Wikipedia:Editors are not mindreaders

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Shortcut WP:MINDREADER

This page in a nutshell: Put yourself in the shoes of other editors. How can they distinguish the incomplete, unreferenced article you've just created but plan to improve from one that will never be improved?

telepathic

abilities, most Wikipedia editors do not have these abilities.

If an article you've created is tagged for

, put yourself in other editors' shoes. Should they have known you have grand plans and will be adding more detail and references soon? How should they have known that?

New articles are created every few seconds. Some are well written, thoroughly referenced, and meet

or is it something that will never be improved? Editors who create unreferenced, very short articles or articles consisting mostly of red links can help prevent this head scratching and avoid having their contributions marked for deletion as well.

One solution is to create a new article in a

rules, articles on medical or psychological topics (which require all statements to be sourced to high-quality sources, such as university textbooks), and articles that aren't going to garner lots of contributions from other editors immediately.

The

can also be used.

If you must create the article in the main article space, because you feel that the article is urgently needed, consider adding the {{

}} tag to the top of the article. This timestamped tag lets other Wikipedia editors know that it is a work-in-progress that you intend to improve in the very near future. This approach works well when you will complete your planned work on the article within a day or two. If your plans stretch out over several days or weeks, consider using your userspace.

If you want to create an article that is likely to be controversial, you may even wish to create it offline (e.g. in a word processor such as Microsoft Word), save it on your personal computer, and not put it into Wikipedia until there is a strong reference for every claim, and you are confident that the article is worded in a sufficiently

) guidelines.

• Wikipedia:Userfication
• Wikipedia:References are not optional
• Wikipedia:What were you thinking?
• Wikipedia:Beef up that first revision