For the ongoing News On Wiki campaign, I'd like to make a series of videos that are very granular, instructions on how to do a very specific task that contributes to building or editing Wikipedia articles about newspapers. (These will have broader applicability, but I'd like to focus on newspapers for now.) This is mainly for brand new Wikipedia editors (such as students) or for Wikipedians with some experience who want to learn a new skill. Here are my initial ideas:
- How to check (thoroughly!) to see whether a Wikipedia article already exists. (This also connects to #6 below, for after you've written a new article)
- General principles around sourcing
- How to find 3-4 really good sources about a newspaper (using WP:WPNEWS/WA#Resources as a guide)
- Once you've found your sources, how to write a solid stub article (at least 2-3 sentences, covering at least two time periods in the paper's history)
- How to place an article in at least two categories (for a newspaper, at minimum, this is "newspapers published in <state>" and "<name of county>"). Could also add things like "<year> establishments" etc.
- Create inbound links from other Wikipedia articles. Start with searches (similar to step #1) to see where the newspaper's title occurs in other articles, and make sure they're links. At minimum, this is to avoid an {{orphan}} tag; but adding as many links as possible will maximize the article's performance in search engines.
- Link to the relevant Wikidata item, or create a new one (and link them).
- Create an infobox (we already have one or two videos on this; it's a little more involved than the others, this might need to be a longer video.)
General standards for short articles
editI'd like to make a page, and maybe a video, on "what is an ideal stub." The guidance at WP:STUB is very thin. The standards for a FA and a GA are very clearly spelled out, but the standards for a stub are arguably much more important for a relatively inexperienced Wikipedian to understand. More or less:
- How to assert significance
- How to establish notability
- How to cover enough of the topic to be reasonably complete
- How to make a footnote, and how far you need to go
- How to add categories, how to figure out which ones, how many do you need to add
Just beyond a stub:
- How to create a Wikidata item
- How to add a short description
- How to add an image
- How to create an infobox
- How to create incoming links
- How to add a navigation template
This video is somewhat related, but I could do much better.