The BiographyWikiProject concerns the creation, development, and organization of Wikipedia's articles about persons (including but not limited to biographies). It includes only articles about individual persons, not about an organization or group or association, unless a substantial section of the article is a biography of a person related to that organization or group. It includes biographies of only real humans; thus, the project does not cover other animals or fictitious persons (such as pseudonyms) or fictional characters. As of 21 January 2021, there are 1,801,381 articles and 5,512 lists within the scope of WikiProject Biography, of which 1,650 are featured and 6,495 are good articles. As of 27 December 2020 according to WHGI and based on wikidata, only 331,170 of Wikipedia's 1,773,341 biographies are about women, amounting to 18.67%.
Are you starting from scratch and want some guidance on creating a biographical article? Follow these helpful tips! Some of them are also useful for work on articles that have already been started.
Research the available literature to find reliable sources. Read them carefully, taking notes.
At this stage, don't add categories or images. (You'll be able to add them later.)
Work up the proto-article until it's coherent and at least slightly informative and has had its facts checked. (It does not yet need either to present a rounded picture of the person or to be a good article in any normal sense; it merely has to be sound in what it does say.) The article, no matter how rough, should clearly state why the person is notable enough to be included in this project, see WP:BIO. It is a good idea to make reference to at least one of the notability determinants in the lead paragraph. Failing to clearly show notability may lead to your new article being quickly deleted.
Create a new article on your subject and paste the content of your proto-article there.
The history of your proto-article up to this point is unlikely to be of interest to anybody other than yourself, and moving it would force you to re-create your user sub-page. Thus copy/pasting makes sense. However, do note that copying and pasting existing articles is frowned upon in Wikipedia; moving makes the history easy to find and complies with the licencing policies.
You may also be able to find suitable categories by looking at related articles, particularly articles about similar people. Failing that, visit the appropriate work groups (which have them listed) or start browsing at Category:People.
Linking: check that the internal and external links and footnotes in the article go where you want them to go.
Make sure that some other, relevant articles link to a new article, so that the new one isn't "orphaned".
Keep working on the article. Chances are that other ors will notice its existence and join you in working on it. If nobody seems to notice it and you'd like one or two to do so, mention the article in the talk page of a relevant "WikiProject" (e.g. Music), or this one, or both.
You may find that the newcomers will be interested in aspects of the person that don't much interest you, or will relish aspects of ing that you find a bit tiresome. Thus their work will complement rather than compete with your own.
Consider adding a list of works (bibliography, discography, etc.).
When you're happy with the article or have done about as much with it as you think you can, consider requesting a peer review by following these instructions.
Remember, there are 7 billion people in the world. While all of them have their own story, not all of them deserve a Wikipedia article. See WP:BIO for notability standards.
Relax! and take a break if you reached this point. You deserve it!
This page is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested ors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
This article has been rated as Project-Class on the project's quality scale.
The project notice designed to be placed in the talk page of any article that has been or should be ed as part of this Wikiproject. Please see the assessment page for parameters to use in rating articles.
Jreferee (talk·contribs) - I've written a bunch of bios and have a soft spot for those people who their own biography. Any problems in that area or other biography area, please contact me.
Kanonkas (talk·contribs) I am giving biographies files. I'm trying to them with more information, mainly it'll be about celebrities. I'm also trying to remove unsourced BLP, that may be defamatory or not. I'll be happy to look after a BLP related article, or if you need something (e.g. protection) feel free to ask me.
Nishkid64 (talk·contribs) I want to help out with articles on world leaders and politicians. Also have been helping out with WikiProject Missing regarding U.S. House politicians.
Scimitar (talk·contribs) - I was the principal or on the Isaac Brock featured article, and have written around 200 bios and stubs, mostly in the field of Canadian politics and NHL players, although I dabble in anything that catches my eye.
SlimVirgin (talk·contribs) — I've written or significantly contributed to around 36 bios, three of which are featured articles, and I've created another 21 stubs, so it's a genre I've very interested in, and I'm particularly interested in BLP issues and the question of how to balance the need for fairness with NPOV.
Vaoverland (talk·contribs) - I mostly work with history, geography and transportation articles related to Virginia and West Virginia, willing to help other project ors with moves, etc., try to avoid controversy, would rather work on content. aka Mark in Historic Triangle of Virginia
The assessment department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's biography articles. While much of the work is done in conjunction with the WP:1.0 program, the article ratings are also used within the project itself to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.
The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{WPBiography}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in a set of categories that serves as the basis for an automatically generated worklist.
The core biographies department seeks to bring 200 of our most important and visited articles to featured article standard (see also: v1.0 Biographies).
The peer review department conducts peer reviews of articles on request; this helps to obtain ideas for further improvement by having contributors who may not have previously worked on particular articles examine them. Project members are invited to submit articles to the department in lieu of using the generic peer review process.
Collaboration: The collaboration department sought to identify particular articles that would benefit from a significant collaborative effort. A single article was selected as the focus, and the project attempted to improve it, potentially to featured article standard.
Outreach: The outreach department acted as the project's central point of coordination for the recruitment of new members and the production of newsletters.
Work groups[]
Please discuss any proposals for new work groups with the project as a whole before creating them.
Workgroups are informal groups of ors gathered for collaborative work on a particular topic within the field of biography; all project members are encouraged to participate in any that interest them. Also included below are other WikiProjects that fall within our scope.
{{WPBiography Archive}} – archive banner for internal project pages no longer in use.
Barnstars[]
The Biography Barnstar – The Biography Barnstar can be awarded to ors who make significant or outstanding contributions to Wikipedia's biography-related articles.
The Royalty's Barnstar – The Royalty and Nobility Barnstar is awarded to ors who make significant contributions to royalty and nobility related articles that expand Wikipedia’s knowledge about the biographies of people belonging to royalty and/or nobility.