Welcome to Wikipedia, the greatest encyclopedia on Earth! You seem to be off to a good start. Hopefully you will soon join the vast army of Wikipediholics! You may wish to review the welcome page, tutorial, and stylebook, as well as the avoiding common mistakes and Wikipedia is not pages. The Wikipedia directory is also quite useful. In addition, you might want to add yourself to the new user log; if you made any edits before getting an account, you may wish to assign those to your username.
By the way, an important tip: To sign comments on talk pages, simply type four tildes, like this: ~~~~. This will automatically add your name and the time after your comments.
Finally, here are some open tasks:
You can help improve the articles listed below! This list updates frequently, so check back here for more tasks to try. (See Wikipedia:Maintenance or the Task Center for further information.)
Help counter systemic bias by creating new articles on important women.
Help improve popular pages, especially those of low quality.
Hope to see you around the Wiki! And if you have any questions whatsoever, feel free to contact me on my talk page![[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (hopefully!)]] 05:54, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)
I've taken the liberty of moving to the Dave c page to User:Dave c. Hope you don't mind! - Ta bu shi da yu 05:55, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Zoroastrian and article editing
editHi Dave c!
This is just a sort of between-us-new-people type of note. I understand you put a lot of work into editing the Zoroaster article, and it was reverted for no reason you can understand. I don't have any comment on what you wrote or why it was reverted, but I can give you some ideas for how to make sure your edits aren't discarded in the future.
- Don't edit the article directly for big changes.
- If you work up the pragraph changes you want to make on a subpage, for example User talk:Dave c/temporary subpage, you can do all your editing and fact checking before changing the main article. If you're just correcting a date, adding a citation, or something small you don't need to build this, but a big change may take some time. And you might want to invite people to look at your change before putting it into the main article, so a separate page is a way to show the proposed change. Be Bold, but be smart about it.
- Discuss the changes you want to make on the talk page.
- People who have been working on an article for a while don't like to be surprised by sudden changes to it. If you mention your proposed change on the talk page they may be able to suggest improvements before you ever add it, which saves everyone time. Wikipedia articles are best when they are collaborations, because no one has all the information about a topic, and fresh eyes can catch spelling and grammatical errors you might miss on your own.
- Understand the concept of NPOV, and POV.
- Generally speaking, articles should be written neutrally. Editors should also be neutral in how they attempt to improve, or examine critically, an article. This doesn't always happen, and there are people who simply revert improvements to articles they don't happen to like. People also write articles which might be advertising or proselytizing, or only tell one side of a story. If you feel a change has been made which is POV, feel free to revert that change, but talk about why on the talk page. If you have reason to feel POV editing is occurring, there are procedures to resolve the dispute.
And a final note: certain users dismiss submissions from non-registered users. There is some small justification for this - unregistered users commit the vast majority of vandalism on Wikipedia, and they tend to be people new to Wikipedia and are less familiar with the focus on articles which are verifiable, well-written, and encyclopedic. (There is also an entire page discussing What Wikipedia is not) This is a bias which must be worked around, because it seems unlikely it will go away.
Oh, and welcome to Wikipedia! - Amgine 18:22, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)