Help:After your first article
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After creating your first article, there are still several things you can do to make it even better.
Add images
[edit]If you are using the Wikitext editor, an existing English Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons image can be inserted into a page with the following wikitext:
[[File:...|thumb|upright=1.0|Your caption text here]]
Using thumb generates a thumbnail picture, typically sized differently from the original image. For guidance on the caption text to associate with images, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Captions.
To increase the size of the image, try |upright=1.1 or 1.2; to decrease it, try |upright=0.75. See Help:Pictures#Thumbnail sizes for details.
For practical and stylistic issues like how to choose an image, what size to use, and where to place it on the page, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images. For how to add your own images or ones you find on the internet to your article, see § Making images available.
Improve formatting
[edit]To format your article correctly (and expand it, and possibly even make it featured!), see
- Wikipedia:Tutorial to learn how to format your article
- Wikipedia:Writing better articles
- Wikipedia:The perfect article
- Wikipedia:Lead section
Others can freely contribute to the article when it has been saved. The creator does not have special rights to control the later content. See Wikipedia:Ownership of articles.
Also, to avoid getting frustrated or offended about the way others modify or remove your contributions, see Wikipedia:Don't be ashamed.
Integrate into the encyclopedia
[edit]Linking through hyperlinks is an important feature of Wikipedia. Internal links bind the project together into an interconnected whole.
Integrating your article into the encyclopedia involves two things, mainly:
- linking important concepts in your article with a wikilink, so it links to other articles, and:
- finding other, related articles, and linking to your article from them.
Of these two, the second is more important, as it will be harder for other users to find your article, if nobody links to it. An article with no in-coming links, is called an orphan.
Add links from other articles
[edit]Adding links to your article from other articles is an important feature of Wikipedia. Internal links bind the project together into an interconnected whole. When your article first reaches main space, it won't have any incoming links to it, or perhaps only a few, if some red links existed previously, targeting your article title before it existed.
De-orphaning
[edit]
An orphaned article is an article that has few or no other articles linking to it. The main problem with an orphan is that there is no way to get to it from any other article, meaning readers likely won't be able to find it if it is not de-orphaned.
Most new articles are orphans from the moment they are created, but you can work to change that. This will involve editing one or more other articles. Try searching Wikipedia for other pages referring to the subject of your article, then turn those references into links by adding double brackets to either side: "[[" and "]]". If another article has a word or phrase that has the same meaning as your new article that is not expressed using the exact same words as the title, you can link that word or phrase as follows: [[Title of your new article|word or phrase found in other article]]. In certain cases, you could create that word or phrase as a redirect to your new article.
Turn mentions into links
[edit]Some articles may already mention your article title without linking to it. These articles are potential candidates to link to your new article. You can search for them, and then turn those mentions into links. Here is how to find them:
Example: Let's suppose you just released your new article, Tornado Alley, about an area of the central United States subject to a high frequency of tornados, to mainspace. How can we find articles that already mention "Tornado Alley" by name, but don't have a link to it yet? We can use an advanced search link to find articles that contain the words "Tornado Alley", but without linking to it:
- Try this search now:
"Tornado_Alley" -linksto:"Tornado_Alley" -intitle:"Tornado_Alley"
That search link turns up over one hundred articles that mention, but do not link to Tornado Alley. By editing articles on that list, and searching on the page for your article title, you can turn it into a link to your article.
Note: one thing to watch out for is that not all of the articles listed on the search result page are about the U.S. tornado region; many are about something else, and not suitable for linking to your Tornado article. It turns out that there is a film by the name "Tornado Alley", and also a song, a company, and more than one book by that title, or that has the words as part of the title. You only want to link back to your new article from pages that are about your topic. In most cases, the brief article excerpt below each search result will be enough to tell you if it is about your topic, or something else.
Here is a generic link you can use to search for mentions of your article title:
To use it to search for your title, just click the link, and then replace your articlex with the title of your article, and press the blue Search button.
See Wikipedia:Drawing attention to new pages to learn how to get others to see your new articles.
Make it easier for readers to find
[edit]There are several ways to get a reader to the page they are interested in quicker, and easier.
Add it to a category
[edit]Add your article to a category. Editors or readers following category links on other pages on a similar topic to your article, will see your article there, if they are in the same category.
Add it to a nav template
[edit]Add your article to a navigation template, sometimes called a nav box. A nav box is a concise grouping of many links to articles related to a particular theme, or topic, like {{Vichy France}}, {{Languages of China}}, or {{Marine aquatic ecosystems}}. Nav boxes are typically found on dozens of articles with something in common with your article topic, and if your article is linked there, readers of the other articles will see a link to your article in the nav box.
Note: as of July 2025, navboxes are not shown on the Wikipedia mobile app.
