Wikipedia:Write the article first

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A Wikipedian pens an article before they create links to the article in other sections of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia editors should write a new article before they create links to that article in list pages, disambiguation pages, "See also" sections, templates, or redirects in the encyclopedia. This is an exception to the

general rule encouraging red links for notable
subjects.

Frequently, editors (mostly inexperienced ones) add

policies and guidelines
), everything is fine.

Red-linking in navigation

Creating red links in purely navigational features of Wikipedia, like navigation templates, disambiguation pages, and "see also" sections, directly interferes with the actual function of these features, which is to help readers navigate the already existing Wikipedia resources relevant to the topic. Red links are strongly discouraged in navigation templates and disambiguation pages, and they are never used in "See also" sections.

The principal rationale for adding a red link to a disambiguation page is that the entry added is definitely notable, will probably have an article eventually, is not covered by any extant article as a subtopic or section that can be linked to, and yet is something that a non-trivial number of readers may actually be looking for at the name being disambiguated. As Wikipedia's coverage expands, these criteria are less and less frequently met by would-be red links that editors consider adding. Lack of notability is the most common point of failure, and many such entries are deleted as essentially promotional in nature, often having been added by someone with an apparent

conflict of interest
. Wikipedia probably does not need a disambiguation entry for your band's new album title, or a vice president at the company you work for, and if either the band or the company already have an article, a disambiguation entry that blue-links to that article is better than a red link that goes nowhere.

Adding red links to navigation templates is tolerated when the missing article(s) are part of a set or series, and the template mostly consists of blue links to real articles (or article sections). Other red-linked additions to nav templates are generally a bad idea. So is adding a red link to a non-navigation template; templates are intended to provide functionality, so if your template's functionality is broken, it is not ready for use in the encyclopedia's content.

Red-linking in lists

Consensus on how helpful or pointless red links in lists are has been a moving target on Wikipedia for a long time, but including them has a large number of detractors for the following reasons.

While lists (especially

laundry lists
" – is a continual cleanup problem.

In the early days of the project, before the notability guideline even existed, a "red-link with impunity" approach was an important part of jump-starting the encyclopedia project. Long "Lists of topics" (also called "Index lists"), sometimes with all red links, were among the first articles created. Now, however, with the English-language Wikipedia at 6,798,764 articles, list articles with many red links play almost no role in leading to the creation of new articles. Instead of using stand-alone "Lists of topics" articles as guides for the creation of new articles, editors have largely moved this function to wikiproject pages that cover specific areas of interest.

As a result of the early Wikipedian approach, editors who these days add red links to lists often have no intention of ever themselves writing the red-linked articles. This may be simply because writing an article is much more time-consuming than adding the link to the list or template. "

speedy deletion
process or other deletion processes.

It is this last reason that is the most problematic: "

WP:Identifying reliable sources. Ask any editor who watches list pages – they will likely have had the same experience. Far too many lists are full of this spam, with no end in sight, often more red links than blue. List of demoparties
has long been one example.

In summary

Because of both of the above, editors are encouraged to write the article first before adding it to a list, template or disambiguation page. Don't worry that the article, even if it is just a

new pages patrol
, which, after all, is much more focused on article improvement than on article deletion. The new article you create could be improved by other editors. Helped by these improvement processes, you can be sure the article is list- and navigation-worthy, and can then place a link to it on the appropriate list(s), template(s) and/or disambiguation page(s), confident the link will be blue from the beginning.

Historically spam-prone lists

See also

  • Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information
  • Wikipedia:Lists in Wikipedia
  • Wikipedia:Starting an article
  • Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, Creating, and Maintaining Articles/Creating a New Article