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Two Parts:Basic Article WritingAdvanced Features for Guided/Advanced Editors

Do you know how to do something that would benefit others? You can share your knowledge and talents by writing a wikiHow article. You may even polish it into a Featured Article! It's easy to get started. Just follow these steps and you'll be on your way!

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Part 1 of 2: Basic Article Writing

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    Review the Writer's Guide, the Editing Basics, the Tour, and How to Write a how-to article.
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    Search for duplicates first, because wikiHow is constantly changing.
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    Click on Write an Article at the upper right of any page.
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    Choose a title.
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    Write an Introduction.
    • Summarize the content of your article. Make sure you get your point across.
    • Include the purpose of the article to quickly inform the reader.
    • If desired, include a question, within the opening line, to capture a reader's interest. For example: "Have you ever wondered how to write an engaging introduction?" Don't describe your article as tips. Many introductions include a sentence along the lines of, 'Here are some tips about....' Tips belong at the end of an article, not in it. Your article is a step by step guide, not tips. So make sure you do that.
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    Write your article's steps.
    • Plan the task you're going to describe and write the steps in the order they need to be carried out.
    • Use a # in the place of a number at the start of each step (the numbers are automatic). Using a #* makes a bullet point within a numbered step.
    • Give accurate information. Research your task before writing the steps. This should improve the accuracy of what you write and the methods you suggest; but don't just copy others' work!
    • Keep in mind how to format the steps correctly. Make each step action-oriented.
    • Limit each step to one main idea. Keep sentences short and simple. Be concise yet specific and descriptive. Add further explanation, if needed.
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    Add other sections as needed. The default New Article Creation tool includes sections for Tips, Warnings, and Sources and Citations. After you publish, or if you are using the Guided/Advanced Editors, you can also include sections for Ingredients and Things You'll Need, if desired. For more information about creating sections, check out How to Format a wikiHow Article, or let the Guided Editor add sections for you.
    • If you're using the Guided or Advanced Editor, make bullet points in these sections with a *.

Part 2 of 2: Advanced Features for Guided/Advanced Editors

  • Some advanced editing features are not available through the default Article Creation Tool. However, they can be accessed by changing your Preferences to the Guided or Advanced Editors, clicking "Switch to Advanced Editor" at the top of the page, or publishing your first draft and then clicking edit again in order to make further changes.
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    Categorize your article. This makes it easier to locate and keeps similar articles together.
    • Click on "Edit Category."
    • Choose a category from the list or use the search box.
    • Click on "Add" and then "Update Categories" to assign your category.
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    Add images and a video if you want. This will make your article better and are much needed for craft or recipe how-to's.
    • You can also import free photos or upload your own to clarify instructions.
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    Click on Preview, at the bottom of the page, to review your changes.
    • Edit, Edit, Edit your article for spelling, caps, punctuation, etc. Imagine that you're an English teacher. How would you grade it?
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    Save a draft, if desired. Click the green "Save Draft" button at the very bottom of the Guided or Advanced Editor if you want to save a draft of the current version. This allows you to keep working on an article over time if you're not ready to publish it yet. To find it again, select "My Drafts" from the "My Profile" button drop down menu at the top right provided you're logged in to wikiHow.
    • If you're not sure if it's ready to publish, you can look up the most recent version in your drafts list from your profile and finish it later without publishing it.
    • If you have a wikiHow account and are logged in, you can access your article quite easily from your profile page because a list of links to the articles you started and are watching will be there as well as your "Thumbs Up Edits" pages.
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    Write a note in the Edit Summary, at the bottom of the article, to clarify your edit.
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    Click on the green "Publish" button at the bottom of the article. This will save your article to make it visible to the public.
    • You can edit it more later by accessing it from the link on your "Profile" page if you have created an account under the list of "Articles Started" if you clicked the Publish.
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Tips

