Ab022688

Hello, Ab022688, and Welcome to Wikipedia! Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or or by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Also, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! SwisterTwister talk 03:01, 27 April 2012 (UTC) Getting started Introduction The five pillars of Wikipedia How to edit a page Intuitive guide to Wikipedia Finding your way around Table of contents Department directory Editing articles How to develop an article Manual of Style Getting help Frequently asked questions Cheatsheet Where to ask a question Help pages New contributors' help page Article Wizard – a Wizard to help you create articles How you can help Contributing to Wikipedia Community Portal Join a WikiProject Follow Wikipedia etiquette Practice civility

Copyright problems with Aristolochia chilensis

Hello. Concerning your contribution, Aristolochia chilensis, please note that Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted text or images obtained from other web sites or printed material, without the permission of the author(s). This article or image appears to be a direct copy from http://www.chileflora.com/Florachilena/FloraEnglish/HighResPages/EH0472.htm. As a copyright violation, Aristolochia chilensis appears to qualify for deletion under the speedy deletion criteria. Aristolochia chilensis has been tagged for deletion, and may have been deleted by the time you see this message.

If you believe that the article or image is not a copyright violation, or if you have permission from the copyright holder to release the content freely under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) then you should do one of the following:

• If you have permission from the author, leave a message explaining the details at Talk:Aristolochia chilensis and send an email with the message to permissions-enwikimedia.org. See Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission for instructions.
• If a note on the original website states that it is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license, leave a note at Talk:Aristolochia chilensis with a link to where we can find that note.
• If you hold the copyright to the material: send an e-mail from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-enwikimedia.org or a postal message to the Wikimedia Foundation permitting re-use under the CC-BY-SA and GFDL, and note that you have done so on Talk:Aristolochia chilensis.

However, for textual content, you may simply consider rewriting the content in your own words. While contributions are appreciated, Wikipedia must require all contributors to understand and comply with its copyright policy. Wikipedia takes copyright concerns very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. Thank you. Choess (talk) 21:41, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Removing Speedy at Aristolochia chilensis

Welcome to Wikipedia, thank you for taking the time to create a page here. It might not have been your intention, but you recently removed a speedy deletion tag from a page you created yourself. Because Wikipedia policy does not allow the creator of the page to remove deletion tags, an automated program has replaced the deletion tag you removed from Aristolochia chilensis. Please do not continue to remove the deletion tag, instead, if you disagree with the deletion, you can follow these steps:

1. Go to the page by clicking this link. Once there, select the button that says Click here to contest this speedy deletion.
2. This will take you to the talk page, where you can make your case by explaining why the page does not meet Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion.

Administrators will look at your reasoning before deciding what to do. For further help about the deletion, you could contact the user who first placed the tag or a highly active user who is willing to help with deletion. This message was left by a bot, so please do not contact the bot about the deletion. Thank you, - SDPatrolBot (talk) 21:56, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

It's OK, I've removed the tag since you removed the copy-and-pasted content. Just make sure you're writing articles in your own words. (You don't want to follow the sentence structure of the source too closely, either; see Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing.) In my experience, the best way to avoid that is to have more than one source, and maybe make yourself an outline of what you want to write into the article so you're not spending too long drawing from any single source. This page is good for helping organize botanical articles. If you'd like me to help you with this article, please leave a note on my talk page. Choess (talk) 00:10, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Ah, OK. The thing about the pictures is that if you have permission to use them here, Wikipedia needs a central way to track that the copyright holder gave their permission. (In other words, they want to hear directly from the copyright holder in a specific way, so they don't have to deal with person A saying "Person B said I could use this," and 6 months later Person B shows up and denies giving permission and gets all bent out of shape.) Fortunately, there is a central clearinghouse called OTRS to handle this. Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission describes the process. The person who has copyright does have to release the images under a free license, and not just for use on English Wikipedia alone. See the "When permission is confirmed" section on that page for what to do when you have a written release from the copyright holder.

