Creating Articles With Wikipedia’s ‘Requested Articles’ Feature

By John Kleefeld
[social-bio] In my previous two posts, I discussed how instructors and students can use WikiProjects to select articles for editing in Wikipedia-based course assignments. In this post, I discuss the creation of new articles, using WikiProject Requested articles (WP:WPRA) as a starting point. This is not the only way to start creating new articles, but the process allows you to see whether the article you are thinking of writing, or one like it, has already been requested, and to see how that request fits in with the larger subject of which it is a part.

What is “WikiProject Requested articles”?

The WPRA page explains that WikiProject Requested articles is one of Wikipedia’s oldest projects, and “offers individuals the ability to suggest articles that should be created but which they do not wish to write themselves.” This is usually done by creating red links. These links, unlike the blue links that allow you to jump to other Wikipedia pages, indicate that the linked pages don’t exist‍—but that the linkers wish they did. This is another example of crowdsourcing philosophy at work, and may at first seem like a recipe for chaos or clutter. In fact, it has been one of the main drivers for Wikipedia’s growth. I adverted to this in a previous post, where I wrote about a project that aims to turn redlinked articles on women into bluelinked ones, and in a field in which Wikipedia is greatly underrepresented.

What is the “Requested articles” page?

One of the WikiProject’s outputs is the Requested articles page (WP:REQ). Near the top of it, you’ll see a couple of things of interest. First, there is a table of contents that puts article requests into 14 categories (see sidebar). These categories are idiosyncratic and are open to criticism; one could argue, for example, that categories based on the Library of Congress Classification system would be more helpful. For better or worse, though, this is the system adopted for article requests, so it helps to get to know it. Second, there is an Article creation infobox with links to various Wikipedia processes, policies and tools to help in the creation process once you’ve settled on the article you want to create.

How do I find out whether an article I want to create has already been requested?

Let’s say you’re in Dentistry and thinking of creating an article on alveoloplasty, which also goes by the shorter term alveoplasty. Wiktionary, a Wikipedia companion project, defines this as the “surgical modification of the alveolar ridges in preparation for the fitting of dentures.” On searching for this term in Wikipedia, though, you find there is no article on it. However, your search yields three pages that contain the longer version of the term, all of which show it in red.[1] A little more searching also reveals two stub articles that might be related to the proposed article: Alveolar ridge and Dental alveolus. You also decide to look for “Dentistry” in the Requested articles page. At this point, you might get stymied because it is not immediately obvious where it falls. But with a bit of imagination, it is not hard to find: Dentistry is on the page for Requested articles in Medicine, which in turn is a sub-category of Requested articles for Applied arts and sciences, one of the 14 top-level headings mentioned above. The page syntax follows a common format for article requests:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Applied_arts_and_sciences/Medicine#Dentistry (#Dentistry refers to a section on the Medicine page).

This section sets out several redlinked articles, including three relating to alveoloplasty: interradicular alveoloplasty, radical alveoloplasty, and simple alveoloplasty. But you decide, wisely, that it would make little sense to have three articles on these procedures when there isn’t even a general article on alveoloplasty. The appropriate strategy, it seems, is to create an article entitled “Alveoloplasty” (which would include a redirect from “Alveoplasty” so that those searching for the shorter term would end up on the right page) and which might use the redlinked article nomenclature (simple, radical, interradicular) in headings for some of the sections within the main article. The article that you create might also link to the articles on Alveolar ridge and Dental alveolus; this is good practice, as such interlinking binds the various pages of Wikipedia into an interconnected whole and might lead to edits on those pages as well.

Of course, you can go straight to the subject headings in “Requested articles” and simply browse, as in a library. This can yield plenty of ideas. For example, the Psychology subheading (under Social sciences) has a long list of redlinked articles, organized alphabetically and annotated. Interspersed among these are blue links, indicating that someone has created an article on that topic or redirected it to another article or article section dealing with the topic. When that happens, the previous red link turns blue. See, for example, “hedonic psychology,” formerly redlinked but now showing in the list as bluelinked and which, on clicking, redirects to Happiness economics; and “externalizing disorder,” which redirects to a section within Emotional and behavorial disorders. Perhaps music, rather than psychology, is your thing. If so, you can find requested articles for jazz performers and venues, classical compositions, instruments, and music organizations, to name just a few topics. If you’re mathematically inclined, the Mathematics heading has 57 categories of requested article categories, ranging from Abstract algebra to Topology (mathematics is one of the most under-developed areas within Wikipedia). And for the list-oriented, there is even a page of requested List articles, ranging from Fictional desert planets to Regional Differences in Medical Terminology. In short, there is something for just about everyone here, and the response to “I don’t know what to write about” may well be: “Go to Requested articles!”

John Kleefeld is an associate professor at the College of Law and a 2017 teaching fellow at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness, where he is coordinating a campus-wide project on integrating Wikipedia assignments into course materials. Portions of this blog series are from an article that he and a former law student wrote about using a Wikipedia assignment for class credit. See J. Kleefeld and K. Rattray, 2016. “Write a Wikipedia Article for Law School Credit—Really?” Journal of Legal Education, 65:3, 597-621.

[1] The pages, from a search done on 12 March 2017, are List of MeSH codes (E06), ICD-9-CM Volume 3, and List of MeSH codes (E04).