Add it to List articles
[edit]Adding your article to one of the many list articles is another opportunity for linking it. List articles come in several varieties, and contain links to many Wikipedia articles on a particular topic, for example: List of cities in Germany by population, List of explorers, or Lists of diseases. (Note the plural Lists in the last one; the content of that list, is a list of lists.)
Other types of list articles include specialized lists, such as Outlines, Indexes, Timelines, Glossaries, and more types.
Add a hatnote to a similarly named page
[edit]If the title of your article is very similar to another article about something else, consider adding a distinguishing hatnote template to the top of the other article (and to yours), such as {{About}}, {{For}}, or {{Distinguish}}. For a list of many more, see Hatnote templates in the Appendix.
Add to a disambiguation page
[edit]If the term is ambiguous (meaning there are multiple pages using that or a similar title), see if there is a disambiguation page for articles bearing that title. If so, add a link to your article to that page.
Create a redirect
[edit]Some articles have an obvious title which most users will type in order to find it, like Canberra to find Canberra. For other topics a user might be searching for, it isn't always obvious what the article might be called in Wikipedia. For this, Wikipedia uses redirects, to help get users to their desired page as fast as possible. A redirect is like a synonym, or alias, and if the user search matches a redirect title, the user will be taken directly to the desired Wikipedia page, even if it has a different name. If someone would like to read about the capital of Australia but they don't know its name, they might type capital of Australia, and the redirect will take them directly to the Canberra article.
Some other redirects that can help get users quickly to their desired page include:
- typos – for example: the article is Pharaoh, but you can get there from Pharoah, Pharoh, and many other spellings.
- singular vs. plural – Pharaohs will also go to the article; in the other direction, someone typing bagpipe or Anglo-saxon will be taken to the article with an -s on the end.
- inflected forms – forms like pharaonic also go to the article
- foreign terms – the event that kicked off the French Revolution is known in English as Bastille Day, but some users might search for it under its original name, 14 juillet, and the redirect will take you straight to the article. Sometimes it goes the other way: our article about the Académie Française has that name, because most English sources call it by its French name. But not all of them do, and users who type French Academy are taken directly to the right article.
There are many other types of redirects such as acronyms, alternative names, scientific names, and many more, that can help a reader find what they are looking for; see Help:Redirect (for help on the general topic) and Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects (which explains how to categorize redirects, but is also helpful because it contains different types of redirects).
Link it to the same topic on other Wikipedias
[edit]Wikidata is a project to create an open, collaborative database. It stores many kinds of data, including interwiki links that link articles in different languages on the same topic. There are Wikipedias in over 300 languages. The list of languages you see at that link articles in other languages to a given article at Wikipedia is stored at Wikidata. If your article is not already linked to articles at other Wikipedias, you should add it; see WP:Wikidata#New articles.
Make it easier for other editors to improve it
[edit]Wikipedia main method to achieve its goal of building an encyclopedia is through collaboration among editors. Even if you created the article essentially alone, no one owns an article at Wikipedia, and attracting other editors is a good way to encourage further improvement of the new article.
Notify WikiProjects
[edit]One way to do this is through a WP:WikiProject, which is a group of volunteers like you who come together to improve Wikipedia in a particular subject area, such as WP:WikiProject Aviation, WP:WikiProject Spain, or WP:WikiProject Law. WikiProjects have Talk pages, just like articles do. Once your article is published, you can add a brief announcement about the new article on the project Talk page. You can use this search box to find WikiProjects related to your topic:
Many articles are of interest to more than one WikiProject, and you are welcome to notify as many WikiProjects on their Talk pages as are relevant to your article topic.
Create a Talk page and add WikiProject templates
[edit]Another way to attract editors to your newly published article, is by creating the associated Talk page, and adding WikiProjects to it. The easiest way to do this, is by adding one or more templates that display a banner about one WikiProject each on the article Talk page, naming the project, and providing a link to it. These templates will automatically populate categories that may attract users interested in the WikiProject related to your topic, who will be able to find your article more easily and contribute to it, if they wish. Some example templates are {{WikiProject Aviation}}, {{WikiProject Spain}}, and {{WikiProject Law}}. To find WikiProjects, you can use the search box just above.
Add optional appendixes
[edit]Many Wikipedia articles have one or more optional appendix and footer sections. All of these are formatted as a bulleted list of links, which may be briefly annotated or just contain a link. The main ones to consider adding to the Appendix area of your article are:
- Publications, Discography, or Filmography – links to Wikipedia articles about works by authors or media creators
- See also – links to relevant Wikipedia articles on related topics, not already linked in the article
- Further reading – a reasonable number of publications that help readers learn more about the article subject, formatted in the same citation style as the article
- External links – a small number of external links to web pages directly related to the topic, such as an official website, not already linked or cited in the article
- Navigation templates – also known as a "navbox", this is a boxed, prepared set of links to help readers navigate to other articles related to the navbox topic; note that navboxes are not shown on the Wikipedia mobile app; for example, the bottom of this page has a navbox
