David10244

Recently edited as a couple of different IP addresses. Now I have an account! Woo-woo!

My most recent IP, before creating my account, started in June 2022. I had 500 edits, mostly to WP space (the help desks). The two edits in 2008 for that IP were not mine.

I had a previous IP, which I'll find so that I know its starting date. My IP address is/was fairly static. In fact, it's the same now (late January 2023) as it was in June 2022. Interesting.

Good explanations

In a help desk, ColinFine said:

Writing an article begins with finding the sources - and most of them have to be independent sources, so interviews don't help. Sources don't have to be online; but if the reliable independent sources don't exist, then he doesn't meet Wikipedia's criteria for notability, and it's not worth spending any time on it.

Very well put.

More great stuff from ColinFine and others:

Trying to create an article before you have spent time learning how Wikipedia works and what its requirements are is often frustrating and miserable. We delete hundreds of articles and drafts a day, many of them by people who have started before they are ready. And if you are connected with the subject (so you have a conflict of interest) it is even harder, as you will need to forget everything you know about the person - and, especially, forget your opinions about them - and write based only on what the independent sources that you have found say about the person. Please read your first article, as well as about notability.

Wikipedia is not interested in what the subject of an article says or wants to say about themselves, or what their associates say about them. Wikipedia is only interested in what people who have no connection with the subject, and who have not been prompted or fed information on behalf of the subject, have chosen to publish about the subject in reliable sources.

...

Where did you get that information from? Was if from a website? What website? Was it from a book? What book was it from? What page in that book can I find it? See, everything in Wikipedia needs to be verifiable, which means that someone else can follow up and find the source of the information; where it comes from. Everything written in Wikipedia should have been written about first in reliable sources, and we cite our sources for every bit of information. The most convenient way for readers to connect all of your information to the specific source it comes from is through footnotes; see Help:Footnotes for how to add those to your article. Help:Referencing for beginners is also a really good guide.

...

(I liked this reply)

Hi @Buligio: most of the draft content is unreferenced, and many of the sources cited don't seem to be about Carranza. Which begs two questions – where is all this information coming from, and how do we know it's true? Perhaps you've misunderstood the way Wikipedia works: you don't just write what you know (or what you want) about a topic, and then find some sources that support the odd bit of your writing here and there. You read what reliable sources have said about a topic, summarise (in your own words) the salient points, and cite your sources as you go so the reader can verify that those sources really say such things. Which takes us back to my earlier point: if that isn't the process you followed (as suggested by the fact that you cannot find sources to cite), then where did all this information come from? As for the promotional, non-encyclopaedic language, this can be found throughout the draft, but I will pick out a few examples to give you an idea of the sort of expressions we don't want to see: "woman aviator, entrepreneur and activist who successfully defied a male dominated field" "suddenly found herself stranded in Buenos Aires and in fear of being caught in the ensuing dragnet" "Irma's attitude towards life: valor, ideals, determination, caring about others, hard work and a smile" Also, the many instances of peacock language such as "trailblazer", "historic", "very first" (just "first" will do), etc. All these can go into a magazine feature about her, or perhaps her obituary, but they do not belong in an encyclopaedia article. HTH, -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 06:32, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Page

An encyclopedia article, not a social-media-type "page".

Misc

No one, whether paid or not, can guarantee that they can create an article that won't be deleted. You should not pay anyone to create an article (or to create and submit a draft) for you. (My words)

I'm sorry if you put in a lot of work into a doomed project; but I'm afraid that that is often the experience of new users who plunge into trying to create an article before they have learnt the basics of Wikipedia's requirements. (ColinFine)

Focus on finding reliable, independent, secondary sources and summarizing what they say, without any reference to what the subject of the article would like it to say. 199.208.172.35

Wikipedia does not have any "company pages" or "company profiles". Instead, we have encyclopedia articles about business that meet the very strict standards described at Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies).

Do not think of YouTube as a source. Think of it instead as a platform that hosts millions of videos, each one of which needs to have its reliability evaluated independently. (Cullen328)

http://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Teahouse

Deleting images

How does one start the image deletion process? How do I contact an admin? 2603:8001:D300:6C00:7C28:B9EF:3B3C:655C (talk) 21:09, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Hello. If the image is hosted here on the English Wikipedia, the proper place is Wikipedia:Files for discussion. If it is hosted on Wikimedia Commons, you will need to discuss it there. Cullen328 (talk) 21:13, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Simplified Ruleset

[[WP:SR|summary of rules and policies]]

Templates for help desks

https://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Template:HD

Color

26bdbd

33ffdb

Reliable

published in a Reliable source that is independent of the person.

