User:Steve Smith/FA guide

As of writing, I have been the primary author of six featured articles, tied for one hundred and sixth on the list of Wikipedians by featured article nominations. As you can imagine, this makes me think I'm pretty hot shit. I think I'm such hot shit, in fact, that I'm going to venture into territory previously visited by such greats as Giano, Cla68, Yannismarou, and Dweller: I am going to explain how to write a featured article, that others can be more like me, only maybe without the lame but self-satisfied sense of humour, because that's annoying.

Selecting a topic

Ideally you should already have done this. I say that because "I want to get X to featured article status" is the kind of aim that suggests an abiding interest in X, which is likely to better sustain you in this process than an abiding interest in getting a featured article, regardless of what it is (that said, if your only interest is in being able to say that you wrote a featured article, this page should give you a good idea of what subjects take the least work, not that I'm disparaging the good people who edit on those subjects).

If you haven't yet selected a subject, here are some factors to consider:

Choose something in which you have a sincere interest. You will be doing a lot of reading on this subject, and if you have no interest in the subject you will very quickly wonder if doing this reading is worth it. In fact, I might even go so far as to suggest not to choose a subject in which you have a truly passionate interest, for fear that this process will make you hate it. Passion is a terrible thing to lose.
Specific is better than general. The more clearly-defined a subject's borders, the easier it will be to write a comprehensive article about. Biographies are good for this. Biographies are about people, and people, by their very nature, exist only for a defined period of time and in only one place at a time. Other subjects that are like this include buildings, events of reasonably short duration (such as tropical storms and political scandals, but not world wars or reigns of your more durable monarchs), specific works of art (movies, books, paintings, etc.), and ditches. It should be reasonably easy (as FA-writing goes) to write a comprehensive article on Peter A. Munch; it's probably somewhat more difficult to write one on sociology.
Moderately obscure is better than famous or really obscure. You want to make sure there is sufficient reference material to write a good, comprehensive article, but you do not want there to be so much that it will overwhelm you.^[1] While Winston Churchill is certainly a specific subject, and may well be one in which you have a great interest, it's also one on which tens of thousands of pages have been published. While it's certainly possible to evaluate these sources and correctly identify the most useful, influential, and credible, it sounds like a lot of work. As a rule of thumb, I like to write about subjects that have been the subject of at least one book, but not more than four.
Ignored by Wikipedians is better than edited by Wikipedians. While we like to pretend that Wikipedia is a collaborative environment, writing featured articles is best done solo. At some point you'll want others to pay attention to your work, but not until they'll just be shifting commas around and praising you for its brilliance. In the meantime, they just get in the way by inserting paragraphs of poorly sourced and more poorly written material that's of dubious relevance in the first place, leaving you with the option of accepting their subpar editing or initiating an edit war that will soon degenerate into an intergalactic blood feud; truly, Hell is other Wikipedians. Before you decide to take an article to featured status, check its edit history and talk page. Ideally, there should be no non-automated edits to the article in at least the last couple of months, and no talk page discussions in longer.

Improving your prose

Between two words, choose the lesser.
— Paul Valéry

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
— Antoine de Saint Exupéry^[2]

You're probably a really lousy writer. Please don't be offended: most people and most Wikipedians are terrible writers, so chances are pretty good that you are too. The odds are also pretty good that you think you're a good writer, because most bad writers, especially those of them on Wikipedia, think that. I'm not saying that you're not a good writer, I'm just saying that, statistically speaking, it's unlikely.^[3] I say this by way of pointing out that humility is a prerequisite to meeting the prose criterion of featured articles. For many of us, it's the hardest prerequisite to grasp. Once you've got it, you'll realize that you should submit the article to a copyeditor or two before sending it to FAC, and that when you've got it there and User:Tony1 chimes in to tell you, in effect, that it's the worst piece of garbage he's ever read, he's probably got a point.^[4]

Before involving other people, though, you should take a stab at improving the prose yourself. First, this will reduce your embarrassment when asking others to look over your article, and it will also prevent potential reviewers from taking one look at your article and scurrying away to go review the latest featured article candidate about a tropical storm that didn't make a landfall. It might also make your experience at FAC more pleasant, but that's not guaranteed. Anyway, here are some helpful strategies for copyediting your own writing:

