extra help with article writing hi i thought i'd drop a few notes on your talk page with some help on writing articles o first of all it may be best for you to do a bit of reading staring with the wikipedia manual of style which will give you a lot of information about how wikipedia prefers its articles to follow it's not as hard to follow as it might look quite a bit of the information there probably won't be vital for you at first second i recommend you make a user sandbox which is just an area you can use to practise in and to make notes in and to get things ready in if you click this red link user sandbox that will let you create that page it gives you an edit window to start work in anything anywhere on the help and information pages which gives you an example try it out in your sandbox until you're familiar with it for your article the next thing you want to do is start collecting as much information as you can about it google searches particularly in books and scholar will be your best friend for this once you've found the information the next most important thing is to start writing up each fact in your own words very important this and make a note at the same time of exactly where that information came from build in the references as you go along i'm going to copy in down below this a whole heap of help on doing references which was produced by one of my own hand picked mentors when i came back to wikipedia after a long break here's another place that you'll find incredibly useful citation templates which you can copy and paste into your sandbox between tags you just fill in the blanks from your sources into the template and you'll end up with nicely formatted citations o it all helps remember to add a references section to your sandbox make a new line and put references on it and type reflist on the next line so that you can see how your citations look as you do them remember to save your page often you don't want to lose your work hopefully this will give you a good start and make life easier for you how references work simple references these require two parts a chzz is years old the book of chzz aardvark books he likes tea tea website b a section called references with the special code reflist references reflist an existing article is likely to already have one of these sections to see the result of that please look at user chzz demo simpleref edit it and check the code perhaps make a test page of your own such as user reftest and try it out named references chzz was born in the book of chzz aardvark books chzz lives in footown note that the second usage has a and no closing ref tag this needs a reference section as above please see user chzz demo namedref to see the result citation templates you can put anything you like between and but using citation templates makes for a neat consistent look chzz has olympic medals citation last smith first john title olympic medal winners of the th century publication date publisher cambridge university press page isbn please see user chzz demo citeref to see the result for more help and tips on that subject see user chzz help refs talk stalk