User:David Fuchs/Guide to featured writing

Please noteThis is a wikipedia essay. It should not be treated as definitive information; it is simply the opinion and advice of one editor, David Fuchs.

Future historians will wonder why a bunch of motley wannabes wrote brilliant encyclopaedic articles all for a bronze star.

This is David Fuchs' guide to writing what I've termed "audited" content—good and featured articles (GAs and FAs). This is but one of many articles addressing the subject of writing quality content on Wikipedia, which will be linked below as further reading. The original version of this advice dates back over twelve years, but in late 2020 I decided to rewrite it to remove some of my bad jokes and update it with more received wisdom and practical tips. I think anyone can write a good or featured article, but everyone's skills vary and it may be easier or tougher. What follows is my advice at every step.

Getting started

You need to start things off by picking an article. The article doesn't matter at all, really. It could be starting a new topic from scratch, finding a neglected stub, or an article that's already at a decent quality but needs additional work. You can "fly solo" and work on something almost entirely yourself or form an active collaboration with a few other editors or a WikiProject. Just remember at every step that you don't own the article. Audited content processes are at some stage going to be collaborative, and you should focus on learning to take feedback gracefully. Outside editors are critical for pointing out mistakes in prose you haven't seen, fixing those mistakes, and offering a fresh pair of opinions regarding the article's quality and format. Sometimes you will get feedback that is dumb, but I've rarely found advice solicited to be free from utility.

Just remember—there are no prizes on Wikipedia, even for topping the List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations. There are no special considerations, either, unless someone hits you with a barnstar. And while that's certainly recognition, it's not money. It's a free encyclopedia with no author's name on the page; treating it as something more can lead to bad occurrences.

Some general advice on your choice of article, especially as a newcomer:

Pick something you know about. It's often easier to start research on a topic if you know roughly what you're looking at and what you're looking for to improve an article.
Realize that not every article can be featured. In the course of revamping an article, you might find that it might not merit enough coverage to meet good or featured article criteria. Maybe it's best merged into another topic. Maybe it's not actually notable and might need to be deleted (the GA and FA criteria notably don't deal with notability.)
Don't write about your friend, your family, your company, or something you care about more than anything else. Conflicts of interest can be tough and open up more cans of worms than you really want to deal with.

The writing

I generally work piecemeal on articles in article space. Some editors like forming a draft in userspace, which allows you to tinker and be as messy as you want without worrying about breaking templates or leaving half-finished thoughts or sentences. If you wrap text in comment tags () you can hide it from normal view; I often use these to dump bare URLs as possible references in section headings.

I generally think it's best to focus on the highest possible criterion when writing, which is the featured article criteria. They are as follows:

It is well-written, comprehensive, well-researched, neutral, and stable.
- This covers a huge amount of an article, and it's the criteria that will often be the toughest for users. Even to this day, I have my own writerly foibles, as does everyone else. Writing for an encyclopedia is not like writing for a blog or a forum or a term paper or even a Wikipedia discussion. There are a host of resources that you can find on Wikipedia as well as off-site to improve your writing. A major one on here is User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a and User:AndyZ/Suggestions.
- When focused on prose, the overarching concern you should probably have is clarity. Is a random person plunked down in your article going to understand the topic when reading it? This is extremely tough when you're discussing technical or scientific fields, but every topic has its amount of received knowledge and jargon you're going to have to grapple with. In general, being short and punchy helps with clarity. Just don't go overboard.
- If you're concerned about comprehensiveness, your best option to see what you need to do is look at similar featured articles. How do they organize their sections? What conventions do they follow? Film articles have a certain structure, video games another, etc. Check out the general Manual of Style or WikiProject-specific guides.
- If you're in doubt of what needs to be cited, read Wikipedia:When to cite. Basically, if something isn't common knowledge, source it. For a good primer on what will constitute a reliable source, see User:Ealdgyth/FAC, Sources, and You. Note that the featured article criteria place an emphasis not just on using reliable sourcing, but high-quality sources. That means fewer blogs or marginal sources, and more scholarly or academic or mainstream news sources.
- The Manual of Style is a pain in the ass. No one is a savant about the manual of style, and the main thing to remember with your article is consistency within it (whether varieties of English, how you space things, dashes versus hyphens, etc.) Over time you'll pick up on stuff, so don't sweat this—while manual of style changes are annoying and fiddly, they're very often minor stuff that doesn't dramatically affect content.
It has images and other media, where appropriate, with succinct captions and acceptable copyright status....
- Depending on the subject, you might have a dearth of usable images or a cornucopia. Just don't go overboard—a single good image is worth a lot more than a bunch of bad ones, especially if they disrupt the text.
It stays focused on the main topic without going into unnecessary detail and uses summary style.
- When in doubt, you're often better off cutting than adding. Big subjects like Law or Evolution are going to be tough to write succinctly about, and will require lots of sub-articles; a random book or small city is going to have different levels of appropriate coverage. In general, I'd recommend that you keep articles somewhere between 1,500 and 10,000 words—too short and it raises questions of comprehensiveness or notability, too long and it becomes tough to read/unlikely to be read at all (read some statistics on webpage views some day and be depressed.)

