User talk:Ministry editor

Creating an article

I see that at User talk:Relativity you asked "Can I create my own article?" I'm not sure what you meant by "my own article:: you may have meant either an article about yourself, or an article which you yourself created. However here are some answers. I hope one or other of them will be helpful to you.

• If you mean can you yourself create an article, then the answer is yes you can, but I strongly advise you against it for now. My advice to new editors is that it is best to start by making small improvements to existing articles, rather than creating new articles. That way any mistakes you make will be small ones, and you won't have the discouraging experience of repeatedly seeing hours of work deleted. Gradually, you will get to learn how Wikipedia works, and after a while you will know enough about what is acceptable to be able to write whole new articles without fear that they will be deleted. Over the years I have found that editors who start by making small changes to existing articles and work up from there have a far better chance of having a successful time here than those who jump right into creating new articles from the start. . Also, in order to reduce the extent of problems caused by inexperienced editors rushing in to create articles before they are ready, a new editor can't create new articles until their account has existed for at least four days and has made at least ten edits. Don't make the mistake some new editors make of thinking that just making ten absolutely trivial edits and then sitting the ten days is a good idea. That almost always results in the article they create being deleted. Finally, if you decide to ignore my advice and go ahead with writing an article anyway, then instead of creating it directly, create it as a draft, and submit it at Wikipedia:Articles for creation. Creating it as a draft simply means putting "Draft:" in front of the page title, so for example you may create a page titled Draft:Tiddly Widdly Jones, and if it is accepted by a reviewer it will be renamed as Tiddly Widdly Jones, which will make it visible on the public face of the encyclopaedia.
• If by "my own article" you meant an article about yourself, then all of the above comments apply, but also you are very strongly discouraged from doing so at all, even if you wait until you have some experience of editing. Wikipedia aims to reflect what information has been published in independent third party sources, not what people say about themselves. See Wikipedia:Autobiography for more on this topic.
• Also, a subject is not suitable to be the topic of an article, no matter who writes it or how it is written, unless it satisfies Wikipedia's Notability guidelines. JBW (talk) 16:01, 27 October 2023 (UTC)