User talk:Allie72399

Hello, Allie72399, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please see our help pages, and if you can't find what you are looking for there, please feel free to ask me on my talk page or place  on this page and someone will drop by to help. Red Director (talk) 21:24, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
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Welcome!
Hello, Allie72399, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:05, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

A kitten for you!
Wouldnt it be nice to come home to this cutie! :(

JayyLo (talk) 18:05, 14 March 2019 (UTC) 

Copyright
Hello, I received a notification that you had posted material that closely paraphrased or took material verbatim from content that had previously been published elsewhere to your article. Always be careful when writing article content - a good way to avoid doing this is to take notes while reading and write your article from those notes.

Unless the material is explicitly marked as falling into the public domain or was released under a compatible Creative Commons license, it should be assumed that the content is copyrighted in a way that would prohibit it from being used verbatim elsewhere. It's always best to write things in your own words, as this can help prevent issues like this from arising. I would like for you to review the module on plagiarism and copyright. --Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:43, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I wanted to explain the copyright on this a little. While things produced by the federal government typically do fall into the public domain, there are some areas/aspects that don't because they're not considered to be governmental work. (See this section in the copyright article on the US gov't.) The Smithsonian looks to be something that would fall into the group whose work wouldn't be considered governmental work. As such, they're able to dictate their own rules as far as copyright goes. One of the main things that they don't allow is for the work to be used for commercial purposes, which would keep us from being able to adapt their work even if this was allowed. It's unclear if this is or isn't, but the main thing I could see is that they don't allow the work to be used commercially, which would be necessary on Wikipedia, as the copyright the site uses does allow people to use article content commercially if they wanted. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:43, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I can see where this would be confusing, for what it's worth. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:45, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I removed the wording on plagiarism since I don't really get the impression that this is a plagiarism issue. I can genuinely see where you would have thought that this would have been in the public domain, as I was a little surprised when I realized it wasn't in the public domain either. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:51, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

An extended welcome
Hi Allie72399. Welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you don't mind if I share some of my thoughts on starting out as a new editor on Wikipedia: If I could get editors in your situation to follow just one piece of advice, it would be this: Learn Wikipedia by working only on non-contentious topics until you have a feel for the normal editing process and the policies that usually come up when editing casually. You'll find editing to be fun, easy, and rewarding. The rare disputes are resolved quickly and easily.

Working on biographical information about living persons is far more difficult. Wikipedia's Biographies of living persons policy requires strict adherence to multiple content policies, and applies to all information about living persons including talk pages.

If you have a relationship with the topics you want to edit, then you will need to review Wikipedia's Conflict of interest policy, which may require you to disclose your relationship and restrict your editing depending upon how you are affiliated with the subject matter. Regardless, editing in a manner that promotes an entity or viewpoint over others can appear to be detrimental to the purpose of Wikipedia and the neutrality required in articles.

Some topic areas within Wikipedia have special editing restrictions that apply to all editors. It's best to avoid these topics until you are extremely familiar with all relevant policies and guidelines.

I hope you find some useful information in all this, and welcome again. --Ronz (talk) 16:52, 9 May 2019 (UTC)