Welcome!

Hello, Cenantua, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created, like Nicolae Dunca, may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines for page creation, and may soon be deleted.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Tagishsimon (talk) 20:40, 29 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

December 2009

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  Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to Wikipedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to Shenandoah, Virginia, did not appear to be constructive and has been reverted. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and read the welcome page to learn more about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. Thank you. A8UDI 12:38, 10 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

  Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, but when you add content (particularly if you change facts and figures), as you have to the article USS Montpelier (SSN-765), please cite a reliable source for the content you're adding or changing. This helps maintain our policy of verifiability. Take a look at Wikipedia:Citing sources for information about how to cite sources and the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. -MBK004 16:22, 21 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

You have raised another issue now, we have a policy against original research, which pretty much says that you yourself cannot be the source. Also, if there are a few subs with the list, they are anomalies instead of the norm. We are not in the business of just listing every commanding officer because we are able to, they are not all notable per the military notability policies here. -MBK004 16:41, 21 December 2009 (UTC)Reply
The reason for total removal is simple, it is allowable within policy (for verifiability, reliable sourcing, and since they are living people, WP:BLP) and the general guidelines for military and ship articles do not support the listing of the commanding officers in a list format. While they may be mentioned in the prose detailing the service history of the vessel, it has been determined through consensus via the editors of this type of article here that the pure list is inappropriate and not in-line with the ideal appearance of an article. Since you dispute this, you need to bring it up for review at the appropriate place, WT:SHIPS. -MBK004 16:52, 21 December 2009 (UTC)Reply
You'll notice that submarines are not well-developed. The project members at WP:MILHIST and WP:SHIPS tend to focus more on battleships and aircraft carriers, in fact we are currently working on every battleship ever built or proposed (see WP:OMT if you're interested). If you look at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Ships#Featured_content you will see the articles which have passed through multiple review levels and are deemed to be some of the best articles the community has to offer. That being said, awards like everything else need to be properly referenced if they appear, and then they are better presented when integrated within the text as part of the vessel's service history. -MBK004 17:13, 21 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Also, I noticed that you've joined MILHIST but were never welcomed, so:

Your recent edits

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  Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You may also click on the signature button   located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 17:02, 21 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Invitation to join WikiProject United States

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Hello, Cenantua! WikiProject United States, an outreach effort supporting development of United States related articles in Wikipedia, has recently been restarted after a long period of inactivity. As a user who has shown an interest in United States related topics we wanted to invite you to join us in developing content relating to the United States. If you are interested please add your Username and area of interest to the members page here. Thank you!!!

--Kumioko (talk) 03:15, 4 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

GLAM-Wiki Baltimore meetup

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Suggestion for WikiProject United States to support WikiProject Maryland

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It was recently suggested that WikiProject Maryland might be inactive or semiactive and it might be beneficial to include it in the list of projects supported by WikiProject United States. I have started a discussion on the projects talk page soliciting the opinions of the members of the project if this project would be interested in being supported by WikiProject United States. Please feel free to comment on your opinions about this suggestion. --Kumioko (talk) 03:03, 16 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

DC-area Meetup, Saturday, October 8

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National Archives Backstage Pass - Who should come? You should. Really.
  You are invited to the National Archives in College Park for a special backstage pass and scanathon meetup with Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, on Saturday, October 8. Go behind the scenes and into the stacks at the National Archives, help digitize documents, and edit together! Free catered lunch provided! Dominic·t 16:02, 29 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

Some tips to help you out!

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Hi Cenantua, I thought I'd drop a few notes on your talk page with some help on writing articles :o)

First of all, it may be best for you to do a bit of reading, starting with the Wikipedia manual of style, which will give you a lot of information about how Wikipedia prefers its articles to be written. It's not as hard to follow as it might look; quite a bit of the information there probably won't be vital for you at first.

Second, I recommend you make a user sandbox - which is just an area you can use to practise in, and to make notes in, and to get things ready in. If you click this red link: user:Cenantua/Sandbox, that will let you create that page (it gives you an edit window to start work in). Anything, anywhere, on the help and information pages which gives you an example, try it out in your sandbox until you're familiar with it.

For your article, the next thing you want to do is start collecting as much information as you can about it. Google searches (particularly in Books and Scholar) will be your best friend for this! Once you've found the information, the next most important thing is to start writing up each fact in your own words (very important, this), and make a note at the same time of exactly where that information came from. Build in the references as you go along; I'm going to copy in, down below this, a whole heap of help on doing references, which was produced by one of our best teachers (Chzz).

