Article Creation Guide
What defines an article? If you aim to write an article or have your work gain the status of an article, it must fall within certain criteria. Of course each work will need to be evaluated individually by staff to determine if it qualifies as these criteria are a guide only. Ultimately what makes an article an article is that a staff member decides that it qualifies, but this guide should give you a good idea what that staff member would be looking for.

Here is a list of the criteria currently used to judge whether a work qualifies as an article:

Article Criteria:

Document is easy to understand
The content of the document must be able to be understood by the reader; don’t use excessively long words unnecessarily and don’t dumb it down either. State things simply, using clear English.

Document does not fit into a standard forum
An article should not fit into the category of another existing forum. Any work must be placed into the most appropriate forum. A guide that would be best placed in the Zero Hour USA Strategy forum for example, is not an article, but a strategy guide.

Document is long enough to fully cover the topic
Leaving things out to get finished fast will not be a complete article. There is no minimum words you need, but the work must have enough content to cover all aspects of the topic. It must be complete.

Document content includes the WHEN, HOW and WHY aspects of the topic
All aspects of the content should be covered; explaining how to do a thing is not enough. There should be information about why to do that thing and when it is best to do that thing. You should really consider the entire set of WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW and answer as much as applies to the topic.

Document is well written (punctuation, sentences and paragraphs included)
Punctuation is important. The document should be well structured, with correct usage of grammar and spelling. It’s not hard to use a word processor such as Microsoft Word to check spelling and grammar and it’s also not hard to have someone look at the document (to proof-read it) with the intent of ensuring correct use of grammar, spelling, sentences, paragraphs and punctuation. Spelling checkers will not catch everything and neither will grammar checkers, so it’s important to have your work checked by someone who can.

Document includes diagrams/pictures for difficult elements where required
A good article will try to make it easy for the reader to understand clearly what is being said. For any complex things, use diagrams or pictures to emphasise on what you are trying to convey, where appropriate.

Document is formatted for easy reading
Heading fonts should be clearly headings, perhaps bolded and colour changed. Blank lines should exist between paragraphs. This post is an example of how headings should look. Try to check your work on the different skins available too, as colours may appear good in one skin but unreadable in another. Orange is a skin-safe colour. And no, colour is spelled correctly here, I’m Australian!

Document content covers something useful to many members.
There’s not much point creating an article on how to eat breakfast . An article should contain something interesting and useful for many people, something that members can benefit from reading.

I hope this guide helps you understand what qualifies as an article