Wannabex

Greetings...

Hello, Wannabex, and welcome to Wikipedia!

To get started, click on the link that says "welcome".

I (and the rest of us here, too) hope you like it here and decide to stay!

Happy editing! Hananekosan (talk) 19:39, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

August 2009

Welcome to Wikipedia. It might not have been your intention, but your recent edit removed content from Fred_St-Gelais. When removing text, please specify a reason in the edit summary and discuss edits that are likely to be controversial on the article's talk page. If this was a mistake, don't worry; the text has been restored, as you can see from the page history. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia, and if you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. Hananekosan (talk) 19:44, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

@Hananekosan, Yes, it was me, I didn't realize I wasn't logged in... Sorry, I really am a newbie! Thanks a million for helping out, it is really appreciated, especially since writing wiki articles is way out of my comfort zone...Wannabex (talk) 22:03, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Wannabex, 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:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

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 {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Hananekosan (talk) 21:21, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Second welcome and misc.

Hi, I added a second welcome message here because it contains some links to general wikipedia guidelines as well as information about writing articles. I had only included the simply welcome initially because I've very new to wikipedia myself and I don't consider myself to be the best person to help a newbie out. I was hoping someone with more experience would come along and give this more extensive welcome, but there are so many areas for the administrators to patrol, it doesn't always happen. The important thing for you to know is how to flag questions on your talk page (this page) so you can get help.

You had commented in the talk page of your article that you're not a programmer. No worries about that. You absolutely don't need to be to use wikipedia. It just takes some getting used to. I am going to revisit the issues about the article in its discussion page, thanks. Hananekosan (talk) 21:28, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Requests for new articles

Hello again. In the talk page for the Fred St-Gelais article, you had commented that you didn't know if you should have just waited for some wikipedia admin to eventually get around to creating an article on the topic, and I wanted to give some insight into how it works. Certainly, you'd have been welcome to do so, but the chances of any particular topic occurring to a wikipedian are slim, and that approach would likely take a very long time. Another method is that anyone is welcome to request an article on any subject at any time. To read more about that, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles. And, finally, anyone can create an article about anything (that doesn't mean it won't get deleted for not meeting standards, though). One doesn't need to be an administrator or even have a wikipedia user name to create or edit articles. We're very serious about wikipedia being by everyone for everyone. So, to summarize, what you did by creating the article is perfectly fine. In fact, it's appreciated. Please don't let the fact that the article was tagged deter you from participating in wikipedia! Those tags aren't meant to offend and are really just a way to notify the article's contributors about what needs to be done, as well as for the community to track issues. All new articles need work, but I do think yours is well on the way to being informative and to having all of its issues resolved and, thus, tags removed. Hananekosan (talk) 22:24, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Request for more information, further discussion of content

Hi again. Can you point me toward some external websites that list the awards you've been given? I am not doubting that you received and earned them, I just need verifiable sources I can cite so I can include information about them in the article. One of the main pillars of wikipedia is that information must be verifiable. I'm conducting my own search, but am having a hard time thus far. Also, do you know which issues of "Recording Magazine" contain articles about you? And are these articles or the containing issues available online anywhere? Those are excellent, neutral, verifiable, third-party sources of information and we should use them!

Partly what's meant by "wiki"fying something is to make it encyclopedic and follow a certain writing style. For instance, we can't say that you're 33 because that's a number that will change regularly, and to write it this way is not "wiki"fied. Instead, we could say you were born on 01 January 1976 as that is information that won't need to be maintained and, hence, is encyclopedic and so forth. Ideally, though, this information would be published somewhere so we can cite it. We can also say that you were born in 1976 (I assume). Does this make sense? Please respond here or on my talk page and I'll help work on this with you. I truly believe the first article is the most daunting. Most new users are not brave enough to try to write a new article as their first project. You'll have wikipedia mastered in no time and it sounds like you have a lot of skills you can bring to the table in other areas as well (French language translation; knowledge of Quebec; knowledge of many areas of music, and so on). Thanks. Hananekosan (talk) 23:07, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

