User talk:Agentbay

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Welcome!

Hello, Agentbay, 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:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome!  Will (Talk - contribs) 04:54, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Don't look like a vandal. Please provide an edit summary when you edit.

When editing an article on Wikipedia there is a small field labeled "Edit summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this:

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The text written here will appear on the Recent changes page, in the page revision history, on the diff page, and in the watchlists of users who are watching that article. See m:Help:Edit summary for full information on this feature.

Filling in the edit summary field greatly helps your fellow contributors in understanding what you changed, so please always fill in the edit summary field, especially for big edits or when you are making subtle but important changes, like changing dates or numbers. Thank you. Will (Talk - contribs) 05:05, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your forgot to sign you post at Talk:Real World/Road Rules Challenge: The Duel.

Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You may also click on the signature button Image:Wikisigbutton.png located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! Will (Talk - contribs) 05:06, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Umiat, Alaska

I noticed you created this article. The contents of the article are pretty similar to what is found in http://www.prudhoebay.com/communities_Umiat.htm, which can be considered copyright violation. Please, when creating articles, write them with your own words. If you use a determined page or book to write it, don't forget to add it as a reference. In this case, I am adding the link as reference, and formatting it around. However, if new articles are found that are very similar to already published works, they will be deleted on sight under G12 criteria for copyright violation. Good luck! -- ReyBrujo 05:25, 20 January 2007 (UTC)


Is there a certain way to reference a link. not ure how to do that?

[edit] survivor agent

This was tagged for speedy deletion on the grounds of notability and later deleted by me. The article must have verifiable independent sources to show that it meets these guidelines. It also needs a more encyclopaedic style. I'll put the text here so that you can work on it if you feel that it can be made to meet the criteria. jimfbleak 20:29, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Survivor Agent

Hi! Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where everyone can edit. However, there is a certain "condition" that must be fulfilled in every article: it must be verifiable. What does "verifiable" mean? Well, that it exists and can be proven to exist. Imagine you reach the article Neurofibromatosis type I. You have no idea what is that about, and read the article. Once you finish reading it, you have a doubt: "Is this true, or someone is kidding?" How would you know someone did not just made this up? By looking at the given references. With references (that is, citations from other sources), you can write an article and point readers to another place to confirm what you wrote is true. Suppose an article reads "The sea is blue, however in 1910, the sea was yellow for approximately 2 hours." You would not believe that, right? However, if the sentence includes a citation, you would. A sentence like "The sea is blue. However, in a strange event in 1910 recorded by "Ye olde news", the most popular newspaper at the time, the sea was found to be yellow for 2 hours. [Ye olde news #10,132, October 1910, p. 15] has now a reference. If you don't believe what is written in Wikipedia, you can search for "Ye olde news" number 10,132, check page 15 and see if, indeed, they confirmed the sea was yellow.

Now, as you can imagine, anyone can "create" a reference. I could create a GeoCities page, put information there, and then reference an article with that page. That is considered original research, and is not accepted by Wikipedia. Why? Because, as I said, nobody checked the information you have written is true. Suppose I add, in the sugar article, that if you mix sugar with water and salt, you get gold. Of course, people would remove it because there is no reference. So, I create a GeoCities page, write this there, and then write the same sentence in the sugar article, adding a reference to the GeoCities page. The people there won't accept it because that page is not a reliable source. Imagine if we were to allow any GeoCities or Tripod page in the world to be used as reference, it would be chaotic. Everyone would create his own page to push his own point of view. Thus, Wikipedia says we can use only "reliable sources". Reliable sources are considered "reliable" between casual and experienced people. In example, BBC, NBC, New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC and CNN for news, eWeek and Ars Technica for technological news, IGN, GameSpy, Gamasutra for games, etc, are considered reliable sources, because people trust them. How they became "trustworthy"? Well, I guess years of providing good information, a corporation that backs them, an organized structure (a CEO, a director, a chief editor, editors and journalists, etc).

So, until now we know that Wikipedia accepts information that can be referenced through a reliable source. So, I cannot write "Cows fly." referencing a GeoCities page, but I can write "Cows fly." referencing Science.

But, these reliable sources also give information that can be considered "trivial". In example, the New York Times can publish a very small article about a man who spoke only one word in his death bed. If you consider what I said before, we would say "This guy can have an article in Wikipedia because we can reference New York Times, which is a reliable source". However, if that were allowed, we would have a lot of information that would be unnecessary (in example, the name of the woman who was killed in a car accident in a village, the bowman who killed an hippopotamus with a single arrow, etc, etc, etc. In order to prevent this, Wikipedia has a set of "rules" known as notability guidelines. The notability guideline tries to draw a line to separate the "trivial" information from the information that can be considered necessary. To do this, it considers a lot of things, but basically, "Is this event/person so notable that someone in another country in another continent may ever search information about it/him?" So, a woman who died in a car accident in a small town in Argentina is not notable, because chances are that nobody ever would search for her. But the assassin of a president is clearly notable because, contrary to the crash accident, there are good chances media around the world had given the news. A turtle mascot dying in a family's house is not notable, but a 750 years old turtle dying in a zoo certainly is (again, if the event had been covered by reliable sources, which is likely to).

To conclude, an article must be verifiable and notable. If it is notable (let's suppose, a man who can breath water) but is not verifiable (the news appeared in a blog and a forum), then it cannot stay. If it is verifiable (a woman died in a car accident, newspaper picked the information up) but not notable (it was a simple car accident in a town), then it cannot stay. If it is both verifiable and notable (the first dog in the space was named Laika, in example) then it can stay.

Now, with all this introduction, you created an article about Survivor Agent, a kind of game. As I had explained, you need to do two things: give reliable sources, and prove its notability. Unluckily, the article had had no reliable sources. In other words, you could not prove the topic (in this case, the game) is so important that appeared in newspaper, television or gaming magazines. With no reliable sources to reference the information there, the article must be deleted. Also, the game appears to be non notable. Only 21 players? Consider other games like hide and seek, thumb wrestling, etc. These games are notable and can be referenced. They are basically human knowledge, played for centuries. I guess in most countries in the world you can find someone who knows how to play, right? Now, truthfully, is a game that had a competition with 21 players in a championship as notable as "thumb wrestling"? There is a notability guide, Wikipedia is not for things made up in school one day, which basically says what I have told you here: that a game should be verifiable by reliable sources, it must be notable, etc.

So, if you want the article to stay in Wikipedia, you need to find reliable sources and prove that the game is notable (a game is not really notable if it is played by 100 persons, but it gets some notability if it is played by over a million, just to give you an idea). I hope I have cleared any doubt you may have had. Cheers! -- ReyBrujo 05:10, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I think while I've slept ReyBrujo has said it all. One reason I deleted was that there were, in web terms, a minute number of players. Good luck in attempting to show notability, but you may have to accept that it may not currently be possible. Internet topics and pop bands must be the serious articles that are most often deleted, because they are of local or restricted interest, but cannot surmount the notability hurdle. jimfbleak 06:49, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
No problem. It seems hard that worthy efforts are treated the same as some junk that a bored kid wrote in 20 seconds, but there is an increasing attempt to standardise notability. The glaring exception is places. In the early days, a bot "wrote" thousands of place articles based on the US census data. In consequence all towns and villages are notable. jimfbleak 17:45, 25 January 2007 (UTC)