User talk:Mwhiz

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[edit] Welcome to Wikipedia!

Hello Mwhiz, welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like it here and decide to stay. I'm not really sure who you are, but we probably know each other. Anyway, here are some tips that will make things easier for you here on Wikipedia:

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills.

If, for some reason, you are unable to fix a problem yourself, feel free to ask someone else to do it. Wikipedia has a vibrant community of contributors who have a wide range of skills and specialties, and many of them would be glad to help. There are also the help pages for self-help and the village pump and IRC Channels, where you are more than welcome to ask for assistance. You should also feel free to ask me on my Talk page.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes(~~~~) produces your name and the current date. Please do not add this signature to encyclopedia articles you may edit, however, even if you have created them. Wikipedia articles are owned by the community, not by any one person. Your contribution is credited on aticles' history pages. Again, welcome! —WAvegetarian•(talk) 21:33, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Request for edit summary

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

Edit summary text box

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. – Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 07:28, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

You recently made an edit to the article on Garfield High School (Seattle, Washington) in which you left no edit summary and removed a citations needed tag. Please explain this. You did not add any citations so the section still needs them. You also should use edit summaries. Please either add citations, replace the tag, or explain what you are doing on the talk page. Thanks—WAvegetarian•(talk) 04:48, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "verified"?

You recently removed a {{verify}} tag from the Spirit section of the GHS article without actually verifying anything. The verification policy requires citing of reliable sources. Please do not remove maintenance notices from pages unless the required changes have been made. If you are uncertain whether the page requires further work, or if you disagree with the notice, please discuss these issues on the page's talk page before removing the notice from the page. These notices and comments are needed to establish community consensus about the status of a page. Thank you. —WAvegetarian•(talk) 19:50, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

As a student at Garfield High School I can attest to the accuracy of the lyrics of the school song posted in the article on GHS. there is such a thing as an Original Document, and in this case, the wikipedia article on GHS serves the original document. any questions?
No offense, but if being from GHS made one a reliable source I could have verified it myself. Wikipedia is not a primary source. As an encyclopedia, it is a secondary, tertiary or more further removed source. We are not a forum for original research. Please read the pages linked to by me in my last two comments so that you can understand exactly what I meant by them. Thanks.—WAvegetarian•(talk) 02:56, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I just discovered that I have a handwritten sheet of paper from marching band with the school song on it!! how convenient! so wikipedia isn't the original document! maybe you should stop being so anal about sources, there are such things as sources that aren't online. don't you have something better to do then ensure the accuracy of a school song? for crying out loud.
Chill out! I have high standards for the article because I hope for it to be a featured article like Stuyvesant High School eventually. I also see no reason why any article should be intentionally left behind policy, which is to verify things with citations as I mentioned above. I also said nothing about sources appearing online. In fact, if you check the reliable source page I linked to 48 hours ago you would read: "In this sense a book or journal citation is superior to an online source where the link may become broken. Some web resources have editorial policies which lead to a lack of persistence; therefore, web citations should be treated with caution." The proper thing to cite would be an Arrow or Mess issue with it. Even having a mess cite for the band having played the song would be better than nothing. Don't get me wrong; I have no problem with it being there. It's just that high school articles, and the GHS page in particular, draw lots of original reasearch which may be fine as a provider of information, but as it is unverifiable it doesn't provide knowledge, i.e. there is no way to know it is true. I take a hard line on this sort of thing because I and others have fought for high schools to be included at all as articles. Many people feel that they don't belong because they draw edits that don't adhere to our policies more than other categories of articles. It shouldn't be that hard to find a reference for it. It probably appears in the programs from graduations, etc. I'm too busy packing to go back to school for 2nd semester to look right now, but I'll look for mine in June when I get back. (time delay of 1 minute) I just did a Google search for a citation. If you had used decent search terms when/if you searched it would have jumped out at you. I searched "garfield high" + "I'm so glad"[1]. The results are a relevant blog(X, not reliable), this article (X, self-reference), two MySpace profiles (X, shouldn't have to explain this), and then the VolleyDogs website (√, semi-official source giving a citation for the usage of the song). Just below that is the Garfield High School Foundation giving further citations for the song. As a current student I'm sure it wouldn't be too much of a burden to ask Miranda if there is a way to search the Messenger/Harbinger/whatever else records to find a citation. To give you an idea of how much citations matter, I made multiple inquiries through email, telephone, web forms, and person to acquire a copy of a page from a weekly publication of Johns Hopkins University from 1963. What you are doing when you contribute to Wikipedia, whether you realize it or not, is editing the largest encyclopedia in the history of the world. I reserve my right to take it seriously and have pride in what we accomplish. Research isn't necessarily boring. I can also say that it will serve you well in college.—WAvegetarian•(talk) 09:00, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

I understand that this is a big endeavor with a huge audience, etc. etc. I completely agree that content needs to have a source, but I think there are much more pressing issues on wikipedia than worrying about the citations for a school song. for example, there are many articles that claim to be scientifically accurate and are in fact complete bogus. cleaning up those articles is much more important than searching for these kinds of citations. in fact, if you look at the wikipedia rules you'll discover that purposefully promoting things on wikipedia is forbidden. I can easily argue that by neglecting to work on patently incorrect articles and instead, working on small additions to the article about the high school you graduated from, you are working against wiki rules. i'm not saying that things don't need to be sourced, just that there are other things vastly more urgent to do on wikipedia then surfing through and putting up a bunch of "citation needed" signs.

If you look at my contributions you will see I have been quite busy doing other things. I have almost 1400 pages on my watchlist, which I usually check multiple times a day. You have made fewer than 70 edits to Wikipedia. Over 8% of your edits have been to your user page, almost 6.5% have been to my talk page. You have only multiple edits to 8 articles and made more than 2 edits to only 3, of which only one you have made more edits to than your own user page. All of that is fine as you are new here. You have been making valuable contributions. That said, I suggest you make some more contributions before you begin to belittle the the contributions of others. Better yet, don't start. I have been here for a long time. I am an administrator and know the "wikipedia rules" fairly well as I am part of the enforcement authority for them. All contributions are necessary and valuable. In my time before being an administrator I did just about everything there was to do. I have expened at least 5 times more effort on each of these replies to you than the total effort expended placing verify tags on the article on GHS. Please stop harassing me over it. The fact of the matter remains that it isn't and could be sourced. I didn't say, "You must provide a source now or you will be forever 8@n20®3d." All I originally did was tag the section for further work by someone. As I have been the primary contributor to the article it was as much if not more a reminder to me than to you. I hope that you can understand that it was not meant to be an attack on you or your editing ability and can move on.—WAvegetarian•(talk) 00:27, 8 January 2007 (UTC)