it can vary based on the situation. Still, the community is quite clear that some select sources are usually good and some sources are almost always bad.

Sources by accredited academics in a relevant field, published by a university press or by academic publishers (such as ABC-CLIO, Brill Publishers, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Springer Publishing, T&T Clark, Taylor & Francis, Walter de Gruyter, or Wiley-Blackwell) are almost always reliable (unless multiple tertiary sources of comparable weight isolate a particular author's views as not mainstream). Sources by someone with questionable academic qualifications, writing outside of that field, published by popular press are more likely to be unreliable. If we have an article about an author, and their views are described as pseudoscience, pseudohistory, conspiracy theory, outdated, "now rejected," fringe, racist, etc... They're obviously not reliable. You should exercise caution if an author's views are described as "controversial."

Self-published books or books from pay-to-print publishers like Lulu.com are generally rejected, except maybe for statements about the author about themselves, or (perhaps) by recognized authorities within a field (though these sources are a lot weaker than lesser-known academics from reputable publishers).

When it comes to journalism, the Associated Press, the BBC, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek, the Pew Research Center, PolitiFact, Reuters, Rolling Stone, Snopes.com, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, and Wired are almost always reliable. Someone questioning or doubting the wholesale reliability of those publications (not just questioning individual pieces; but especially the Associated Press, Snopes, or Reuters as institutions) is generally going to be considered way too far off in some biased political extreme to be of much use to the site. However, opinion pieces should be attributed and some of those publications host blogs on their site that are not reliable. For example, Forbes is generally reliable, Forbes.com contributors are not.

WikiLeaks are primary sources that sometimes raise questions of authenticity or provenance, and must be interpreted by secondary or tertiary sources instead. Also, "Wiki" is just a software, we're not affiliated with them.

InfoWars is so obviously a fake news source that defending it can (and probably will) lead to a blocked for "not being here to improve the encyclopedia" or even "lacking competency necessary to improve the encyclopedia." If someone defends InfoWars, feel free to ignore anything else they have to say. Sites that cite InfoWars as authoritative are likewise full of shit.

Breitbart News, the Daily Mail, the National Enquirer, The Sun, TheBlaze, and WorldNetDaily have well-deserved reputations for caring more about sensationalism than accuracy. Sources from the official companies behind them can be reliable for attributed claims about themselves.

Sources that anyone can create or change are never reliable. This especially includes Wikipedia, Wikia, or WikiNews. This includes blogs (except maybe by individuals so recognized as authorities on a subject that we have articles on them), Amazon listings and reviews, Baidu Baike, Ancestry.com entries, Discogs listings, eBay listings, Find a Grave entries, Goodreads, or IMDb. This includes most social media posts (such as Facebook posts, Tweets, or Tumblr posts), except by the subject of an article for an official and uncontested statement about themselves (and even then, it's better to cite a secondary source that puts things into context). The same goes for press releases. Youtube comments are not reliable. Youtube videos are almost never reliable or if they are reliable there's a good chance they're a copyright violation.

If you're making any sort of claim relating to medicine, you need to cite tertiary meta-analysis, not isolated studies or sensationalist news reports on those isolated studies.

I've also tailored a version specifically for editors trying to create pages about their companies at User:Ian.thomson/Company.

If you're going to write an article about anyone or anything that is not you or something you are connected to, here are the steps you should follow:

1) Choose a topic whose notability is attested by discussions of it in several reliable independent sources.

2) Gather as many professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources you can find. Google Books is a good resource for this. Also, while search engine results are not sources, they are where you can find sources. Just remember that they need to be professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources.

3) Focus on just the ones that are not dependent upon or affiliated with the subject, but still specifically about the subject and providing in-depth coverage (not passing mentions). If you do not have at least three such sources, the subject is not yet notable and trying to write an article at this point will only fail.

4) Summarize those sources left after step 3, adding citations at the end of them. You'll want to do this in a program with little/no formatting, like Microsoft Notepad or Notepad++, and not in something like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer. Make sure this summary is just bare statement of facts, phrased in a way that even someone who hates the subject can agree with.

5) Combine overlapping summaries where possible (without arriving at new statements that no individual source supports), repeating citations as needed.

6) Paraphrase the whole thing just to be extra sure you've avoided any copyright violations or plagiarism.

7) Use the Article wizard to post this draft and wait for approval.

8) Expand the article using sources you put aside in step 3 (but make sure they don't make up more than half the sources for the article, and make sure that affiliated sources don't make up more than half of that).

Doing something besides those steps typically results in the article not being approved, or even in its deletion.

If you are writing about yourself, or someone or something you are connected with (such as a friend, family member, or your business), the following steps are different:

0) If the subject really was notable, you wouldn't need to write the article. Remember that articles are owned by the Wikipedia community as a whole, not the article subject or the article author. If you do not want other people to write about you, then starting an article about yourself is a bad idea.

8a) If the article is accepted, never edit it again. Instead, make edit requests on the article's talk page.

8b) If the article is rejected, there will be a reason given. Read it carefully and closely. If there are links in the reason, open them and read those pages.