Help:Your first article

Welcome to DCCWiki! This is a guide to some important things you should know before creating your first encyclopedia article.

Be bold.
Please don't create vanity pages, advertising, or personal essays.
Be careful about: copying things, controversial material, redundant articles, extremely short articles, and local-interest articles.

And be careful about...

Copying things. Do not violate copyrights. To be safe, do not copy more than a couple of sentences of text from anywhere, and document any references you do use. You can copy material that you are sure is in the public domain, but even for public domain material you should still document your source. Also note that most Web pages are not in the public domain and most song lyrics are not either. In fact most things written since January 1, 1978 are automatically under copyright even if they have no copyright notice or © symbol. If you think what you are contributing is in the public domain, say where you got it, either in the article or on the discussion page, and on the discussion page give the reason why you think it is in the public domain (e.g. "It was published in 1895...") If you think you are making "fair use" of copyrighted material, please put a note on the discussion page saying why you think so. For more information: Copyrights
Good research. Articles written out of thin air are better than nothing, but they are hard to verify, which is an important part of building a trusted reference work. Please research with the best sources available and cite them which, along with not copying large amounts of the text, will help avoid any possibility of plagiarism.
Advocacy and controversial material. Please do not write articles that advocate one particular viewpoint on politics, religion, or anything else. Understand what we mean by a neutral point of view before tackling this sort of topic.
Redundant articles. DCCWiki already has a lot of articles. Before creating an article, try to make sure there isn't already an article, perhaps under a slightly different name; check the DCCWiki naming conventions. If an article on your topic is there, but you think people are likely to look for it under some different name or spelling, learn how to add a redirect; adding needed redirects is a good way to help DCCWiki.
Extremely short articles that are just definitions. Try to write a good short paragraph that says something about the subject. We welcome good short articles, called "stubs", that can serve as launching pads from which others can take off. If you don't have enough material to write a good stub, you probably should not create the article. At the end of a stub, you should include a "stub template" like this: {{stub}}. It helps track articles that need expansion. Definitions belong on Wiktionary.

Questionable	Better
A close-up is a shot in a movie taken with the camera close to the actors.	A close-up is a shot in a movie taken with the camera close to the actors. Close-ups are typically brief, and are used to draw attention to the actor's expression. Closeups are an important part of film grammar. D. W. Griffith invented the close-up as we know it. {{film-stub}}

Local-interest articles. These are articles about places like schools, or streets that are of interest to a relatively small number of people such as alumni or people who live nearby. There is no consensus about such articles, but some will challenge them if they include nothing that shows how the place is special and different from tens of thousands of similar places. Photographs add interest. Try to give local-interest articles local colour. Third-party references are good!

Questionable	Better
The University of Notre Dame is located near South Bend, Indiana. It has an undergraduate enrollment of 8000. Its president is Edward A. Malloy. Its school colours are gold and blue.	The University of Notre Dame is a Catholic university located near South Bend, Indiana. It has an undergraduate enrollment of 8000. Its president is Edward A. "Monk" Malloy. It is famous for its football team, the "Fighting Irish," and for its landmark Golden Dome.
Canal Street is a street in New York.	Canal Street is a major street in lower Manhattan. It is a ramshackle but bustling commercial district. Tourists and locals pack the Canal Street sidewalks every day to frequent its open-air food stalls, and its bare-bones stores selling items such as perfume, purses, hardware, industrial plastics, and pirated DVDs.
Louis' Lunch makes the best darn hamburgers in New Haven.	Louis' Lunch is a restaurant in New Haven famous for its hamburgers. The proprietors claim that Louis' Lunch was, in 1895, the first place in the United States to serve hamburgers as we know them today. The Library of Congress has material apparently supporting this claim.

Help:Your first article

And be careful about...

See also