Wikipedia:Write the article first

For the official guideline on this topic, see Wikipedia:Red link.

Frequently editors add entries to lists, "See also" sections, templates or disambiguation pages, Wikilinking those entries to articles that do not exist; the result is a red link like this one. Where the editor goes on and creates the new article, the redlink in the list turns blue, and assuming the article follows Wikipedia's policy on verifiability, notability, and other relevant policies, there is no problem.

In the early days of Wikipedia, this approach was an important part of growing the encyclopedia. Long "Lists of topics" (also called "Index lists"), sometimes with all red links, were some of the first articles created.

Now, however, with the English encyclopedia at 3,871,750 articles, list articles with many redlinks are less essential in leading to the creation of new articles. Instead of using stand-alone "Lists of topics" articles as guides for new articles, editors have largely moved this function to WikiProject Pages that cover specific areas of interest.

As a result of this evolution, these days, editors who add these links to a list often have no intention of writing the redlinked article, ever. This may be simply because writing the article is more time consuming than adding the link to the list or template. "Someone else will do it," the editor reasons. Or the editor may be choosing to contribute anonymously, which means that editor cannot create any article. Lastly, it may be because the editor knows, maybe even from first-hand experience, that newly created articles that do not follow Wikipedia policies can be deleted, whether or not the editor is aware of Wikipedia's new pages patrol or is familiar with the details of the speedy deletion process or other deletion processes.

It is this last reason that is the most problematic: adding to lists (and to a lesser extent dab pages and templates) becomes an easy outlet for spam. Look at the edit history for List of social networking websites. Nearly half of the edits are adding, for spammy reasons, redlinked sites to the list. A large portion of the rest of the edits are removing them, which, while critical to maintaining the quality of the page, is a tremendous waste of WP editor resources. Ask any editor who watches an alumni page – they will likely have had the same experience. Far too many lists are full of this spam, with no end in sight, often more redlinks than blue. Look at List of demoparties for an example.

Because of this, editors are encouraged to write the article first before adding it to a list. Don't worry that the article will be exposed to the new pages patrol, which, after all, is much more focused on article improvement than on article deletion. The new article you create will be improved by other editors. Helped by these improvement processes, you can be sure the article is list-worthy, and can then place a link to it on the appropriate list(s), template(s) and/or disambiguation pages, confident the link will be blue from the beginning.

See also

• Wikipedia:Lists in Wikipedia
• Wikipedia:Starting an article
• Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, Creating, and Maintaining Articles/Creating a New Article