Identify the stylistic flourishes and turns of phrase of which you're proudest. Delete them all.^[5] Just trust me on this.
Do not save a single edit unless it reduces your character count.^[6]
If you're tempted to save an edit that increases your character count, make absolutely certain that you're doing so because it conveys additional information, and not because you think it improves the prose. It does not improve the prose. Besides, even if you have some legitimate reason to add characters, it should be possible to make the edit a net character remover by trimming from elsewhere.
Replace nouns with pronouns. For reasons that elude me, many Wikipedians think that readers will forget what they are talking about if they do not repeat its name every sentence. This is absurd, but is especially so when what's being talked about is the subject of the article. As a rule of thumb, mention the article subject by name in the first sentence of each paragraph, and elsewhere only where clarity demands it.
Conduct a parallelism audit. Most Wikipedians are terrible at parallelisms, though they're easy to get right. There are two questions you should ask when evaluating a parallelism. The first is whether it's faulty. A parallelism is composed of a stem and at least two branches. In a faulty parallelism, one or more of the branches does not match the stem. For example, the parallelism "Bob believed that it was the responsibility of the state to provide for its citizens, to protect its sovereignty, and that the economy is best-served by taxes being kept as low as possible." is faulty. The stem is "Bob believed that it was the responsibility of the state", while the branches are "to provide for its citizens", "to protect its sovereignty", and "that the economy is best-served by taxes being kept as low as possible". The first two branches match the stem ("Bob believed that it was the responsibility of the state to provide for its citizens" and "Bob believed that it was the responsibility of the state to protect its sovereignty" are both valid sentences), but the third does not ("Bob believed that it was the responsibility of the state that the economy is best-served by taxes being kept as low as possible" is what grammarians call "total horseshit"). The parallelism could be repaired by changing it to something like "Bob believed that it was the responsibility of the state to provide for its citizens, to protect its sovereignty, and to help the economy by keeping taxes as low as possible." The second question to ask in a parallelism audit is whether the stem is as long as possible, thereby keeping the branches as short as possible. In our example, we could improve the parallelism by moving the "to" from the beginning of each branch to the stem, giving us the slightly shorter "Bob believed that it was the responsibility of the state to provide for its citizens, protect its sovereignty, and help the economy by keeping taxes as low as possible."
Eliminate one third of your adjectives and two thirds of your adverbs.
Eliminate at least half of occurrences of "however".
Eliminate at least three quarters of occurrences of "also", "in addition to", and "as well as". The second and third can usually be replaced by "and", while the first can usually be eliminated entirely.
Eliminate at least ninety percent of occurrences of "subsequently" and "able to". "Subsequently" is used to situate events temporally relative to one another. If your prose is otherwise solid, there should rarely be a need to do this. If there is, words like "after", "later", or "in February 1996" are almost always preferable. "Able to" is most commonly used on Wikipedia in the past tense: "He was able to implement a rule...". In those cases, it should just be eliminated, with the subsequent^[7] verb changed from the infinitive to the past tense: "He implemented a rule...". The exception to this is if, despite being able to do something, the subject did not do it, in which case you can retain "able to" or convert it to "could have": "He [was able to implement/could have implemented] a rule...but decided not to." It is also sometimes used in the present tense, when it would usually be better replaced by "can": "Members are able to rent human spleens from the quartermaster..." should be "Members can rent human spleens from the quartermaster".
Replace all occurrences of "utilize" with "use". Many people do not understand the difference between these two verbs. It is as follows: "utilize" makes right-thinking people want to punch you in the throat.^[8]
Cut down on douchey pseudo-past tenses. There are two of these: conditional and pluperfect. Both have their places, and both are abused all over Wikipedia. Conditional can be used when describing past events that occurred after the events you're describing: "In 1946 she married Horatio Algorithm;^[9] they would have eleventeen children." There's nothing inherently wrong with this sentence, but avoid overusing its ilk. "they had eleventeen children" would be just fine too, but makes you sound less like a douche. Pluperfect is used when describing past events that occurred before the events you're describing: "She had her first child in 1950 with Horatio Algorithm, whom she had married in 1946." There's nothing inherently wrong with this, either, but if you find yourself using a lot of pluperfect, there's a good chance that your article jumps around too much (couldn't you have covered the wedding before the birth of the child?). Besides, it can often be replaced by the past tense without loss of meaning: "...whom she married in 1946."
Avoid the passive voice. This is a tough one, because the passive voice is loved dearly by me, but even I have to admit that it's a plague upon the language.

excessive gerunds
"X of Y" possessives
passive voice
misplaced modifiers
parenthetical, especially with commas
throw away the thesaurus
semi-colons, colons
during

Notes

^ Among my medium-term plans is to turn Pierre Trudeau into a featured article, which will mark my first time disregarding my own advice on this point.
^ I'm not sure why the French produce the best quotes about concision. It's counter-intuitive, especially when you look at much of the rest of what they produce. My theory is that, unlike other countries that try to be reasonably competent at most things, the French just concentrate all of their excellence in a few areas. Cheese is another one.
^ Here's a good test: list your five greatest weaknesses as a writer. If you can't do this, you are almost certainly a terrible writer.
^ I think I'm a pretty good writer, and I still manage to come up with clunkers like that last sentence.
^ Alternatively, keep one or two of your favourites in, so you'll have something to delete when you want to convince Tony that you're making a sincere effort to improve your prose.
^ For an example of how to reduce character count, consider that the first sentence of the paragraph before this list originally read "Before you start getting other people involved, though, you should take a stab at improving the article's prose quality yourself."
^ Did you notice that?
^ If we wish to be technical, utilize is a more precise word. But there is never a case in which "utilize" is accurate and "use" isn't, and it's best to avoid appearing to be a twat in front of all those FAC reviewers.
^ What do you get when you set a global warming presentation to music? Al Gore rhythm.

[1] Among my medium-term plans is to turn Pierre Trudeau into a featured article, which will mark my first time disregarding my own advice on this point.

[2] I'm not sure why the French produce the best quotes about concision. It's counter-intuitive, especially when you look at much of the rest of what they produce. My theory is that, unlike other countries that try to be reasonably competent at most things, the French just concentrate all of their excellence in a few areas. Cheese is another one.

[3] Here's a good test: list your five greatest weaknesses as a writer. If you can't do this, you are almost certainly a terrible writer.

[4] I think I'm a pretty good writer, and I still manage to come up with clunkers like that last sentence.

[5] Alternatively, keep one or two of your favourites in, so you'll have something to delete when you want to convince Tony that you're making a sincere effort to improve your prose.

[6] For an example of how to reduce character count, consider that the first sentence of the paragraph before this list originally read "Before you start getting other people involved, though, you should take a stab at improving the article's prose quality yourself."

[7] Did you notice that?

[8] If we wish to be technical, utilize is a more precise word. But there is never a case in which "utilize" is accurate and "use" isn't, and it's best to avoid appearing to be a twat in front of all those FAC reviewers.

[9] What do you get when you set a global warming presentation to music? Al Gore rhythm.

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