This is one editor's observations / opinions, based on a couple of years' worth of reviewing drafts. It is not a policy nor a guideline, but the kind of advice I try to give to draft creators.

When you submit a draft through the Articles for Creation process, a reviewer will read it, evaluate it, and decide if it is ready to be an encyclopedia article. There are a number of things for the reviewer to look for, and the time it takes until a draft is reviewed can vary quite a lot. Often, drafts have problems that take some time for a reviewer to check before the draft is declined; if you look for those before you submit and do your best to fix them, you might make the process quicker and reduce the risk that the draft is declined.

Sources[edit]

Read the source first[edit]

• If you don't have access to a source, and have not been able to read it yourself, don't use it in Wikipedia.
• Don't do keyword searches in Google Books, and link to books you have no access to, simply because a particular keyword appears in the "snippet view".
• If you read the sources you use, it will become easier to spot duplicate sources, where the same text is published in several places.

Relevance[edit]

For each reference in the draft, make sure that the source is relevant. It should verify the information in the sentence or paragraph where it appears.

• If you are writing about a person and say "she was the champion tiddlywinks player throughout the 1970s" or "he worked as a turtle tamer", do not add a reference pointing to the Tiddlywinks Association or the Turtle Tamer's Handbook, unless the source actually talks about the person. It is not the word that needs a source, but the fact about the person.
• If you have been told that the draft needs more sources, start by checking, carefully, which bits of information in the draft are unsourced. Add sources that verify that information.
  • Don't simply add new sources that support information that already has a reliable source.
  • Do add references after the information it verifies. For example, if the sentence "Brown was the champion tiddlywinks player throughout the 1970s" needs a source, don't add a reference after the word "Brown". It is not the name that needs verification.
  • Can't find a reliable source for some unsourced piece of information? Remove the information!
• If you do have a reliable, independent source for some fact, it's almost never necessary to add another source for that info. If a simple statement like "He appeared in the film Snölp-mysteriet" is followed by three or four footnotes, it will look like an attempt to inflate the person's importance. Do the sources say anything about him, beyond verifying his role in that film? If not, one reliable, independent source will be sufficient.

Copies[edit]

Make sure that the different sources you use are in fact different, and not copies (or closely paraphrased copies) of other sources in the draft.

• When one text, for instance a press release or an interview, is published in different newspapers or on different websites, it is still just one source.
  • This is also true if the text is translated and published in different languages.
  • It also applies to churnalism. (Such sources are often not reliable anyway.)

Wikipedia mirrors, sources that copy Wikipedia articles, should never be used.

• If you find a source that's identical to a Wikipedia article, it is almost certainly a Wikipedia mirror, unless the text in the article is a copyright violation of the source. Here is more information on how to identify mirrors.

Formatting / presentation[edit]

The purpose of a reference is to tell the reader where the information comes from. A draft doesn't have to be in perfect shape, with perfectly formatted references, to be accepted. But a draft where the list of references is hard for the reviewer to understand will be just as hard to understand for a reader, and it is not certain that the reviewer will take the time to edit the references.

• Do not use bare URLs as references. There are tools that make it easy to insert references with (at least) a minimum of information. Here is a guide.

What constitutes "a minimum of information" depends on the type of source.

• The Title of the reference should be the title of the newspaper article, or the specific web page, or the book, or the journal article – it should not be a description or explanation of the source.
• The Author should not be included unless there is a named human author (or several authors). To take a few examples, "News Desk", "Associated Press", or "Department of Energy" are not authors.
• Pressreader is not a source. If you cite a newspaper with a link to Pressreader, the newspaper and not Pressreader is the "work" or "newspaper".
• If you cite a book, it is not necessary to include a link to Google Books; if you do, try linking to the specific page, not to a keyword search result. If there is no Google Books preview that lets the reader see the complete context, it's better not to include a GBooks link at all.
  • If you cite a book, do cite the page number(s) where the information can be found.
  • Do not put "Google Books" as the publisher in a book citation (or anywhere else in the citation). Google Books is just the website where the work is stored.
  • Do not use a "cite web" template if you are citing a book. Use "cite book" instead; again, having an url is an optional extra if you use a book as a reference.

Sources in languages other than English are fine to use, but please make an extra effort to help the reader – including the reviewer – understand what the source is.

• The "title" parameter should be the original title, but if you can provide a translation (not a machine translation, please) of the title in the "trans-title" parameter, it will be very helpful.
• Including the name of the publication, website, or journal in the "publication" or "website" field is usually helpful, and particularly helpful in a non-English source.