User talk:BetaGeneral

February 2016
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Interstate 66 (Kansas–Kentucky) has been reverted. Your edit here to Interstate 66 (Kansas–Kentucky) was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline. The external link(s) you added or changed (https://www.facebook.com/I-506070-Trans-America-US-460-Corridor-Q-US-121-Coalfields-Expressway-207891349370508/) is/are on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 05:25, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Welcome, roadfan!
Hello, BetaGeneral, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like this place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:
 * Introduction
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Help
 * How to write a great article
 * Manual of Style

Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or. If you are interested, there is already a community of users who are roadfans or who edit articles about roads, just like you! Stop by any of these WikiProjects—WP:HWY (worldwide), WP:AURD (Australia), WP:CARD (Canada), WP:HKRD (Hong Kong), WP:INRD (India), WP:UKRD (United Kingdom), or WP:USRD (United States)—and contribute. If your interest is in roads in the United States, there is an excellent new user's guide. There is a wealth of information and resources for creating a great article. If you have questions about any of these WikiProjects, you can ask on each project's talk page, or you can ask me! If you like communicating through IRC, feel free to ask questions at as well. Here, there are several editors who are willing to answer your questions. For more information, see WP:HWY/IRC. Again, welcome!  Imzadi 1979  →   05:40, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Also, it's not helpful to drop large blocks of quoted text into articles as you have. While works of the federal government are in the public domain, other text is not. Even though we can, that doesn't mean we should. We should be writing the content of our articles, not piecing together large quotations of the writing of others.  Imzadi 1979  →   05:43, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

WP:BRD
That link will take you to a page on a concept called "Bold, Revert, Discuss". In short, it means:
 * You were Bold in making a change or addition to an article, but someone noticed and disagreed, so they
 * Reverted the changes. The next step is then to
 * Discuss those changes and seek a solution to the disagreement.

As I noted above, we shouldn't be hosting large quantities of quoted text from other sources in our articles. Even when it isn't a copyright violation because the text is public domain, it's a lazy writing practice. In some cases, even though fair-use doctrines would allow us to directly quote text provided we attribute it to its source, in large quantities it's no longer fair use and becomes a form of copyright violation.  Imzadi 1979  →   06:00, 15 February 2016 (UTC)