User talk:24.130.11.107

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[edit] Welcome

Welcome

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

You are welcome to continue editing articles without logging in, but you may wish to create an account. Doing so is free, requires no personal information, and provides several benefits. If you edit without a username, your IP address is used to identify you instead.

In any case, I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your comments on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your IP address (or username if you're logged in) and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! -- ReyBrujo (talk) 23:28, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] References

Hey there! I see you are requesting English sources in articles. Please note that foreign sources are accepted in our Verifiability policy. Therefore, using the {{unreferenced}} template may be not correct in some cases. If you want additional sources, consider using {{more sources}} instead. Also, leaving a note in the talk page where you added the template is considered good etiquette. Thanks for participating! -- ReyBrujo (talk) 23:28, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Requests for English Citations

Hi there! Answers for your comments:

  1. Usually yes, people will check the history to see why the tag was added, so thanks for adding descriptive summaries. However, we can never know how long the article can become, or when will the article be checked. If tomorrow someone checks the article, he can easily find the revision in which the tag was added. However, if the article grows with hundreds of revisions, it may be harder to find the exact revision in which it was added (that is why it is a good idea to prefix your comment with the tag, like Adding {{unreferenced}} tag, article has so many paragraphs without reference that it justifies it so that, whenever the history becomes too long, one could do a search for the tag and find it in the history). Adding a note in the talk page is usually good because it encourages discussion (someone who arrives late to the article is able to quickly grasp why the tag was added, and either agree or disagree with it, give suggestions about text to remove or another course of action). In any case, just adding an edit summary is more than what many others do, so thanks for doing that!
  2. I agree that the policy states "readers can verify for themselves" and "readers can check that it agrees with article content". However, we are built around the good faith assumption: you may not be able to verify the information (which contradict the verifiability policy!) but someone else could. Imagine if we were following the letter instead of the spirit of the policy (what is known as wikilawyering): I would not be able to add a citation to a magazine because you would not be able to verify that easily (you would need to buy that specific release number) or a historical book (which may be already out of print, or exist just a few volumes worldwide). I would not be able to cite a video (the program may not air anymore, you would not be able to get a copy, and I would not be able to share it because it is copyright violation). Thanks to the AGF policy, we trust in our fellow editors. You may not be able to verify it. I may not be able to verify it. But someone who knows Japanese may. This is similar to discussions about free pictures: Sometimes an editor will say "I cannot go to Japan to take a picture of this artist, that is why we should use a fair use image" to which I answer "The beauty of Wikipedia is that you are a link, not the full chain. If you cannot supply that free image, someone in Japan may. Trust in your peers."
  3. True, sometimes it is possible an article that has been deleted in another wiki language comes here using references from other languages that make it harder to verify. However, we go back to the previous point: none of us can verify every single article in Wikipedia (even though that would be ideal), otherwise we would only be able to use very few references, mostly online (and even then, some countries block access to determined urls, so for those countries the articles would be unreferenced!). So, we go back to the previous point: trust your peers. Feel free to tag articles and open discussions about whether an article appears unreferenced or unverifiable, to request more references, or to put skepticism in the reliability of some references. Some day someone will come and fix the article for you, or reply demonstrating that you were mistaken.
  4. Finally, about assessments: as a reader, anyone should be able to read an article and understand it, regardless of your technical level. When an article fails in that goal, it should be indicated in the talk page. So, it is possible that you can give a better assessment to English topics, but you can still give a good assessment to articles based in non-English elements. Truly speaking, every single article in Wikipedia would need a {{refimprove}} tag, because there can never be "too few" references. So, following the letter, you have the right to go through every single article and tag them all with that tag. But that is not very useful for us: we need to know the point of view of readers. If you find something fishy, feel free to point that out. As long as you are polite and demonstrate a minimum interest in resolving the issue (for example, having read the full section before commenting, following comments up and not just forgetting about them, and having an open mind, knowing that certain topics may have "fans" that will be hard to talk to), nobody will object if decide to take stronger measures (like deleting a full paragraph because it is not referenced, rewriting a long paragraph to make it clear, etc).
  5. A last point: there is almost a template for every article problem. When needing more sources, you have the {{refimprove}}, for possible misinterpretations of references you have {{citecheck}}, for articles citing a single source only (which may bring problems since we need to weight all sides in a discussion) {{onesource}}, etc. I don't even know all of them, just the most important ones, but hopefully someone else (just as I did earlier) will point you out the right templates in determined situations. As you can imagine, this may bring some problems (like you adding a {{unreferenced}} tag but someone else removing it because there are a few references), that is why a post in the talk page of the user or the article itself to make your point even clearer than the edit summary will help others to understand why you used a template and point you to the right one in that situation.

Thanks again for your expanded point of view. Conversations like that let us, editors who have been around for enough time to view everything from the editing point of view instead of the reading point of view, know what is right and what is wrong in an article. Cheers! -- ReyBrujo (talk) 04:37, 30 March 2008 (UTC)