Wikipedia talk:Writing Wikipedia articles backward
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Suggestion
edit@Maproom: I have the following suggestion to change the "How to create an article forward" section by swapping steps 2 and 3 as follows.
- Find several reliable independent published sources with extensive discussion of the subject.[1]
- Check that your sources could demonstrate that the subject meets the appropriate notability guidelines. Go back to 1) if it does not but there are more sources you could use.
- Write a draft basing it on what those sources say, citing them as you go.
References
- ^ "Reliable independent published sources with extensive discussion" means sources each of which is reliable and independent (not based on press releases, or on statements by the subject or people associated with the subject) and published and has substantial discussion of the subject.
If the sources aren't suitable, no amount of draft writing will overcome that. GoingBatty (talk) 16:01, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you, GoingBatty, for the suggestion. I've edited the page accordingly. (My own view is that the "check for notability" item is superfluous, it's implied in item 1. Another editor added it, in what I agree was the wrong place in the order.) Maproom (talk) 16:33, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Missing: due weight
editBoth forward and backward are missing any notion of WP:DUE WEIGHT. The "forward" description has a better chance of success, if one relies on a search engine to produce a representative sample of the majority opinion of reliable sources, and if you assume the user will choose their three reliable sources from among that majority, by reading down the search result page far enough and checking a decent number of sources to figure out what the majority opinion is.
The backward approach has a high risk of violating WP:DUEWEIGHT, due to inadvertent confirmation bias resulting from composing your search engine queries based on the stuff you remembered from high school or wherever. If what you wrote is a minority view, or fringe, searching for sources afterward will find results for exactly that view and not the majority view; i.e., it amounts to WP:CHERRYPICKING. This would result in an article that is highly likely to be non-neutral and a policy violation from beginning to end. In particular, bullet #2 of How to write an article backward is a clear policy violation.
The only editors who should use the "backward" approach, are true ___domain experts: if you are the author of the definitive work on the Battle of Agincourt, then probably you can use the backward approach to write the Wikipedia article about it, assuming your ego isn't so big from all the great book reviews and your National Book Award, that you feel you can blithely ignore other historians who disagree with you on it. (Even then, we have had some honest-to-god ___domain expert/authors editing here who end up getting blocked, because they just can't get past that; I'm aware of two.) Everybody else should use the forward approach. Mathglot (talk) 19:45, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
- Feel free to add a point about due weight if you want. However, I disagree with your premise. An internet search will turn up sources. We can easily identify which ones are mainstream or reliable, cross checking against WP:RSP if needed. Once one identifies those, any assertions in the draft article should be written weighted appropriately as found in the collection of sources.
- The main point of this essay is to give advice on how to write an article to avoid deletion due to lack of notability. Finding sufficient sources first that comply with WP:Golden Rule pretty much guarantees that the article won't be deleted. ~Anachronist (talk) 20:04, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
Current wording
edit@Valereee, others, hello. This:
"Check that your draft meets the notability guidelines for your subject. If these three best sources do not support a claim of notability, choose another subject to write about, or improve Wikipedia some other way."
Doesn't seem right to me at all. I never publish an article with only 3 sources. Previous version read
"If three of the best sources do not support a claim of notability, consider if other sources will help. If not, choose another subject to write about, or improve Wikipedia some other way."
and I think something like that is necessary. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:42, 10 July 2025 (UTC)
- As the creator of this page, I try not to get involved in its subsequent life. But I would like it to be short and snappy, rather than become another long bloated page like many others on the topic. So I prefer Gråbergs Gråa Sång's version, and would go a step further: not "three of the best" but "the best three". Maproom (talk) 22:11, 10 July 2025 (UTC)
- I just was responding to the previous edit, which objected to three as expressing some sort of maximum, so I was trying to clarify. I do publish as soon as I get to three. I never stop writing with only three sources (unless that's literally all I can find) but that's the point at which I move to article space. Agree that short and snappy is always best. Valereee (talk) 16:56, 11 July 2025 (UTC)