Structure
Tips for writing biographies
Are you starting from scratch and want some guidance on creating a biographical article? Follow these helpful tips! Some of them are also useful for work on articles that have already been started.
- Remember, there are more than 7 billion people in the world. While all of them have their own story, not all of them warrant a Wikipedia article. See WP:BIO for notability standards.
- Research the available literature to find reliable sources. Read them carefully, taking notes.
- Create a proto-article in a subpage of your own user space.
- Work up the proto-article until it's coherent and at least slightly informative and has had its facts checked. (It does not yet need either to present a rounded picture of the person or to be a good article in any normal sense; it merely has to be sound in what it does say.) The article, no matter how rough, should clearly state why the person is notable enough to be included in this project, see WP:BIO. It is a good idea to make reference to at least one of the notability determinants in the lead paragraph. Failing to clearly show notability may lead to your new article being quickly deleted.
- Create a new article on your subject and paste the content of your proto-article there.
- Read Wikipedia's article title conventions to decide what the page title should be. Also see m:Help:Starting a new page.
- The history of your proto-article up to this point is unlikely to be of interest to anybody other than yourself, and moving it would force you to re-create your user sub-page. Thus copy/pasting makes sense. However, do note that copying and pasting existing articles is frowned upon in Wikipedia; moving makes the edit history easy to find and complies with the licencing policies.
- Add images such as those obtained from Wikimedia Commons, image list, or by posting a request for an image from other editors.
- Add the appropriate categories.
- You may also be able to find suitable categories by looking at related articles, particularly articles about similar people. Failing that, visit the appropriate work groups (which have them listed) or start browsing at Category:People.
- Linking: check that the internal and external links and footnotes in the article go where you want them to go.
- Make sure that some other, relevant articles link to a new article, so that the new one isn't "orphaned".
- Keep working on the article. Chances are that other editors will notice its existence and join you in working on it. If nobody seems to notice it and you'd like one or two to do so, mention the article in the talk page of a relevant "WikiProject" (e.g. Music), or this one, or both.
- You may find that the newcomers will be interested in aspects of the person that don't much interest you, or will relish aspects of editing that you find a bit tiresome. Thus their work will complement rather than compete with your own.
- Consider adding a list of works (bibliography, discography, etc.).
- When you're happy with the article or have done about as much with it as you think you can, consider requesting a peer review by following these instructions.
- Relax! and take a break if you reached this point. You deserve it!
Policies
Guidelines
No classification of biographies has been defined. See this example on dividing a topic into a hierarchy.