September 2017

edit

The content you added to the page The mathematics of quantum gravity has been removed, as there were several problems with it.

  1. It was written in a rather informal, chatty, tone which is not the way Wikipedia aims to be written. Remarks such as "You can almost see the connection being made in Einstein’s mind" and "Let’s start by thinking again about all those things" and "You turn away, and in the act of turning you see yourself reflected in the window—Why?" may be effective in an essay as a way of making the reader feel involved, but they are not considered suitable in Wikipedia articles.
  2. The topic was essentially a duplication of that in the article Quantum gravity. It is not usually helpful to have multiple articles on the same topic, as it makes it difficult for readers to find information.
  3. The page is a redirect to Quantum gravity, so that anyone attempting to view The mathematics of quantum gravity would be taken to Quantum gravity, and would not see your contribution anyway.
  4. Most importantly, the content was copied from another source. It is almost never suitable to copy content from another web site to Wikipedia, for more than one reason, the most important being copyright. When you post anything to Wikipedia you release it for anyone in the world to reuse it, either unchanged or modified in any way whatever, for any purpose whatever, commercial or otherwise, subject to attribution to Wikipedia. It is uncommon for the owner of copyright in a text to license content for such very free reuse, and in those few occasions when they do so, we require proof of the fact. We don't assume that content is freely licensed on the unsubstantiated say so of just anyone who comes along and creates a Wikipedia account, for the simple reason that very often people come to Wikipedia and falsely claim to have copyright rights that in fact they don't have. Even in those few occasions where content published elsewhere is released under an appropriate free license, since it has not been written for the purpose of becoming a Wikipedia article it is almost always written in a form which makes it unsuitable for Wikipedia, as is the case here.

My advice to new editors is that it is best to start by making small improvements to existing articles, rather than creating new articles. That way any mistakes you make will be small ones, and you won't have the discouraging experience of repeatedly seeing hours of work deleted. Gradually, you will get to learn how Wikipedia works, and after a while you will know enough about what is acceptable to be able to write whole new articles without fear that they will be deleted. Over the years I have found that editors who start by making small changes to existing articles and work up from there have a far better chance of having a successful time here than those who jump right into creating new articles from the start. Also, if you are the author of the content, or are personally connected to him, you should almost certainly not be posting content derived from him, and you should read Wikipedia's guideline on conflict of interest before doing any more editing. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 11:09, 23 September 2017 (UTC)Reply