Help:Your first article

Welcome to Bharatpedia! Before starting a new article, please review our notability requirements. In short, the topic of an article must have already been the subject of publication in reliable, secondary, entirely independent sources that treat the topic in substantive detail, such as books, newspapers, magazines, peer-reviewed scholarly journals and websites that meet the same requirements as reputable print-based sources. Information on Bharatpedia must be verifiable; if no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article. Please search Bharatpedia first to make sure that an article does not already exist on the subject.

An Article Wizard is available to help you create an article through the Articles for Creation process, where it will be reviewed and considered for publication. The ability to create articles directly in the mainspace is restricted to editors with some experience. For information on how to request a new article that can be created by someone else, see Requested articles.

Please consider taking a look at our introductory tutorial or reviewing contributing to Bharatpedia 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 basicsEdit

First, please be aware that Bharatpedia is an encyclopedia written by volunteers. Our mission is to share reliable knowledge to benefit people who want to learn. We are not social media, a place to promote a company or product or person, to advocate for or against anyone or anything, nor a place to first announce to the world information on topics that have not already been the subject of the reliable publication. Please keep this in mind, always.

We find "accepted knowledge" in high quality, published sources. By "high quality" we mean books by reputable publishers, respected newspapers, peer-reviewed scientific and academic journals, literature reviews and other sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. This means generally not using random personal websites, blogs, forum posts, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter content, self-published sources like open wikis (including other Bharatpedia articles), etc. We summarize such high quality, published sources in Bharatpedia articles. That is all we do! Please make sure that anything you write in Bharatpedia is based on such sources – not on what is in your head.

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. After a few days of editing articles, it will give you the power to create a new one.
  • Practice first. Before starting, try editing existing articles to get a feel for writing and for using Bharatpedia's mark-up language—we recommend that you first take a tour through the tutorial or review contributing to Bharatpedia to learn editing basics.
  • Biographies of living people are among the most difficult articles to get right. Consider starting with something easier.
  • 'Search' Bharatpedia first in case an article already exists on the subject, perhaps under a different title. If the article already exists, feel free to make any constructive edits to improve it, while citing the sources that verify your changes.
  • Nothing? OK, now you need to try to determine if the subject you want to write about is what we call "notable" in Bharatpedia. The question we ask is: does this topic belong in an encyclopedia?
    • Please make sure your topic is notable by our definition before you spend time and effort on it. An article on a non-notable subject will be rejected or deleted. No amount of editing can overcome a lack of notability.
    • We generally judge this by asking if there are at least three high-quality sources that a) have a substantial discussion of the subject (not just a mention) and b) are written and published independently of the subject (so, a company's website or press releases are not OK). Everything here is based on high-quality independent sources, and without them, we generally just cannot write an article. By far, the largest cause of frustration for a writer of a new article is caused by a lack of notability. Anything else can be corrected by improving an article, but lack of notability means the article will not remain on Bharatpedia, regardless of how well written it is. To avoid frustration, start by determining notability before you spend any effort on an article.
    • If those sources exist, we also ask that you demonstrate the notability of the topic, by citing these reliable, secondary, independent sources that treat the topic in substantive detail. Doing so for all significant factual statements in an article is also necessary to meet another core content standard: verifiability of information.
    • We cannot stress enough how important citing your sources is at Bharatpedia – it is at the heart of all of our core inclusion policies and guidelines. In order to learn about how to do so, we suggest starting with Help:Referencing for beginners and Help:Introduction to referencing, and then seeing Bharatpedia:Citing sources for a more involved treatment, noting that each contains see also sections linking to additional help pages, guides and tutorials. There is also a visual guide and a screencast available to walk you through aspects of citing your sources, as well as a screencast demonstrating the referencing features of Bharatpedia's editing toolbars.
    • Please be mindful of conflict of interest editing. If you have one, you will probably have a hard time writing a good enough Bharatpedia 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 Bharatpedia. 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. Your conflict of interest might lead you to believe something is "notable" when it isn't and to argue too hard for it to be published here.
  • The Article Wizard will help you create your article in Draft space, and will put some useful templates into your draft, including the button to click when you are ready to submit the draft for review.

Article Wizard
An easy way to create articles.

These points are explained in further detail below.

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

Gathering referencesEdit

Gather sources for the information you will be writing about. You will use references to establish notability and to cite particular facts. References used to support notability must meet additional criteria beyond reliability. References used for specific facts need not meet these additional criteria.

To be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia, a subject must be sufficiently notable, and that notability must be verifiable through citations to reliable sources.

As noted, the sources you use must be reliable; that is, they must be sources that exercise some form of editorial control and have some reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Print sources (and web-based versions of those sources) tend to be the most reliable, though some web-only sources may also be reliable. Examples might include (but are not limited to) books published by major publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, websites of any of the above, and other websites that meet the same requirements as a reputable print-based source.

In general, sources with no editorial control are not reliable. These include (but are not limited to) books published by vanity presses, self-published 'zines', blogs, web forums, Usenet discussions, personal social media, fan sites, vanity websites that permit the creation of self-promotional articles, and other similar venues. If anyone at all can post information without anyone else checking that information, it is probably not reliable.

If there are reliable sources (such as newspapers, journals, or books) with extensive information published over an extended period about a subject, then that subject is notable. You must cite such sources as part of the process of creating (or expanding) Bharatpedia article as evidence of notability for evaluation by other editors. If you cannot find such reliable sources that provide extensive and comprehensive information about your proposed subject, then the subject is not notable or verifiable and almost certainly will be deleted. So your first job is to go find references to cite.

There are many places to find reliable sources, including your local library, but if internet-based sources are to be used, start with books and news archive searches rather than a web search.

Once you have references for your article, you can learn to place the references into the article by reading Help:Referencing for beginners and Bharatpedia:Citing sources. Do not worry too much about formatting citations properly. It would be great if you did that, but the main thing is to get references into the article, even if they are not perfectly formatted.

Create your draftEdit

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

It's always a good idea to draft your article before adding it to the main article space, and it's required for very new contributors. The article wizard will guide you through the steps of creating a draft.

Article wizard

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.

Autoconfirmed users can publish their drafts to mainspace as Bharatpedia articles via a pagemove, as explained in Bharatpedia:Drafts#Publishing a draft.