Username

If you are not xxxxx, you will need to change your username. Cannot use his name as your username unless you are him. Please go to Special:GlobalRenameRequest or WP:CHUS to make a change request.

backwards

You need to create the draft from what the sources say, rather than writing the draft and then hoping to find supporting material. There is an essay about this that you should read (link)

Ha

@Hoary "Upsurge", I like that! I may start using it, if I can figure out what it means. American, eh? Hmmmm.... David10244 (talk) 06:41, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Don't just be a user, @David10244. No point talking the talk if you don't also walk the walk. Upsurge your brand's discernibility; do it today. (Obvious first steps: (i) Lots of userboxes; (ii) Gimmicky signature.) -- Hoary (talk) 07:07, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Misc

summarise what reliable published sources have said

when writing a Wikipedia article, you should only be summarising what published sources have said

something that's often counterintuitive for new editors is that "real and longstanding" isn't what Wikipedia cares about. It literally doesn't matter to us that the subject exists. What we care about, when deciding whether a subject should have an article, is at least three instances of significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. And to start out with we'd actually prefer you don't provide more than three. We want to see the three best sources. That lets us assess notability without having to wade through 35 sources that may or may not support a claim to notability. Which three and only three of those sources best represent significant coverage in independent reliable sources? (Valereee)

When you write that you "need to upload" something, experienced Wikipedia editors will respond "No, you don't" because we only accept content that is in full compliance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Read and re-read and study until you thoroughly understand Your first article, and follow every one of the recommendations that you find there.

Inline

(Quoted from talk:afchelp)

I hear you, and I don't disagree, but bear in mind that part of the reviewer's job is to check that the draft is reliably sourced, and it can be very difficult to do that if the author hasn't indicated at all which of the sources provides which bit of the content (and therefore, how much of it is just OR/synth, or entirely made up even), especially when citing offline sources. So yes, general refs are accepted, as are offline sources, as are non-English ones... but if all these are pushed to the limit, at some point it becomes nigh-on impossible to verify the information, and a reviewer may just give up and move on. (This is just a personal observation, without commenting on policy.) -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 12:32, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi KylieTastic and DoubleGrazing, it's not just a response to Greenman's comments on Lothar Abel, though prompted by this. It's something I've noticed generally, and not just in my own translations (I can't find the link, but it came up recently in the teahouse with another translator-from-German too, who was giving the same advice: don't even attempt general referencing. They were again pointing out the difference between German and English WPs).

The problem is an interaction of AFC and the core policy, which I quote: "All material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists, and captions, must be verifiable. All quotations, and any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation". Thus if AfC reviewers habitually challenge everything that doesn't have an inline citation, it has been challenged, and therefore must have inline citation, by definition.

I totally accept that without inline citations, you'd need to read the entire general source to check whether each fact is verifiable, which is too much for any volunteer. I think, in any case, you have an impossible task: if you doubt that the person who wrote the original article actually read the sources they cite, there's no guarantee their inline citations are any more reliable than their general sources. DoubleGrazing is correct that there's a risk of the checks being nigh-on impossible; if you pursue this to its logical conclusion, AfC can't accept anything unless the reviewer has managed to track down and understand a reliable, scholarly and respected book written in Lithuanian in 1970; Wikipedia would degenerate into a collection of facts available electronically, with open access, in English. A bad outcome. I don't know the answer. Elemimele (talk) 14:55, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

From the Help desk

ms majina 27th oldest person died a week ago why still on list? 82.3.92.129 (talk) 03:18, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Because nobody has read of her demise in a reliable source, realized that she was in some list in Wikipedia, realized that she should no longer be on that list, and then taken the trouble to remove her from the list (of course citing the reliable source for her death). If you have a reliable source for her death, and if dead people should be removed from the list, then please remove her from the list (of course citing the reliable source in your edit summary). -- Hoary (talk) 04:15, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

And obviously the article should be written to reflect the content of sources, not the other way around