You asked earlier but I forgot to comment on whether you can just delete the whole article. You certainly can delete all the text (though it's not usually encouraged to delete tags others have made), and then request that the page be deleted since it contains no content (this is the usual process once a page has been created), but please don't! I know the process of creating an article can be daunting but you're already part way there! Hananekosan (talk) 04:38, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Major rewrite/expansion underway at Fred St-Gelais

to address some of the issues. To work on some of the issues, I had to rewrite some of your text to meet style guidelines, other rules, or just for flow. If I've messed anything up, it wasn't intentional. Just let me know what doesn't work for you and why, and we'll come up with something that makes up both happy and abides by the rules. I flagged quite a few to do items within the article itself, as well as on the talk page. As a general rule, the main article is live at all times so we should keep discussion of what needs to be done to the topic out of the article as much as possible. Let me know if you have any questions. Hananekosan (talk) 09:40, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks again

...For all the help. as I said, I have a lot of material that could be considered reliable source, but not everything is on the web. How do I go about giving what I do find on the web to you? paste the link here? ThanksWannabex (talk) 15:37, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Millions of links

I found a whole bunch of links giving sources to most of the stuff above some things are too old for me to find anything on the web, si I will just go and delete them. I will add them back once I find sources. How can I send you the links?Wannabex (talk) 17:17, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Figured it out

I just figured out how to add "citations" or "references"!!!! I'm curious as to why I need so much! Like, for the fact that I live in montreal, that I produced no-name local bands in the 90's, that I studied music, and that I singed, played and programmed stuff on local jingles when I started out! There's certainly no records of that on the web, other than in the biography everybody is already using on the net (the one on fredstgelais.com. What should we do? Because I read tons of biographies on wikipedia, and most of them aren't referenced to anything, even the ones from lesser known individuals...Wannabex (talk) 19:03, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.20.114.206 (talk) 17:06, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for the delay. I've been working away on the page and haven't had a chance to check the talk pages to see if you had left any questions for me. I know there are tons of biographies all over wikipedia that aren't very well cited and they will eventually, probably get caught. The idea is that wikipedia, though available for the public to use and contribute to, should be like an encyclopedia in that every statement it makes can be backed up by a verifiable, neutral source. You and I both know that this doesn't always happen, but the better articles do have references to substantiate just about everything that's said. (Think of it this way: if you needed to prepare a factual report on me life from age 16 on for some reason and you had two potential sources of information. The first being my blabber-mouth sibling whose prone to exaggeration; the second being the complete, with references, background dossier my work has on me in order to have me bonded and insured due to the nature of my work, which one are you going to pick if your grade depends on being able to prove all of the claims you make in the report? I'm not sure that makes perfect sense, but I hope it gives you an idea. In summary, wikipedia wants to be a reliable source of information, and that means we need lots and lots of citations. You are absolutely right that there are lots of articles that don't meet these standards. They will eventually get tagged and have to be fixed or they will be deleted. (And feel free to tag articles as you see fit, as well as to edit articles when you see corrections that need to be made or know of additional information that could be added.)

You don't have to have citations for everything, just the things you want to mention in your article. Since your article initially mentioned the jingles, it got tagged asking for references that back up that claim is all. I think we've rewritten around that nicely, though. And I dropped the request for the citation about living in Montreal. I only ever tagged that in the first place because I had falsely assumed that move had happened before your name became more well known and their might have been some news about it when you moved. Does that make sense?

Anyhow, like I said, I think we're at a stage now where nearly all the tags can come off of your article. I did add back in the stuff about Lilith Fair and the stuff about Hépatite B's album nomination and 3 top 20 hits, as I think these help validate that you're noteworthy enough to warrant having a page on wikipedia (these requirements are there because, without them, everyone would create a page and say anything they want and it would no longer be a reference material/encyclopedia. It would be more like a social app or public diary.

When you have a chance, you might want to read some of the documents I sent to you in the welcome messages. You don't have to read them all at once, but I think that you'll find the answers/explanations to everything wikipedia in those pages, elsewhere in wikipedia, or by asking.

Let me know if you have any other questions or need anything else. We nearly have the same b-day, by the way. Mine is 8/31/74.

P.S. I should mention that the majority of the new pages that are created on wikipedia need a lot more work than yours does to meet standards. Many are spam, many just don't want to follow the rules, and many just plain won't try to do anything to help themselves fix their own pages. They expect someone else to do it for them, but we're all volunteers here, so they eventually leave and eventually when enough time lapses that it's become clear that no one is going to address the issues in the articles, they are deleted. I know this process has been frustrating for you but I just want to give you props for helping to get the issues resolved so quickly! Now, if you feel like it, you can create an article on Hépatite B, help out by translating articles into French, expanding your article further, etc. There's no end to projects here and you can do as little or as much as you like, anytime. Thanks for joining us here at Wikipedia! Hananekosan (talk) 02:59, 24 August 2009 (UTC)