Help:How to start a new Wikipedia
Do you want to start a Wikipedia in your language?
The Vision of Wikimedia is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. So ideally, there should be a Wikipedia in every language that human beings speak.
If there is no Wikipedia in your language yet, you can create it! However, please realize that while the world-wide Wikimedia community will be happy to give you the technical support in creating a space for your language, you will actually have to do the writing, and it could require a lot of work. It will take some time until the Wikipedia in your language becomes ready to "go live". You need to be able to write your language well, and it is strongly recommended to team up with other speakers of that language.
While this is not a requirement, it is also useful to be experienced in editing a Wikipedia in another language.
Check whether your language already has one
There are editions of Wikipedia in more than 300 languages, so maybe there already is a Wikipedia in your language! Here are a few places where you can check for it:
- Look at the page List of Wikipedias.
- Look at https://www.wikipedia.org, the Wikipedia portal page for all the languages.
- Go to the article about your language in a Wikipedia in a large language, such as English. These articles usually have a link to the Wikipedia in the language at the bottom.
If you cannot find an existing Wikipedia in your language, check the page Requests for new languages—there may be a request for it already.
Please be patient. It can take up to four months or longer.
Getting help
If you are not already experienced at writing in Wikipedia in some language, you might have many questions when you begin. For answers regarding your questions, you may contact other Wikipedians. For example, you can contact people using mailing lists (especially "Wikimedia-L"), Telegram groups (especially "Wikimedia General" and "Wikimedia Language Diversity"), and the channel #wikimedia on IRC.
Here are some particular people on Meta willing to help:
- Amir E. Aharoni (English, русский, עברית, español, français)
- Jon Harald Søby (English, norsk, Kiswahili)
Creating the initial content
Create the Incubator
Follow the instructions on the page Incubator manual, and start creating the initial pages there.
Creating the Main Page
Create the Main Page for the Incubator. You may also go to the main page of Wikipedia in another language, copy it, and translate it into your language.
Note that main pages tend to have advanced code, and in the first stages of creating the Incubator, the articles are much more important than the main page. The initial main page should be simple and functional. You can create a cool-looking main page later, after you gain experience editing usual articles.
How to edit a page
You should translate the page How to edit a page into your language.
Another helpful link: Help:Starting a new page.
Translate the interface
To start a Wikipedia in a new language, you also need to translate the user interface of the software that runs it, called MediaWiki. This is done on the site https://translatewiki.net. Note that it uses a separate user account. Translating the "Most important" messages is a condition for creating a new Wikipedia, but much more should be translated so that readers and editors would be able to use Wikipedia fully in your language.
Even before translating the user interface, it is recommended to decide what will be the basic terminology about wiki editing in your language. These are words such as "page", "user", "log in", "account", "editor", "block", and so on. The most convenient way to do it is to read the Basic glossary on translatewiki, discuss it with other people who know your language well, and translate that glossary. (It's recommended to translate at least the terms, but translating the explanations and the definitions is recommended, too.)
Special characters
If your language has characters that are difficult to enter on keyboards used by speakers of the language, you should add support for it to the Universal Language Selector. Ask for it at the talk page of Universal Language Selector.
You can also add a box of special characters to insert using the Edittools message.
Going further
Translate other things
The name "Wikipedia" and the tagline "The Free Encyclopedia", which appear in the logo, must be translated, too.
Some notes:
- The name Wikipedia can be spelled differently if the rules of your language require it, but it should generally be based on the English name. For example, the name in the Catalan is "Viquipèdia", because the standard Catalan alphabet doesn't include the letters W and K. If your language is not written in the Latin alphabet, the name should be written in that alphabet.
- In the tagline "The Free Encyclopedia", the word free means "not restricted". This sometimes confuses people because English does not have different words for free as in price or cost, like the French word "gratuit", and free as in freedom or liberty, like the French word "libre". If your language has different words for the two kinds of "free", please use the one that refers to freedom or liberty. For more information on this, see this essay on the English Wikipedia: Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia.
- The word "Encyclopedia" can be translated in any way that is correct in your language. It can be a transliteration of the English word, or a completely new word that has the same meaning. Make sure that you understand the difference between an encyclopedia and dictionary; if you are not sure, please read the relevant articles: Encyclopedia, Dictionary.
Prepare the Community pages
Each Wikimedia project has a place where users go to talk about things. In the English Wikipedia, for example, this is the Village pump page. The French Wikipedia has Le Bistro. Please choose a name for the community page and then create the page.