In the meantime, I'm going to request that FlickrUploadBot move some of those freely-licensed images onto Commons so that we have some images for your article while the OTRS ticket works its way through the system. You can use your original image once the copyright issues get sorted, but that way we'll have a stopgap image in there.

I'll be back afterwards with some more tips on writing and source use. By the way, which college or university do you attend, if you don't mind my asking? I think I've helped with a few articles from your class. And thanks for coming to the talk pages to discuss this—a lot of people just write their articles and disappear, and that's a little frustrating for the active editors here. (It feels like we're shouting into the void...) Choess (talk) 01:47, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, the Flickr upload bot doesn't seem to be working right now, but I'll try to get those backup photos on later in the weekend. One of my former students is graduating from Stony Brook this year, but I think he's a premed, so I'm not sure you'd know him—Nikhil Sonalkar. I know Dr. Raleigh in the chem dept. too, although it's been a long time since we talked.

I know what you mean about Wikipedia being more complicated than it looks. I've been here about seven years (!) now, and it was a going concern when I arrived, and in Internet time, that's more than long enough to build an elaborate civilization and lots of twisty rules and customs. (Speaking of which, if you put ~~~~ at the end of each post when you post on a talk page, the software will automatically sign it for you so people know who made it.) The thing is, there are quite a few people around here who know how to format a taxobox or which categories to add or where to put the bold at the beginning of an article, so you don't need to sweat the small stuff. Once your article is out there, people will come in and tweak the little things like that.

As far as how to write an article that will look good and won't get banged around, I suggest approaching it a bit like a short paper. First, figure out what things you want to include—draw up a sort of an outline. (That plant article template gives a good idea of what sections you'd usually find in a plant article.) Then, pull some sources together. You can probably get some from Google Scholar. Start by looking for the more general, descriptive articles. You don't want to get bogged down in a lot of highly technical papers describing some obscure plant-insect interaction where your species is one of many getting studied. Sometimes those papers will include a useful short description, though (like the one I linked at Talk:Aristolochia chilensis) and you can use that and not worry about the rest. You have better library/journal access than I do, so you might want to see what you can find there. If you have access to some floras covering Chile and that part of South America, they should have descriptions of the plant, its habitat, and distribution.

Once you have some sources on hand, sit down and tackle a section. Look over your sources, and then write a paragraph or two summarizing them. Write as if you were explaining things to a classmate, so they could understand where the plant lives or what it would look like if you were out collecting and so on. It's OK to use some technical terms (after all, you've all been taking plant systematics!), but the more obscure ones should get wikilinked with [[ and ]]. Then, add your references. For each sentence, after the period, put <ref>text of reference here</ref> and give the reference where people can look up the information in that sentence, so they know it's true. Wait! You don't have to have a reference after every single sentence--if you have several sentences or a paragraph that all came from the same reference, just put the reference at the end. If you're going to use a source multiple times in the article, you can give it a name the first time you use it: <ref name="some name">text of reference</ref> and then you just have to put <ref name="some name" /> later on and it will duplicate the footnote. Just keep doing that for each section. Some sections, like the description of the plant, will probably be longer and harder to write, while things like the distribution will probably be fairly quick and easy.

That's the key, really. You and your classmates should be the experts on whatever plant you've chosen: focus on getting that knowledge across, together with the sources so other people can verify it. When you've managed to do that, it's easy enough to get help tidying up the references and making the formatting nice. Once an article is in the main space of the encyclopedia (out of the sandbox), you can create a talk page for it and add {{WikiProject Plants}} at the top. That will let the WikiProject Plants people know there's a new article that needs to be assessed. Usually we can spot plants articles even before that, though, because a bot runs every few days and generates a list of new articles that might be about plants. (That's how I found yours.) And the WikiProject has a talk page if you need to flag down a Wikipedia-active botanist or ask a botanical question. I'd better go now (long post, and I have a botanical club trip tomorrow), but pass this on to your classmates. We're unlikely to see their articles until they get them out of their sandboxes, and if there's a big issue with the article (copyright, medical claims, etc.), they're going to want us to spot that and tell them sooner rather than later. Good night! Choess (talk) 04:35, 28 April 2012 (UTC)