User talk:Brank

Hello, Brank, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of your edits have not conformed to Wikipedia's verifiability policy, and have been reverted. Wikipedia articles should refer only to facts and interpretations that have been stated in print or on reputable websites or other forms of media. Always remember to provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed. Wikipedia also has a related policy against including original research in articles.

There is a page about the verifiability policy that explains the policy in greater detail, and another that offers tips on the proper ways of citing sources. If you are stuck and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type   on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers: 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 have any questions, check out Where to ask a question or ask me on. Again, welcome! -MBK004 01:05, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
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 * A further note, quoting from cruise books is not allowed because they do not meet the neutral point of view guidelines with regards to how they are written. -MBK004 01:08, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

USS Galveston (CLG-3)
Thanks for your expansive message. This will also be a long reply since I need to deal with each of the points that you have expressed. I certainly share your desire to see the article become a more complete history of the vessel, but as I have put forward, we are essentially waiting on the NHC to update their records. We (WP:SHIPS) are currently undertaking a grandiose project to expand and improve all articles on the battleships of the USN, and that effort will in turn trickle-down to the aircraft carriers, cruisers, and other vessels, and as the Galveston was one of the last capital ships, it will be one of the first to be updated after the battleships because some of the editors do not especially like the aircraft carriers for some reason (they like big guns).
 * Firstly, you may have a well-defined conflict of interest which might prohibit you from editing the article on your former ship as well as promotion of the website you are the webmaster of. This also means that per your admission, any edit you do make to the article can not include the website as a reference. You can propose such edits on the talk page, but policy states that you can not make them.
 * DANFS is being updated slowly but surely by the Naval Historical Center, and as soon as we notice an update, it is uploaded here as well to fill-in the missing gaps in the service history of the articles based upon the DANFS. (Just about every US Navy vessel relies on DANFS).
 * Cruise books, while in the public domain as products of employees of the US government, they do not meet NPOV (for obvious reasons) and they are not published to the public per-se, except for those who receive them, and they generally do not provide enough information to be held up as reliable sources in our higher-level content reviews due to them lacking certain essential publishing information that all public documents and books have.
 * You are certainly correct that the uncitable sources are a big no-no and border on original research according to our policy.
 * As to the objectivity of the website, it would need to be backed-up by a reputable source (namely the one which most editors here would like to see would be DANFS), and the reason being is that WikiProject Ships has developed an extensive tutorial on how to take a raw DANFS entry and make it into an encyclopedic article that is free of POV: WikiProject Ships/DANFS conversions.

I especially would like to thank you for your service to our nation, and yes you did get the signature right, four tildes ~. -MBK004 04:51, 15 July 2009 (UTC)