Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-14/Featured content

Writing featured content: Advice from Sturmvogel 66; Sports, sports, sports!

To give our readers a "sporting" chance at writing featured content, here are some suggestions from Sturmvogel 66, who has written or co-written 16 pieces of featured content and 28 A-class articles, including this week's HMS Eagle (below), since becoming a Wikipedian in 2007.

• Make friends with a really good copyeditor; he or she will save you endless aggravation regarding your prose.
• Before nominating, participate in several FACs to get a feel for the process and to learn what most of the reviewers look for. Then carefully dissect all the comments and try to figure out why they were made.
• Be prepared to grow a thick skin; just because you can't see the value of a reviewer's comment doesn't mean that it doesn't have one. If you don't understand a comment, ask for clarification, but be prepared to address the issue. I found this one of the hardest things to do when I first began going through the process, as many of the requested changes seemed pointless.
• Don't sweat stupid little mistakes being discovered at FAC; no reviewer is sniggering to himself about what a moron you are for x and y mistakes. They're embarrassing, but get over it as those sorts of things are sometimes the hardest things to catch.
• Learn to value consistency; that's one of the first things that reviewers will notice about your citation style, bibliography, or whatever. You'll save yourself a lot of time and effort if you do it, whatever it is, consistently as you're writing.
• Learn the basics about image licensing; just because it's on Commons doesn't mean that it has a valid license or is out of copyright.
• Let someone else look at your article before you submit it to FAC.
• Submit your article to a Good Article nomination or, if your project has them, an A-class review; they're unlikely to catch everything, but they should be able to identify major problems.