  • You might also want to review the Advanced syntax page for when an article has various different methods to achieve the same result, or when you desperately need to add something that isn't standard to a page. But use this information sparingly.
  • Do not be concerned if your writing is not perfect. Nothing is. Other editors will help improve your work (and you can edit it more if they happen to break something). Just do your best and have fun!
    • Don't take offense at others' editing.
    • Consider it liberating. They're trying, and, hopefully overall succeeding, in making a great community resource. You can put your best thoughts into a pretty-good article, make them available quickly, and go on to something else interesting. You're free to return to the article when you have something else to add or feel like polishing it - and just as free to let others perfect it over time.
  • Use examples in your article. Be very specific and use lots of details, but don't over-explain it. You can also get your point across with some pictures.
    • Err a little toward over-explaining. It's much easier for someone to skim over part of your article or for the community to delete something much too long than it is for someone who got confused to figure out how to save a project. If you think a young adult - or, if you're writing an article for children, a young child - who's not particularly sophisticated would know how to perform a step you've described, you've probably written enough. Take extra care to prevent confusion likely to be dangerous or ruin a project.
  • Save the article as a draft often, to avoid losing it.
  • Try to think of an article idea that no one has ever thought of before. Try to go above and beyond. Try to get those creative juices flowing!
  • Consider "Modular Programming" principles[1] for whether your idea should be its own article, part of an article, or several articles.
    • A single article should be about a set of steps that are normally performed only as a unit.
    • Articles about simple basic tasks, like an article about planting seeds, can be linked into different articles about variations on them, like special tricks for planting pumpkin seeds.
    • Articles about large-scale tasks, like growing pumpkins, can consist of links to sub-tasks like planting pumpkin seeds (optionally followed by very simple summaries so knowledgeable people need not follow links) and storing vegetables, and additional steps like fertilizer requirements for pumpkins.
    • Modular programming minimizes wikiHow's learning curve[2] by making articles easier to understand and confidently improve. It increases wikiHow's scalability[3] by minimizing the amount of new material for new applications. It increases wikiHow's maintainability[4] by carrying each improvement to a discrete process across all of the projects to which it is relevant[5]. And it increases wikiHow's usability[6] by rapidly guiding users to one or a very few articles that would have relevant information. Because wikiHow is Free, unlike many other references, it should be unlikely to waste contributors' and users' efforts by degenerating into the equivalent of a tedious-to-browse bookcase or database of largely-overlapping, inconsistently-organized, sometimes overly-pared-down[7], and each expensive tomes.[8]

      It's easiest to get the scope about-right to begin, but an article can be split into several new articles, several old articles' content can be merged into a new one. Be Bold on wikiHow, but not too bold[9]: especially if a page has had a lot of editors or viewers, run a major structural change by its discussion page (which its enthusiasts may be automatically watching) and wait a few days first.
    • The special wiki "merge" procedure is for pages with equivalent titles such as "Become a Popular Girl" and "Be a Popular Girl - It Works!" rather than just similar content. The content is combined, and one page is replaced with a redirect to the page with the best, usually the simplest, title. If there are two pages with meaningfully different titles about how to do the same thing, it would be better to combine the text under the more relevant title, and note in the edit summary or discussion page who contributed to the old page.
  • Make a habit of teaching yourself new things. You'll soon intuitively find all kinds of connections you can share and use to make wikiHow's tutorials even easier and better!
  • Learn how to:
  • If you've never adjusted your wikiHow preferences, the default setting for starting a new article will be through the Article Creation Tool, which requires no wikitext to write an article. However, you can also adjust your Preferences, if desired, to turn off use of the Article Creation Tool and create articles using the Guided Editor or Advanced Editor, instead.
  • If you want notifications by email when the article is changed by someone else leave the check mark in the box next to "Watch". You'll need to have a user page with your email address to get the notifications though, and be logged in to wikiHow
  • Remember the exact title of your article if you chose not to login or have a wikiHow account so you can perform a search for it in the search box at the top of every wikiHow page, in case you want to watch or edit it later without having an account.
  • It's a good idea to check the deletion policy before you do so, to make sure your article won't be deleted.

Warnings

  • Be warned: If you are new to wikiHow and are planning to write an article, it is more than likely that someone has already written that same idea.
  • When writing long articles, there has been a tendency for the editor to lose their article, even when you have pressed "Save draft". Always backup your work, especially in the cases where the article is long and may take some time to recreate. Or better luck yet, paper draft a copy of the article, create in another word-processing program (with wikiformatting), and publish the article.
  • Please note that due to a recent change in the software, new articles are de-indexed from search engines by default, and your article will remain de-indexed until it has been reviewed by boosters and is free of all maintenance (cleanup, introduction, etc.) and NFD tags. This is to ensure that articles on wikiHow are of presentable quality. If you want to know how to bring your article up to standard, check out the writer's guide or ask the help team.

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Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_programming
  2. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve
  3. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability
  4. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintainability
  5. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants#Application_to_the_free_software_movement
  6. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability
  7. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damaged_good
  8. ↑ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/x.html
  9. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold

Article Info

Categories: Writing and Editing

In other languages:

Español: Cómo escribir un nuevo artículo en wikiHow, Italiano: Come Scrivere un Nuovo Articolo su wikiHow, Русский: написать статью на wikiHow, Português: Como Escrever um Novo Artigo no wikiHow

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