User:David.Mestel/How not to look like a newbie

How not to look like a noob

 * Get yourself a user account. I really can't stress this enough.  As an IP, no matter whether you have singlehandedly written twelve featured articles, you will not get taken seriously.
 * Make a yourself a userpage. Redlinks in your signature make you look like a sockpuppet.
 * Sign your comments on talk pages. Always.  If you realise that you've forgotten after clicking "save page", just hit the "edit this page" tab and sign it.  The  template after your comment makes it look so unprofessional, and not knowing who's said what will really annoy other editors.
 * I hate to say this, but make some minor cleanup edits as well as article-writing ones to get your edit count up, at least initially. Unfortunately, editcountitis does exist in spades on Wikipedia.  To cite just one example, on one AfD, my comment was ignored despite the fact that I had several months experience and had written the Roman Litigation article, because I only had about 70 edits to my name.
 * Add userboxes to your user page. It looks much better than just a few lines of text.

Just my thoughts...

David.Mestel 14:43, 13 July 2006 (UTC)