The review process

Once you think your article is in good enough shape, it's time to get to the "audited" part of the process where you expose the article to wider outside review. The best way to get better at your own articles and the processes described is to participate in them yourself. If you're an active reviewer, you'll find a lot of people more likely to work on your own articles. I try to do at least two or three reviews for every article I submit to one of the processes below.

Peer Review, or "if another bot suggests house style changes I'll go mad"

The first stop is Peer Review; like all the content processes we'll discuss, peer review suffers from a dearth of reviewers. If you want good feedback, you need to go and be active at recruiting editors. Search out active editors on Wikiprojects or talk pages. Scratch someone's back and they might scratch yours, and as long as the back-scratching is for the improvement of the encyclopedia no one should have issues with it. The only thing more frustrating than getting bad feedback is getting no feedback.

Good Article Nominations, or "The Big Backlog"

Good Article Nominations (GAN) is where you nominate an article for Good article status. The Good article criteria are less stringent than FA, so you might have an easier time getting an article to GA than FA. But it can also serve as a useful check before going for featured article status. The main difference is that only a single editor is (usually) reviewing your article, meaning that the quality of the review depends on the quality of the reviewer. Thus, some reviews will be bad, some will be good, some will be overkill. If you have questions, follow up with the reviewer. There are lots of times I think the reviewer has some bad ideas, but you can always ask for a second opinion, but try and explain your own thoughts on the topic first, and see their side as well.

Featured Article Candidates, or "On Bribing Wikipedians"

When you think your article meets the featured criteria, then you can bring it to Featured Article Candidates. Statistics bear out that first-time nominators have a very high bar to clear to get their article successfully passed. This isn't surprising! How often have you succeeded at anything you tried for the first time? Some pointers:

Things can get testy—Especially if an article has a lot of issues, some editors can get freaked out and demoralized by opposes. Reviewers are testing your article against stringent criteria, but it's better to have harsh, constructive comments than weak ones with no substance. Ideally, editors would be very nice with their feedback, but sometimes they won't. Just remember, a bash against your article isn't a bash against you.
Your article may fail—See below about what to do about it, but my first FAC ended in failure, and from time to time even now one of mine might. I'll give you tips on minimizing this occurrence, but if you're a newbie all I can say is learn from the process so you'll be ready for next time.
Your article may fail again—It happens. And even if your first FA passes with flying colors, the next article you put up at FAC may be shot down.

I'm not going to go too deeply into the process, because others have written about it better than me. But like with peer reviews, soliciting wikiprojects for reviews or similar is crucial to driving attention to your article. These days much more than a decade-plus ago, a lot of nominations fail not from opposes but from lack of engagement and support. I recommend that before you nominate your own article, you try and review other editor's work. You don't have to support or oppose, but getting a feel for the process before your article is in the spotlight will help you greatly.

Note that sometimes the editors will be asses, along the lines of "Why the hell did you nominate this, X, Y, and Z are wrong with the article, to start. Strong oppose." Deal with it, be courteous if at all possible; I know from experience it never helps to get pissed. Just work on fixing their issues, put a note on the FAC page you think you've addressed their concerns, and then {{ping}} them or (even better) leave a note on their talk page politely asking them to look again. This is key on getting people to refactor their opinions. They may never come back to look at the article after opposing unless you bug them (nicely). If the editors still don't respond after a poke or so, note that "So and so did not respond, but I believe I have addressed their comments." Then you've done all you can do. The FAC show-runners drop by and determine consensus, and your article is then either promoted or failed.

Sometimes the article fails. It's inevitable. But don't just renominate it. Go through a peer review, polish it up, and pay attention to what opposers said. In other words, make it better. Sometimes I ask all the reviewers who reviewed my failed FAC to check out the new page, but some editors might frown on it. Just don't message only the supporters, okay? It's bad form, and besides, you can't guarantee you'll get the same feedback the next time you go through FAC anyhow.

What next

Wait? You've done it? You've got your first/another shiny star? Ok, so once the feeling of smugness goes away, what next? Read on, featured article veteran!

Main page, or The Ugly Truth

Getting an article on the main page as "Today's Featured Article" is detailed at WP:TFA. Just be aware that if your article does make it on the front page, the 24 hours of warm glow will be eclipsed by constantly having to revert vandalism every freakin' minute. Hope the glory was all worthwhile.