Set up basic guidelines
There are a few rules that all Wikimedia projects must follow:
- You cannot violate the terms of a copyright. Please make a page to warn users not to copy things from other places without asking the author.
- As of 2023, Wikipedia articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Very briefly, it means that everyone is free to read, copy, change, and redistribute the content, but please read the full license to understand it. You should also make a page in your language to explain it and publish it in the Wikipedia.
- Authors must write from a neutral point of view (NPOV). Please make a page to explain this.
- Please make a page to explain what Wikipedia is not.
Other than these rules, which apply to all projects, each Wikipedia has created its own rules. For examples, the English Wikipedia has important rules about Verifiability, Notability, and Article titles, as well as an extensive Manual of Style and several other policy pages. You should consider adding similar policies, but this is not a strict requirement, and you can do whatever is right for your language and your community.
Some rules you might want to have right away include:
- Orthographic practices: if there is more than one way to spell or write your language, you will need rules about it.
- Stylistic conventions: if your language does not have a standardized universal form, which guides how should people write so that everybody can understand each other, you should have a page to tell people which varieties or dialects of your language to use. Also, you will sooner or later need more complex stylistic conventions. For examples in many languages, see the page Language guides.
Add a style guide and resources for writers
You want to have a high-quality encyclopedia. Please write a few suggestions for writers. Are there any websites in your language about how to write? Maybe you want to add a dictionary or a grammar guide here. Put in everything that could be useful for writers.
Write a few good content articles as an example for others
You might want to write a few articles for your Wikipedia to get it started, and to give an example to other potential writers. You can translate articles from Wikipedia in another language, or you can write your own.
There is a List of articles every Wikipedia should have. This list is by no means a requirement, but it is a good source of ideas for articles about universally-important topics for articles to create. You can, and should, also write articles about topics that are important to your local culture, such as songs, crafts, foods, and important people from the region where your language is spoken, or your region's history.
Have cooperation with Wikipedias in other languages
You should join some mailing lists so that you will know what is happening in the world of Wikimedia in general. The mailing lists are also good resources that you can use to learn from the things that are happening on other Wikipedias.
Please make a local Wikimedia Embassy for multilingual cooperation. Make a page in your wiki so that we can talk to you more easily, and write a name for a contact.
The page goings-on is a central place to find out about events in the whole Wikimedia community.
Graduating from the Incubator
As this page says, the two most important things that you need to do to graduate from the Incubator are:
- Translate the basic user interface on translatewiki.
- Write good test encyclopedic articles in the Incubator together with your friends.
If you think that you have completed the localization, and that you have been writing good articles for a while, and the Language committee haven't yet noticed that your project is in a good shape, you may contact the committee on the page Talk:Language committee and ask it to take a look.
If the committee thinks that you have been doing well, and an external expert checks the content of your wiki and finds that it is indeed written in your language, your project will be approved, and after some time, a separate domain will be created for the Wikipedia in your language. All the content from the Incubator will be imported into that new domain.
Congratulations! Here are some more things to do, however:
Permissions
You might need someone with administrator (sysop) status very soon. Add your request on Requests for permissions.
Interlanguage links
Go over all the pages in your new Wikipedia and add interlanguage links to articles that are also available in Wikipedia in other languages.
Promote your Wikipedia
Find appropriate forums, discussion lists, social media groups, and so on, where there may be people who would be interested in knowing that the Wikipedia has started in their language. Offer to write an article for a local newspaper about your work on the project, and its cultural value to society. Contact local radio and TV stations.
Lecture at conferences where the topic would be appropriate. Create a brochure or a poster about Wikipedia in your language. Add a link to Wikipedia in your email signature. Write about it in your blog.
Now your language is ready for the public! Try to convince your friends to join the project, and explain how the Wikipedia works.
Keep localizing the software!
The localization of the Most important messages is a requirement for creating a Wikipedia in a new language. However, there are many more features in the MediaWiki software that should be translated into all the languages. Someone should keep doing this, and ideally translate 100% of the features that are used on Wikipedia. This is time-consuming, but highly recommended for better development of the Wikipedia editing community in your language.
Keep writing articles!
This is the most important thing! Graduating from the Incubator is an initial goal, but Wikipedia is a long-term project that doesn't really have an end. That's why its logo is an unfinished puzzle.
Wikipedia in every language needs to grow and provide useful content to readers, so you need to write more articles, improve existing articles, and improve the rules about style, fact-checking, and other things. Of course, you shouldn't do it alone, so invite other people who know your language to do with you, and grow the editing community, too.
Thank you for working hard! By remember: This is the beginning and not the end. Good luck!