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You will need to find sources before you start writing, because all content in articles at Wikipedia must be verifiable—that is, backed up by reliable sources. The best way to demonstrate verifiability, is by creating a citation to a reliable source that you found, and embedding it in-line as you write your article.
If you want to read some of Wikipedia's finest articles, have a look at Wikipedia:Featured articles. For information on how to cite sources, see Wikipedia:Citing sources. For our guidelines on style, see the Wikipedia:Manual of Style and its subsidiary pages, listed in its template. To learn about markup in Wikipedia articles, see Help:Editing.
An exception to this is when Wikipedia is being discussed in an article, which may cite an article, guideline, discussion, statistic or other content from Wikipedia or a sister project as a primary source to support a statement about Wikipedia (while avoiding undue emphasis on Wikipedia's role or views and inappropriate self-referencing).
Because Wikipedia cannot be considered a reliable source, the use of Wikipedia is not accepted in many schools and universities in writing a formal paper, and some educational institutions have banned it as a primary source while others have limited its use to only a pointer to external sources.
A reliable source is one that presents a well-reasoned theory or argument supported by strong evidence. Reliable sources include scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books written by researchers for students and researchers, which can be found in academic databases and search engines like JSTOR and Google Scholar.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic writing or research. Wikipedia is increasingly used by people in the academic community, from first-year students to distinguished professors, as an easily accessible tertiary source for information about anything and everything and as a quick "ready reference", to get a sense of a concept or idea.
A good article (GA) is a Wikipedia article that meets a core set of editorial standards, the good article criteria, passing through the good article nomination process successfully. They are well-written, contain factually accurate and verifiable information, are broad in coverage, neutral in point of view , stable, and illustrated, where ...
Now that you know how to evaluate a Wikipedia article's quality, you should have a good sense of the kind of thing you should be contributing to the articles you work on. A key aspect of good articles is good sourcing. Everything you read on Wikipedia should come from a reliable source.