User talk:Arnuldlayne

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Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to St. Charles North High School‎, did not appear to be constructive and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. 82.35.210.119 (talk) 00:55, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Please do not delete or edit legitimate talk page comments, as you did at User talk:Arnuldlayne. Such edits are disruptive and appear to be vandalism. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. 82.31.166.26 (talk) 00:22, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did to User talk:82.35.210.119. Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. 82.31.166.26 (talk) 00:22, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Please stop. If you continue to delete or edit legitimate talk page comments, you will be blocked for vandalism. 82.35.210.119 (talk) 23:39, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] response

Perhaps you misunderstand the point of wikipedia - no-one is restricted from editing articles such as the St. Charles North High School‎ article unless they "are an employee/staff". If you want to help collaborate in order to make this article better, great; however, you should bear in mind that wikipedia has (and requires in order to operate effectively) guidelines regarding appropriate and inappropriate edits, and your edits didn't meet these criteria. Please take a moment to Read about them in order to make your life easier!

Please also note that warning templates posted to user discussion pages should not be edited. Thanks! 82.35.210.119 (talk) 11:21, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Please don't remove comments on talk pages, as you've recently done on both my talk page and yours - you're more than welcome to edit your User Page, but your talk page serves a special purpose, and removing attempts by others to communicate with you and resolve issues is not productive or within the spirit of wikipedia.

In response to your request that I and others should "you in the UK deal with your stuff. Just stay on your side of the pond ok, cause I don't mess with your stuff", sorry, no - one of the beautiful things about wikipedia is that it has no nationality. Here on wikipedia, we attempt to be Neutral, and respect all points of view. To this end, you need to ensure that your contributions are positive, neutral, and well-sourced - if we all abide by these simple guidelines, we can collaborate to make wikipedia great. If we don't, wikipedia devolves and ceases to be a useful reference source for all of us.

If you'd like to work to make wikipedia better, great - please do. Repeatedly breaking rules, vandalising pages, and removing warnings from talk pages, however, will ultimately end up with your being blocked; far better to try and work productively than lose the ability to do so entirely! 82.35.210.119 (talk) 23:39, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

In response to your question, I'd like to try and make wikipedia as accurate and useful-a reference source as I possibly can. Your experience here directly contradicts the point your teacher was (possibly) trying to make; there are checks and balances that serve to move wikipedia into the right direction, and to cause it to be more positive, neutral, and well-sourced, and the fact that we're having this conversation in the first place quite clearly demonstrates this. You only have to look at some of the comparisons between wikipedia and other reference sources to see quite clearly that this comparatively new, ad-hoc, much-debated project is doing extraordinarily well compared to institutions such as the Encyclopædia Britannica, which has been around for over 200 years.

Whilst individuals may introduce content or make changes which don't adhere to those principles, they're generally simple to remove, and wikipedia as a whole is increasing in the levels of accuracy and comprehensive coverage it brings to content. Your teacher may have made the point that it shouldn't be used as a primary reference source without further research - which is of course, correct, and applies equally to any piece of reference material. Evaluation is extraordinarily important, and if you're interested in this, and the process of acquiring knowledge on the internet more broadly, I'd recommend reading this excellent article.

The NPOV and Style guidelines, which serve to provide a basis on which we can collaborate irrespective of our backgrounds and viewpoints, and our philosophy regarding Attribution serve to facilitate this process, and improve overall scholarly quest for knowledge! Read some of these articles or studies for yourself, and see what you think.

Wikipedia is a constantly changing piece of reference material, and in this respect, your teacher may have a point (which you may have oversimplified, or which (s)he may have made poorly) that what you see when you browse to a page on the site may not represent the best version of that page; you're also correct that "As long as someone wants to go search all the revisions of the page they would find all they need to know.", if we assume that "all they need to know" means "all wikipedia can tell them".

This is still no reason for vandalism, however, and it is not necessarily a bad thing; the point of a reference source is to obviate the need for time-consuming hunts and investigation for the most trivial of facts. The fact that anyone can contribute to wikipedia is extremely positive, and overwhelmingly improves the encyclopedia, not damages it.

If you don't like the dynamically changing nature of wikipedia, you're free to use one of the many sites which take wikipedia content and present it in a more permanent state. These sites combine the best aspects of wikipedia (community-created and collaborated content) with some of the better aspects of commercial and traditional works of reference (a fixed individual or body of individuals performing a 'sanity check' on the content), but at the cost of poorer coverage and slower speed.

Either way, there's an option that works for you, and contributing garbage to what amounts to a colossal and laudable piece of work, undertaken not by a publisher, country, or even continent, but a broad cross-section of humanity, really isn't reasonable, clever, or positive.

Hopefully that answers some of your questions and gives you some interesting things to read and ponder. Feel free to let me or another wikipedian know if you have more questions or want to discuss this further. :)

Welcome to wikipedia, by the way! ;) 82.35.210.119 (talk) 00:44, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Incidentally, you might consider signing your comments to make life easier for other users (See here for more info) - you can do this using four tildes, like so: ~~~~. 82.35.210.119 (talk) 00:50, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

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In response to your request "please stop messing with US affairs, being from the UK its not proper. Just stay on your side of the pond." I find it humourous that you have chosen to go by the pseudonym Arnold Layne, a single by British band Pink Floyd. 82.31.166.26 (talk) 01:47, 9 January 2008 (UTC)