User:Ktr101/Articles for Creation

Hi. If you are here, it is because I have declined your Articles for Creation submission (but if you are here because you stumbled by, welcome!). Before you write on my talk page, please understand that I do care about what you have written. I do have a life though, so I have created this page in order to explain my reasoning here so that I do not have to repeat the same thing to many people. Below, I will attempt to address some common issues that I get because of my declines. If in the end anything is confusing, please let me know and I will help to clarify it.

So, you declined my article...

Yes, there was a reason that I declined it. Less than one quarter of AFC submissions that are submitted are accepted (although it is probably way lower because a lot of the rejected submissions get periodically deleted). As the Wikipedia article Notability in English Wikipedia states pretty well, we have guidelines to help prevent the encyclopedia from being watered down with useless information. I have been around for over four years, so I have a pretty good idea of what notability is. That being said, I am human and I will make mistakes from time to time. That does not mean that I have some sort of vendetta against your submission. I do know what Wikipedia is not, as well as what Wikipedia is. If your article does not have reliable third-party citations, I will decline it. Oftentimes, your person might be notable, but if I do not see a reasonable attempt to let me know how this person is notable, I will decline it because it is unlikely that I will know anything about the topic before I review it. If you make claims and do not cite them, it would be better if you could cite them, so that it would be easier for me to back up the claims that you make in the article. Additionally, I am open for reviewing my requests, but I do not want to spend an hour a day replying to inquiries about notability.

But I did everything right...

You might have, but you also might not realize that a conflict of interest might exist in your writings. If you think this is a problem, just try to be a historian, where all works have some sort of bias within. In short, we all write with a bias, but there are ways to make it less apparent. If you are writing about a company in which you are involved in, do not write it in a promotional tone. If you are writing about your favorite person, do keep it neutral. Should your work be declined because there is a bias or advertising tone, try having someone whom you know look over the article and try to neutralize the wording. It would help if they are not connected to the subject in any way, but it might amaze you how much peer-review will help you. If I see anything in the article that goes against this, I will decline it. Also, we all make mistakes and there is the possibility that I will decline the submission by accident. If this is the case, then please let me know.

In addition to all of this, you may have added references that talk about the person. One issue of references is that there are differing levels of mention in references. In terms of references that focus on the person (say, a story in the Boston Globe or New York Times on the person), versus an article that just mentions them, the former is applicable here. Just because a person is mentioned in something, doesn't mean that they are notable. If that were the case, there would be millions more articles on this site, just because people were mentioned by a news source.

Is there hope for my submission?

Yes, but only if it does have reliable sources and it meets all the criteria. The idea of Articles for Creation is to allow you to essentially make your submission the best thing possible before you send it to be a real article. This is in contrast to the other system where you just type the article up, submit it, and hope for the best. If you are unable to address the notability guidelines, your submission will not be accepted by either me or any other editor who reviews articles.

You also have to be aware that this whole process is a great lesson on sales. Your job is to convince us that your submission is notable. If it is not, we will not accept it. If it is, we will. This means you usually have one shot to tell us everything, although we will work with you if you think that you may have had something missed, no matter what. Sometimes, your article will not be notable, and I will let you know before I send you down a dead-end path.

What do I do now?

Well, if you have read all of this and you have addressed all of the issues, you can leave a message on my talk page, or leave a message at the AFC help page. Please make sure that all of these issues are addressed before you leave a message, so that your article has the best chance possible.