Here's another place that you'll find incredibly useful - citation templates which you can copy and paste into your sandbox, between <ref></ref> tags; you just fill in the blanks from your sources into the template, and you'll end up with nicely formatted inline citations :o) It all helps. Remember to add a references section to your sandbox (make a new line, and put ==References== on it, and type {{reflist}} on the next line, so that you can see how your citations look as you do them. Remember to save your page often! You don't want to lose your work.

Hopefully this will give you a good start and make life easier for you.

One last thing to keep as a motto: "It's better to write one good, well-referenced, nicely-presented article than it is to create fifty unreferenced one-line stubs!" Pesky (talkstalk!) 09:29, 22 October 2011 (UTC)Reply

How references work

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Simple references

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These require two parts;

a)
Chzz is 98 years old.<ref> "The book of Chzz", Aardvark Books, 2009. </ref>

He likes tea. <ref> [http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com Tea website] </ref>
b) A section called "References" with the special code "{{reflist}}";
== References ==
{{reflist}}

(an existing article is likely to already have one of these sections)

To see the result of that, please look at user:chzz/demo/simpleref. Edit it, and check the code; perhaps make a test page of your own, such as user:Cenantua/reftest and try it out.

Named references

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Chzz was born in 1837. <ref name=MyBook>
"The book of Chzz", Aardvark Books, 2009. 
</ref> 

Chzz lives in Footown.<ref name=MyBook/>

Note that the second usage has a / (and no closing ref tag). This needs a reference section as above; please see user:chzz/demo/namedref to see the result.

Citation templates

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You can put anything you like between <ref> and </ref>, but using citation templates makes for a neat, consistent look;

Chzz has 37 Olympic medals. <ref> {{Citation
 | last = Smith
 | first = John
 | title = Olympic medal winners of the 20th century
 | publication-date = 2001
 | publisher = [[Cambridge University Press]]
 | page = 125
 | isbn = 0-521-37169-4
}}
</ref>

Please see user:chzz/demo/citeref to see the result.

For more help and tips on that subject, see user:chzz/help/refs.

Something to make your life easier!

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Hi there Cenantua! I've just come across one of your articles, and noticed that you had to create titles for your url links manually, or were using bare urls as references.

You might want to consider using this tool - it makes your life a whole heap easier, by filling in complete citation templates for your links. All you do is install the script on Special:MyPage/common.js, or or Special:MyPage/vector.js, then paste the bare url (without [...] brackets) between your <ref></ref> tabs, and you'll find a clickable link called Reflinks in your toolbox section of the page (probably in the left hand column). Then click that tool. It does all the rest of the work (provided that you remember to save the page! It doesn't work for everything (particularly often not for pdf documents), but for pretty much anything ending in "htm" or "html" (and with a title) it will do really, really well. Happy editing! Pesky (talkstalk!) 09:29, 22 October 2011 (UTC)Reply

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it ..."

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Your next task is to go through your recent article Lewis P. Firey and add inline citations (references) for all that information, using the tips above! Remember that writing an article is a bit like building a piece of furniture - once you've put the basic structure together, it neds all those finishing touches (sanding, polishing, etc.) before it can be considered "done". Happy editing. Pesky (talkstalk!) 09:31, 22 October 2011 (UTC)Reply

The same needs to be done at other articles you have created, such as Four Locks which I just tagged as unreferenced. Thank you very much for all your recent contributions to Wikipedia; I am sure these are worthy subjects. But they REALLY need to be substantiated by references, cited at the appoprriate place in the article. If all the instructions given to you above seem too daunting, just do the very simplest thing (as I did when I first started editing at Wikipedia). Just go to the place in the article where the fact to be cited is. Put <ref>The citation information</ref>. If the information you are citing is available online, make the reference clickable by enclosing the information in brackets, like so: <ref>[THEURL, then a space, then a brief description of the url]</ref>. If you do this, the system will automatically insert a footnote number at the place where you put the citation, and will place the reference information at the bottom of the page in the "References" section. Try it! --MelanieN (talk) 16:27, 24 October 2011 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom elections are now open!

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Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:49, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/The 50,000 Challenge

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  You are invited to participate in the 50,000 Challenge, aiming for 50,000 article improvements and creations for articles relating to the United States. This effort began on November 1, 2016 and to reach our goal, we will need editors like you to participate, expand, and create. See more here!

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:37, 8 November 2016 (UTC)Reply