Principles of Wikipedia page creation template

How to Create Wikipedia Template or Modify a Wikipedia Page?

Natfrenchie
5 min readFeb 7, 2021

Creating a Wikipedia template, the free encyclopedia, is no easy task. This is also a task that was proposed by many SEO agencies and which is no longer part of their offers today: too much risk, too much time, too much refusal or cancellation of content by contributors or moderators.

Wikipedia page template

The founding principles of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that incorporates elements of general encyclopedia, specialized encyclopedia, almanac and atlases. It is not a compilation of information added indiscriminately. It is also not a source of first-hand documents and original research, nor a platform for propaganda. Wikipedia is not a newspaper, a free web host, a personal page provider, a series of promotional articles, a collection of memoirs, an anarchist or democratic experiment, or a directory of links. Finally, this is not the place to share your opinions, experiences or debates. All Wikipedia writers must respect the ban on original research. (also known as “unpublished work”) and to seek as much accuracy as possible.

Wikipedia strives for point of view neutrality, which means that articles should not promote any particular point of view. Sometimes this means describing several points of view and representing each of these points of view as faithfully as possible, taking into account their respective importance in the field of knowledge.

It also means providing the necessary context for understanding these views through those who hold them, and not representing any view as the truth or the best view. These conditions allow verification of information by citing authoritative sources on the subject (especially in the case of controversial matters.

Wikipedia is published under a free and open to all license: the published texts are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license not transposed (CC-BY-SA 3.0) and GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This license authorizes everyone to create, copy, modify and distribute the content of Wikipedia. The obligations are to keep the same license for certified copies and modified copies, as well as to credit the original authors.

No one has control of a particular item

Any text contributed to Wikipedia may be edited and redistributed without notice by anyone, including commercially. “ Free” does not mean that everyone can write or do whatever they want with complete freedom. The copyright must be respected.

Wikipedia is a collaborative project that follows rules of good manners: you are required to respect other Wikipedia’s, even when there is disagreement. Always be polite, courteous and respectful.

Look for consensus

Do not indulge in assaults on people, nor in insulting generalizations. Keep your cool when the atmosphere heats up.

Avoid editing wars. Keep in mind that there are 1,891,298 different articles on Wikipedia that you can work on and discuss. Act in good faith and assume that your interlocutors are doing the same, unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. Strive to be open, welcoming and friendly.

Wikipedia has no fixed rules other than the five founding principles stated here

Don’t hesitate to be bold in your contributions, since one of the advantages of being able to edit Wikipedia is that everything doesn’t have to be perfect the first time. It is therefore not necessary to know all the rules to contribute. If you make mistakes, other contributors will spot them, correct them, and explain them to you.

Don’t worry about making a mistake either:

All previous versions of articles are kept and accessible through history., it is therefore impossible to damage or irreparably lose information on Wikipedia. But remember that whatever you write will be preserved for posterity.

Rules and best practices for creating or modifying an template on Wikipedia

When it comes to creating or editing Wikipedia pages, here are a few recommendations Many, the best content manager I know, gives you.

1 / Source your information

Before writing or modifying a Wikipedia article, it is recommended to research and list as many sources as possible. It can be a web page, a tweet, a blog article, extracts from magazines, books, TV or radio shows …

The more information is based on diverse and varied sources, the more likely it is to stay in place.

Also, it is important to put as many internal links as possible (to other Wikipedia articles) in the body of the article.

2 / Adopt a neutral and encyclopedic style

That is to say, avoid using subjective turns of phrase, superlatives … You should also avoid anything that can be seen as disguised advertising and which does not have an informative purpose. For example, we can talk about a technology offered exclusively but avoid talking about the price.

Also note that the titles should be clear and informative. Thus, it is advisable to avoid the parts entitled Anecdotes, Others, Miscellaneous …

3 / Discuss with the community

Wikipedia is presented as a free encyclopedia: everyone can contribute freely while respecting the established rules. However, administrators are there to ensure the quality of the suggested changes.

After modifying an article, the History section at the top of the page provides an account of any subsequent changes. You can discuss with administrators to ask them for areas for improvement before making new changes.

Finally, the Draft feature allows you to have an article in draft version and share it. The only downside is that it is currently not possible to create more than one draft.

4 / Optimize the SEO of the article

Like all web content, titles, sub-titles and elements in bold are valued for SEO to have some guidelines concerning SEO and apply them if possible, to Wikipedia articles. And if you want to backlinks from Wikipedia, follow these guide!

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Natfrenchie

Natalie is a book editor who helps authors get their books out of their heads and into print. A former publishing house editor-in-chief