User:Andrew Gray/Boilerplate

Handy boilerplate replies for OTRS:

The problem's not with you, or with your email address - it's with AOL itself. AOL uses "shared and dynamic" IP addresses for its users; a shared IP address may be used by many users from a school, business, or geographic region, whilst an user with a dynamic IP address can have a different numeric address each time they sign on.

An IP address is a simple numeric value, like 205.188.116.131 - in theory, it identifies a specific computer on the Internet; in AOL's case, it just identifies one of their shared central servers. It's like the difference between a home telephone number and one that goes to a large corporate switchboard, in some ways.

In either case, it looks like a large group of people all coming from the same computer. Since Wikipedia is a site that anyone can edit, sometimes people make inappropriate edits, and in that case other editors need to leave messages for them. When people edit our site without signing in, we record them by their IP address; unfortunately, because you share that IP address, you will also see that comment, as we cannot single out that one user to receive the message.

My apologies for the delay in getting back to you - a lot of our mail has been misdirected in the last couple of weeks and we're only just now able to reply to it.

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you - most of the people who normally answer the email are away at a conference just now.

The article has been fixed. Thanks for letting us know.

In this case, the article was corrected between the time you loaded it and the time you went to edit it; when you edit a page you use the most recent version on our servers, and if that's been changed since you originally loaded the page, then it won't be perfectly in synch with the article you were reading.

It appears we had some technical problems earlier in the day with our images - there was a power failure at the hosting site, and some machines didn't come back up perfectly, so the software which renders the equations in articles was dead whilst the articles themselves were otherwise fine. It's all apparently working now, but broken images may persist on internet caches - closing and reopening your browser, refreshing the page, or clearing your browser's cache may help to speed it along.

We've had this problem reported a couple of times recently - I'm not sure what's causing it. The best way to deal with it is to log back into Wikipedia, go to the "my preferences" tab in the top right corner, re-enter your email address, and save. This will make the system send out a new confirmation email, which should hopefully work.

(The confirmation email isn't needed to open the account, just to confirm the email address, so you should be able to log in okay)

Thank you for taking the time to contact us regarding this issue. However, deletion decisions are not taken centrally, but after a discussion amongst the Wikipedia community, and with reference to our deletion policy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy

If you feel you have information which would be important to contribute to this discussion, please see the discussion page; we welcome reasoned opinions and rational discussion based upon our policies and guidelines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/ (...)

Note, however, that this is a discussion, not a vote, and that a decision to delete is not a reflection on the merits of the topic, but rather a discussion on whether the subject is of appropriate significance for an article in an encyclopedia.

Thank you for your interest in Wikipedia.

Yours sincerely,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_start_a_page should help; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article gives some useful information on what should be contained in a new article. Bear in mind that you'll need to be a registered user, so you'll have to sign in first.