This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community. |
| This page in a nutshell: Creating an article is much easier if you start with the sources. |

If you read pages like the Teahouse where experienced editors advise the less experienced about creating new articles, you'll see statements like these:
and even:
Not necessarily so.
True, creating a new article isn't easy. It's harder than rewriting a clumsy sentence, or adding an image, or finding and adding a reference. Few experienced editors would recommend it to anyone who's made fewer than 300 constructive edits to existing articles. But it's easier than editing a large table in wikitext or creating a template with parameters, let alone changing Wikipedia policy.
So why do experienced editors say such things?
They do so because they're used to seeing new editors try to create their first article backward. It's this that's extremely difficult.
(For very full instructions, see Help:Your first article.)
This is much harder than doing it forward. Experienced editors would say at least 20 times as hard. Step 2 is of course the difficult bit.
Go through what you've written, looking for any reliable sources with extensive discussion of the subject that you happen to have cited. Everything that you cannot find references for, delete. Yes, everything else. Then switch to creating your article forward.
Many people who've started writing backward will be reluctant to do this. You'll suffer from the sunk cost fallacy, and place value on the words you've spent time typing in. But those words, if not supported by acceptable sources, are worse than useless. They'll distract you from the task you need to get on with. When you're creating an article, typing in the words isn't the difficult bit, finding sources is.
Hint: If you're worried about losing everything you've already done, then remember that any version you've already published (including posting to your sandbox) is available in the page's history. You can blank and still be able to see the earlier versions later. That means that if you decide that you took out too much, you can always go back to the earlier versions and copy the bit you want to restore.