Public accounting, or "Your article sucks... and so do you!"

FA standards rose dramatically from the period roughly 2007–2010. They may well continue to rise. As a veteran writer, a large amount of time is spent updating and cleaning up old featured articles. New research or retrospectives come out, and your article needs to change; content on other pages might cascade to yours. It's possible that you will eventually hit a point where an article you work on is brought to featured article review (FAR). FAR is about saving featured content, and you should approach it as an opportunity to get more feedback on issues that prevent it from meeting FA criteria. The best way to prevent a rush as FAR to improve an article is to be proactive and constantly look at ways to update and improve your articles. Don't neglect them!

Postscript 1: on fictional topics

Fiction, a realm I deal with quite often, is a tricky beast. For some historical article or a biography, you just tell the facts as clearly and as straight as you can. Video games or novels, to some extent, have similar concerns, but you must also avoid delving too deeply into plot. For fictional subjects within these works, however, you're in for an even tougher slog, as everything within the articles scope is grounded in fiction, but justification for its existence must come from the real world. How do we deal with this? Here's some pointers on a featured article about a fictional facet of a universe (say, a character from a video game or comic book, etc.):

Style and Layout—video game characters and comic book characters, and characters and factions in between, have styles pioneered by braver FAs in the past. Try to use these as a template for what you should include in your articles.
Secondary sources—these prove the notability of the element of fiction, so don't skimp! Search for critical commentary in reviews of the game, for example, if looking for how your subject was received by critics. Look in features or interviews for information on how the designers came up with the element, what influenced the design, or such. Generally, to qualify as a good fiction article by itself, articles need both reception and development.
Don't hesitate to merge—Ok, maybe an article reaches the threshold for notability, but after exhausting all notable sources you only have 3KB prose. It may be time to bite the bullet and merge the article in somewhere else; for example, a fan adaptation which gained critical interest into the main series article, or a character from the second game of the series into the main characters list.
Images: Don't go overboard—Read WP:NFCC, and let it be your bible when it comes to images. Sure, the tendency is to have big resolutions shots of every character from the game, but we legally can't do that. It's that simple. Prioritize what you think are the absolute essentials you'd use to talk about a subject (an image of the character, a screenshot from the film), and what audiovisual aspects have critical commentary in the article (the design of a prop, the reception of a passage of music.) Those are the non-free media worth trying to justify including.
We are not the gaming wiki of the world—Somethings just will never belong on Wikipedia, no matter how well-written they are. Migration of content is often a good way to improve other wikis and Wikipedia without the loss of content.

Postscript 2: Source reviews

For whatever reason, a lot of FACs end up with supports but no image or source reviews, holding things up. Image reviews are relatively easier, given the relative amount of images in any given topic, but source reviews especially can be a bit daunting. What follows is my tips on how anyone can be diligent and perform an adequate source check.

Check the formatting—is everything formatted correctly? Is the citation scheme consistent? Do books and websites have publisher or website details filled in? Are there archives for internet links to ward off linkrot?
Evaluate the sources—Do the sources used appear to be the best available? This is one of those things that you get better at the more time you spend in a topic area. The best sources are going to look very different for a video game or pop culture article than they are a historical or scientific topic. Check Wikiprojects for guidance (the Video Games Wikiproject has a Reliable sources page where consensus is determined on outlets, for example, so you can easily check and see if a source is at least reliable if you're unfamiliar, and work from there.)
Spot-check the citations—Compared to source evaluation, this one is more time-consuming but really anyone can do it. I tend to go through an article and try and pick not less than 10% of the sources, and perform a spot-check on statements attributed to those sources. I try and pick a mix of statements; checking to make sure direct quotes are properly attributed and transcribed, for instance, along with longer summaries. You look for close paraphrasing and plagarism issues where the wording on Wikipedia is too close to the material quoted. Sometimes you'll find the content cited isn't actually in the reference given, or that it doesn't cover everything the text uses the citation to support. In general, these aren't huge issues; especially at FAC, it's easy for a citation to "slip" and become disjointed from what it supports, or for refs to be bundled for readability while making it unclear which citation supports what, but if there are a large number of these issues in the spot-check or the issues seem more concerning than just moving a citation back or forth a sentence, I usually do another check of additional citations. If there are more issues there, it becomes worth it to oppose on sourcing concerns. Websites are the easiest sources to check, because you can search for key words and quickly find material, but these days many books can give you snippet views on Google Books to double-check a citation without owning the material, or otherwise are available on Archive.org or through research databases. Any review is better than none, so if you don't have access to sources, make a note in your review and do what you can. Ultimately, Featured articles, if nothing else, should be expected to be broadly accurate to the research out there, so this is a vital part of the FA process.