User:Thefourdotelipsis/Tutorial

Hello, there. I'm The Four Dot Elipsis, but most people call me Four Dot. Through this tutorial, I'm going to take you on a tour of what I consider to be the essential steps that have to be taken in order to write a Featured Article about a Star Wars character on Wookieepedia. Of course, this is not the definitive way of writing a character article, and hopefully, if you decide that you would like to write articles for Wookieepedia on a regular basis, you will develop your own method.

But it's starting out that's always the most daunting prospect, and it's generally the first few steps that are the hardest. With practice and consistency, writing on Wookieepedia will become almost second nature (though generally still a challenge.) Hopefully, by reading this tutorial and following the basic steps, you will be able to produce a top-quality article and submit if for consideration on the Featured Article nominations page. But we'll get to that later.

Step I: Recon
Before I even considered contributing to Wookieepedia, I decided I would read through its output first. This was to gauge just what kind of work was expected and wanted by the community, so I could write in a style consistent to that which had come before me. And hopefully, I would write better than I did in that last sentence. Even back then, in late 2006, most of Wookieepedia's Featured Articles were based on characters. The difference was, back then, I could read through all the Featured Articles fairly quickly, because there was only about 40-50 odd in existence. Now there are over 300 Featured Articles on Wookieepedia, which is a considerable boost indeed. But the fact remains that most of these articles are written about characters.

That's probably because Star Wars is a character driven story&mdash;most people don't come for the Sci-Fi elements. But that's just my crazy little theory. At any rate, it's the most established of the various article types, and that means that there's a lot of possible research to be done. But I don't expect you to read all of them, unless you have a lot of time on your hands.

Still, it is important to read some, because although Wookieepedia has changed, the fact that there is a degree of consistency between articles has not. It's important to look at precedents for the type of article you want to do (in this case, character articles) and fully assess just what has been done, both in formatting and layout style. To maintain the relative consistency that the site enjoys, it's important to emluate, to a degree, what has come before you.