User talk:Essetra

Welcome to Wikipedia!

Welcome!

Hello, Essetra, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome!

And thanks for your help editing Street newspaper. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 02:09, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the welcome! I noticed that the street newspaper article is a "featured article" - I would assume from the name that this recognizes quality articles? How are featured articles chosen? Do they all appear on the main page? Thanks for your help in advance. Essetra (talk) 02:13, 14 May 2009 (UTC) (hopefully this *is* how one signs?)[reply]

Yep, "featured articles" are articles that have gone through Wikipedia's review process, gotten discussed and heavily edited, and eventually identified as some of Wikipedia's best work. To become "featured," articles have to go through WP:FAC (short for "featured article candidates"), where people scrutinize articles and make sure everything is up to speed. Featured articles (FAs) are pretty much the highest quality rating on Wikipedia, but there is a whole rating system all the way from "stub-class" (the lowest) to FA-class, with several intermediate levels.

Once an article is featured it can appear on the main page, but it's not guaranteed...generally, you have to either file a request at main page requests or sometimes the main page director, User:Raul654, will choose an article on his own and put it on the main page. There's a somewhat complicated point system for determining which articles make it to the main page (it has to do with things like how long the article has been a "featured article" without having gotten to the main page, how well-represented that topic is--ie, FAs about music or television, which are very common, are less likely to be put on the main page than FAs about math or language, which we don't have as many of--and whether the date is relevant, such as a major anniversary).

If you want to get a feel for some of Wikipedia's assessment system, you can look at User:Rjanag/Assessed articles, my list of articles I've written that have been through Featured Article or Good Article assessment--that might give you an idea what level of quality each ranking corresponds to. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 02:20, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

And, about replying...you can reply here or at my talk page, either one is fine. As for how to make the link display differently, you can use piping (there's more about that in the tutorial)...for example, [[Example|link]] displays the text "link" but links to the article "Example". rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 02:22, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Superscript footnotes like that aren't necessarily mandatory—some people prefer to use Harvard-style parenthetical citations, for example—but it is necessary to have some form of reference to verify all the sources your information came from. That's because one of Wikipedia's core policies is Verifiability: nothing added to Wikipedia should be "new" research, it should all be facts that have already been published in reliable sources. The main reason for that is because Wikipedia editors are anonymous—for all anyone knows, I could be some 12-year-old kid—so the credentials of individual editors are meaningless, and what really matters is the quality of the sources people use to cite all the information in writing articles.

As for the standards...yeah, standards for Wikipedia's top content are pretty high, but don't let that discourage you from editing! Anyone is welcome to edit articles, and the more you edit the more you will understand the standards; it only took me about a month before I was ready to start writing Good Articles. Wikipedia is chock-full of articles that need serious cleanup, so just do some browsing around in topics that interest you and before long you'll find something you can improve. :) rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 02:33, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]