User talk:Wikidrift
Hi welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you enjoy contributing.
Unfortunately, I've had to undo your edit to
To help you in future, I'm posting below a standard welcome template which contains some suggested reading and tells you how to get help if you're not sure how to do things. Enjoy your editing.--
Welcome!
Hello, Wikidrift, and
- The five pillars of Wikipedia
- Tutorial
- How to edit a page and How to develop articles
- Article Wizardif you wish)
- Manual of Style
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a
{{helpme}}
before the question. Again, welcome!
- Thanks for the reply. I do recognise that you were acting in good faith and dong your best to do things properly. As for how to avoid making the same mistake again, it's quite complicated. Wikipedia:Copy-pastegives a summary and links to longer material but, in summary, there are two separate issues involved.
- One is WP:Copyright and related articles, policies and guidelines,) a legal issue where the Daily Telegraph and/or its journalists have a right to make money from their work and other people should not profit from it without permission or cause the copyright holder to lose the opportunity to make money. The copying of one and a half sentences is unlikely to have done them significant damage but, for all I know, some legislations may be punitive on this. Wikipedia generally follows American/Floridan law, but there may be different legislation that also applies depending on where you and the source are. I know that the National Portrait Galleryis threatening legal action under English law against someone who copied some of their images that would not be restricted under American law.
- The other issue is WP:close paraphrasewhich can also be problematic. SO you can't just alter a couple of words.
- As far as your original contribution is concerned, then if you think the information is important you could say something like "Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, several of the hijackers, including Atta himself, visited strip joints." There is a paragraph in the "mistaken identity" section which discusses media reports of his drinking and I suggest these the booze and the strip bars are topics that belong together. So you could insert your point there or move this other stuff up to where you think is a better place.
- If you have difficulty laying out the reference to match others, I can help with that. One thing that I've done in my suggested wording is remove reference to "atrocity" - Wikipedia has policies on not using subjective terms like that unless attributing it to a notable source George W Bush described the attacks as... The such-and-such centre for the study of conflict said... Ossama bin Laden, on the other hand said... The other thing I missed out is the "Western Decadence". Although the intentions of the Telegraph writer are pretty clear, Wikipedia policies would really need them to have explictly stated that despite their claims to be fighting for the high moral standards expected of devout Moslems, the hijackers actually enjoyed the types of sexual pleasures which they claimed were typical of the decadent West.
- I hope this helps and isn't too much to mention in one go.--talk) 19:25, 13 November 2009 (UTC)]
I'm sorry you're feeling intimidated by this. But it's something you can pick up as you go along. It's not that I or other long term Wikipedians are professional, it's that we're experienced. The welcome message I posted above has mentioned how you can post helpme in double curly brackets here to get advice. Also every article has a talk page associated with it. So you can always say on the help page that you think mentioning something is a good idea and people will either give advice or maybe they will do it for you in which case you've still contributed by putting the idea in someone's head. There's also various places you can gert help by following the help link at the bottom of the interaction box on the left. And a final place to get help is through
You're clearly willing to think about things and not push your ideas. My experience is that there are plenty of Wikipedians who are willing to help users like that. (Of course some subjects related to religion or conflict areas such as the Middle East etc generate a lot of argument and aren't the best palces to go while you're lackign in confidence, and there are some rude individuals but you get to know who they are and can ignore them.)
EVen if you're not immediately confident enough to add content, there are other places you can help. ASw you may have noticed, I often mistype things. There are plenty of spellign mistakes or badly written sentences in WIkipedia articles. Some people (
I hoep this helps you feel that you can do something useful even if you're not confident enough to do anythign too complex yet.--
ASIRT
If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read
the guide to writing your first article.to help you create articles.You may want to consider using the Article Wizard
A tag has been placed on
If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hang on}}
to the top of