Sbelder8

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Hello, Sbelder8, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! tedder (talk) 17:43, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

school article guidelines

Please take a look at the guidelines for school articles on Wikipedia. Some notes:

• Alma maters aren't encyclopedic and often have copyright problems
• There's no reason to include a link to the district website in the school's infobox. The district already has an article at Rowland Unified School District.
• Rivalries should be cited to a reliable source- for instance, ESPN and LATimes will mention significant rivalries. Even if it was there, a wikilink to the school should be used, not an external link to the school's website.

It would be great to spend energy finding sources for items listed as {{citation needed}}, like the Blue Ribbon designation or sources showing that the alumni attended the school. tedder (talk) 15:16, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

{{help me}} thank you for your guidance. i'm a total noob at this and have no idea what i'm doing. is this where i'm supposed to put Sbelder8 (talk) 20:30, 12 August 2011 (UTC)?

If you mean your signature, then that looks just fine.  Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 22:31, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

{{help me}} How do I provide proof of our WASC accreditation, Blue Ribbon award, etc? Does it need to be a link or text or what? Thank you. Sbelder8 (talk) 06:57, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

When you edit there should be a CITE button, one click and a menu of Web, News, Book, Journal appears. It does not have to be on-line - e.g there are plenty of science articles with links to journals which are not readable on-line - but an editor could go to a library and check if he desired - the data just has to be verifiable somewhere.  Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 20:00, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

help me do i highlight where it says "citation needed" and then click on a template from the drop-down menu? when i add a web cite, what do i put for last name, first name, title, work, publisher, ref name, ref group? Sbelder8 (talk) 07:58, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

August 2011

Your addition to John A. Rowland High School has been removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without permission from the copyright holder. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other websites or printed material; such additions will be deleted. You may use external websites or publications as a source of information, but not as a source of article content such as sentences or images. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. tedder (talk) 17:17, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

I will stop editing this page. I had no idea there was a conflict of interest, I was just trying to give accurate information about the school. Thank you for taking the time to explain and instruct me, I really appreciate that. One last question: why was the California Distinguished School citation removed when other schools have that exact same citation?

I am the webmaster for John A. Rowland High School. I wrote all the text on almost every page of our site. How do I write about my high school on Wikipedia without duplicating what I've already written on my school's pages? I did copy and paste from the Rowland website not knowing this was a violation, but how do I give information about my school in a different way? Sbelder8 (talk) 07:39, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

I will give you instructions for releasing copyright for use on Wikipedia, which you can follow if you like. However, I think it is only fair to warn you that, in my experience, it is usually a waste of time doing so, as material copied from an organisation's web site is almost always of such a nature that it will be removed as promotional, even if the copyright issue is dealt with. Looking at your recent edits, I think that certainly applies to much of the text you have posted to the article. Wikipedia is not a medium for a business, school, club, or any other kind of organisation to promote or advertise itself. You should also consider carefully the fact that you have a clear [conflict of interest in editing this article. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be written from a neutral point of view, and Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline strongly discourages anyone with a close personal involvement in an organisation from making substantial or significant contributions to an article about that organisation. I don't think anyone would object to your making minor factual corrections to the article, such as updating the name of the principal if he/she is replaced, correcting spelling errors and mistakes in dates, etc, but you should avoid posting substantial new material to the article.

I will now give you the promised information about copyright release, but please consider the comments I have made above before deciding whether to make any use of this information.

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:John A. Rowland High School 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:John A. Rowland High School 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:John A. Rowland High School. JamesBWatson (talk) 10:39, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

I will not edit Rowland High School's page any more. Since everything I added has been cleaned up can the warning at the top of the page be removed? Sbelder8 (talk) 00:48, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

You can remove user warning templates at any time, as they are not intended to be a badge of shame, but rather as a message warning you not to do something. Also, please do not just copy and paste from websites to Wikipedia, as the material hasn't been released into the public domain. Even if you did donate that copyrighted material to Wikipedia, it would need to be reworded drastically to conform to the Neutral Point of View policy. This basically defeats the whole purpose of donating the material, so it is better to reword the content in the first place. Regards, Samwb123^T-C-E 02:19, 28 August 2011 (UTC)