User:Theresa knott/boilerplate texts

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Hello ______, welcome to Wikipedia!

I hope you have a lot of fun here. There are lots of resources around to help guide you. Be sure to check out:

*Naming conventions *Manual of Style

If you want to add any images check out:

*image use policy *How to keep image file sizes as small as possible

If you need any help try:

*Help *Village pump *Or ask me at my talk page User_talk:Theresa knott

Don't be afraid of making the odd mistake, there are any number of others eagerly waiting for a chance to correct it!

Explanation of VFD header
The reason we add the header is to warn people that the page may possibly  be deleted. That way, they can go to the votes for deletion page and state their opinion as to whether the page should or should not be deleted. Removing the header will not stop the vfd debate. In fact it may make the page more likely to be deleted. Consider the following possiblity


 * Editor A writes a terrible article
 * Editor B nominates it for deletion at votes for deletion. He puts the vfd header on the article to warn A about the debate.
 * Editors C D and E all vote for deletion
 * Editor A removes the header
 * Editors F G H all vote for deletion because the vote is still going on, header or no.
 * Editor X comes along reads the article, thinks this is terrible, and does an excellent rewrite, and so vastly improving the article. However since there is no VFD header he doesn't know about the vfd debate. If he had, he could have gone there and said "Everyone take another look because I have greatly improved it"
 * The article gets deleted.

I hope this explains why removing the header is a bad thing to do. Theresa Knott (Nate the Stork) 23:46, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Kiddie Vandal
I really don't see what people like you see in this sort of sillyness. It's not like you can say to your mates "I hacked Wikipedia". I mean, we are free and open. Anyone can vandalise - there is no kudos in it, no one will think you are cool or uber leet, everything you do gets reverted instantly anyway, so what's the point? Try adding some good information to articles. It's actually a lot more fun, and your edits stay put and are not reverted. You don't have to write about schoolish subjects, we have articles on all sorts of things here, how to hotwire a car, every sexual fetish under the sun, the ins and outs of pipe bomb making, films, music, Shock sites, Hacking, you name it we've got it or we want it. Try writing an encyclopedia - you might enjoy it.~

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:FindSpam

AOL users
AOL puts all requests to the internet through an army of "cache proxies". These are machines that store copies of web pages on them. So your computer goes to the proxy and says "can I have this page from the wikipedia site?" The proxy machine checks to see if it has a copy stored on its harddrive. If it does it sends it to you (this speeds up your surfing considerably). If it does not it asks wikipedia for the page on your behalf. As far as wikipedia's web server is concerned the AOL cache proxy is asking for the page not your computer. Now since hundreds of different AOLers use the same proxies, there is always the possibility that one of them will vandalise and get a vandalism message. The next person to use that proxy will get a vandalism message even if they have never been to wikipedia before. The solution is - get an account.