User talk:Moldy loofah
Welcome
[edit]Hi. I see you've been struggling a little bit - you might want to investigate the Wikipedia:Adopt-a-user programme and ask questions at Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions which is busier than some of the WikiProjects. If you have specific questions about an article, then its Talk page is the first place to look for other people interested in the subject. You might also want to have a read of WP:Controversial articles and some of the links at the bottom of it. But just generally, I suggest you steer clear of the more general, controversial articles to start with - they can be tricky to get right even for people with experience. I suggest you cut your teeth on a smaller topic that is more specific and more factual first - perhaps a biography of a historical figure, or an event in Islamic/Arabian history, something that is well documented in written sources. You should go into every article aiming to make edits that will ultimately help it to meet WP:Featured article criteria - and the WP:Good article criteria are a stepping stone along the way. High quality references are key - ideally everything you write should be backed up with a WP:RELIABLE third-party reference. Google Books and Google News are your friend, whereas random websites off the internet probably won't count.
Doing it this way will help you pick up certain conventions we have, such as See Also links using the actual name of an article rather than a redirect, even if that means the See Also list is a "messy" mix of Arabic and English names. Also we adopt WP:Summary style with an overview article having sections covering every aspect of the subject, sometimes with a link to a longer article of which it is a short summary. It may mean a little duplication, but it allows every article to stand alone in its own right, even when the more detailed article is not available. That means the general article still works if it is printed out, or is on a CD that only has room to include the general articles and not the more detailed ones, or if it is translated into a foreign language but there's not been the resources to translate the subsidiary article. Anyway - hope this helps, and have fun! Le Deluge (talk) 17:24, 9 March 2016 (UTC)