Bahaipedia:Your first article

Welcome to Bahaipedia! This is a guide to some things you should know before creating your first article.

1. Be bold.
2. Sign in with your account. If you do not have an account, you should create one.
3. Please don't create pages about yourself or your friends, pages that advertise, or personal essays.
4. Be careful about: copying things, controversial material, redundant articles, extremely short articles, and local-interest articles.

Things to avoid

Articles about yourself, your friends, your website, a band you're in, your teacher, a word you made up, or a story you wrote

If you are worthy of inclusion in the encyclopedia, let someone else add an article for you. Putting your friends in an encyclopedia may seem like a nice surprise or an amusing joke, but articles like this are likely to be removed. In this process, feelings may be hurt, which can be avoided by a little forethought on your part. So, just don't do it, please.

Out-of-scope topics

Due to the limitations on editor resources, the scope of Bahaipedia is purposely limited. Limiting scope enables editors to focus on articles which are going to be more widely accessed. If an article about a person, an organization, or a product does not assert the notability or importance of the subject, it may be speedily deleted. This can offend—so please check our guidelines on project scope and assert (or preferably show!) the notability or importance of your article's subject if you decide it falls within the project's scope.

Advertising

Please don't try to promote your product or business. Please don't insert external links to your commercial website unless a neutral party would judge that the link truly belongs in the article; we do have articles about books, games, movies, and businesses, but if you are writing about a product or business be sure you write from a Bahá’í point of view and have no conflict of interest.

Personal essays or original research

Bahaipedia surveys existing human knowledge; it is not a place to publish new work. Do not write articles that present your own original theories, opinions, or insights, even if you can support them by reference to accepted work.

A single sentence or only a website link

Articles need to have real content of their own.

And be careful about...

• Copying things. Do not violate copyrights. To be safe, do not copy more than a couple of sentences of text from anywhere, and document any references you do use. You can copy material that you are sure is in the public domain, but even for public domain material you should still document your source. Also note that most Web pages are not in the public domain and most song lyrics are not either. In fact, most things written since January 1, 1978 are automatically under copyright even if they have no copyright notice or © symbol. If you think what you are contributing is in the public domain, say where you got it, either in the article or on the discussion page, and on the discussion page give the reason why you think it is in the public domain (e.g. "It was published in 1895...") If you think you are making "fair use" of copyrighted material, please put a note on the discussion page saying why you think so. For more information: Copyrights.
• Good research and citing your sources. Articles written out of thin air are better than nothing, but they are hard to verify, which is an important part of building a trusted reference work. Please research with the best sources available and cite them properly. Doing this, along with not copying large amounts of the text, will help avoid any possibility of plagiarism.
• Advocacy and controversial material. Please do not write articles that advocate one particular viewpoint on politics, religion, or anything else. Understand what we mean by a Bahá’í point of view before tackling this sort of topic.
• Redundant articles. Bahaipedia already has a lot of articles. Before creating an article, try to make sure there isn't already an article, perhaps under a slightly different name; you can search for it here;. If an article on your topic is there, but you think people are likely to look for it under some different name or spelling, you can add a redirect with that name; adding needed redirects is a good way to help Bahaipedia. Also, remember to check the article's deletion log in order to avoid creating an article that has already been deleted.
• Extremely short articles that are just definitions. Try to write a good short paragraph that says something about the subject. We welcome good short articles, called "stubs", that can serve as launching pads from which others can take off. If you don't have enough material to write a good stub, you probably should not create the article. At the end of a stub, you should include a "stub template" like this: {{stub}}. (Other Bahaipedians will appreciate it if you use a more specific stub template, like {{art-stub}}. See the list of stub types for a list of all specific stub templates.) Stubs help track articles that need expansion. Definitions may be appropriate for adding to a glossary.

Questionable	Better
Peace is the absence of conflict.	Peace is a physical, spiritual and social condition characterized by harmony, cooperation, tranquility, and the absence of conflict or disturbance. As a physical quality, it is synonymous with quietness and calm; as a spiritual quality, it reflects composure, contentment, and a lack of internal conflict. {{stub}}

• Organization. Make sure there are incoming links to the new article from other Bahaipedia articles (click "What links here" in the toolbox) and that the new article is included in at least one appropriate category (see help:category). Otherwise it will be difficult for readers to find the article.
• Local-interest articles. These are articles about places like schools, or streets that are of interest to a relatively small number of people such as alumni or people who live nearby. There is no consensus about such articles, but some will challenge them if they include nothing that shows how the place is special and different from tens of thousands of similar places. Photographs add interest. Try to give local-interest articles local colour. Third-party references are good!

Related pages

• Help:Editing - How to edit pages
• Bahaipedia:Article development - Guide to writing great articles