User:Tazmaniacs

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[edit] News

• A tsunami triggered by an earthquake strikes the Solomon Islands (flag pictured), killing at least 15 and leaving thousands homeless.
• Iranians protest outside the British embassy in Tehran in response to the ongoing dispute over the capture of Royal Navy personnel off the Iraq-Iran coast.
• Michael Phelps breaks five world records in swimming at the 2007 World Aquatics Championships in Melbourne, Australia, becoming the first swimmer to win seven gold medals at a single championship; seven other world records are also broken.
• Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks receives the first sentence from the Guantanamo military commission, and the first conviction in a U.S. war crimes trial since World War II.
• In Mauritania, Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi is declared the winner of the presidential election, the final stage of the transition to civilian rule since the military coup of 2005.

• Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko dissolves the parliament during a nationally televised speech, calling for early parliamentary elections on 27 May 2007. (All Headline News)
• India's Foreign Secretary, Shivshankar Menon, says that Iran is likely to get an observor status in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. (IHT) (Times of India)
• United States Presidential Election, 2008: Former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson announces his candidacy for president. (CNN)
• Insurgency in Somalia: An Ethiopian helicopter is downed in Mogadishu as Ethiopian and Somali government troops battle insurgents. (BBC)
• The United States House of Representatives narrowly passes a US$2.9 trillion budget blueprint which results in a surplus after five years but relies heavily on the expiration of the Bush tax cuts to do so. The United States Senate passed a similar budget blueprint last week with negotiations to ensue. (AP via San Francisco Examiner)

Other current events:

• Iran's nuclear program
• Iraqi insurgency

[edit] Wikipedia?

"The phenomenal but unreliable online encyclopedia is best used with a healthy dose of scepticism", correctly stated The Times of London on July 21, 2006. But again, reading The Times of London as the New York Times is also done with a "healthy dose of scepticism". Thus, the importance of sources...

GUIDELINES:

• WP:SOURCE (Attribution)
  • WP:NOR (No original research - OR)
  • WP:SYNT (No synthesis of sources for OR)
• WP:CITE sources
• WP:AUW, WP:DATE and WP:CONTEXT: stop overlinking!
  • This guideline recalls that there are three ways to cite sources. I do not like Citation templates, as they make very complex edit pages and are more bother than anything else. You can achieve exactly the same result without taking so much place on the edit page. In particular, they are not appropriate to face link rot. I hate the practice of deleting a newspaper source because the link doesn't work any more. You can't delete past history: the article still exists, and the link should be removed without deleting the source.
• Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles#Provide context for the reader. Necessary, and all too often forgotten. Think that an alien is going to read this or that article.
• Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context It is tiring to see all country names wikilinked ten times, when you perfectly know that 0,0001% of the reader is going to click on, say, the United States. If you really need to look information on the US, you surely can Google "United States" up and find the relevant Wiki page.

So, healthy dose of scepticism, as always should we add, and also, when you find something really interesting, be sure to make a permanent link (as done immediately above) or even copy it into your personal files. And, more important than anything else, be sure to check Reliable sources, and Cite sources, as well as Wikipedia:Footnotes on how to set them up. Post a message here (I will adress content dispute on the relevant talk pages, but you might want to let me know by leaving me a post if you're in a hurry for the answer).