User talk:ConnieOC

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I saw your message on the new user log. No one else had welcomed you, so I decided to welcome you myself. As the standard greeting says, if you need help, just ask. Acalamari 23:43, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I am the web master for the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), a component of the Department of Justice. I have been asked to update, flesh out, and administer the article on NDIC in Wickipedia. I am a true neophyte to Wikipedia and must rapidly go from simple editor to administrator in record time. I have no idea where to begin. I need a mentor with immense patience and time. (This might also be a great opportunity to invest time in developing a class for others similarly tasked). Lexiconnie 14:18, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia tends to look down on organisations trying to control the content of the Wikipedia articles about them (as does the press; there have been some high-profile cases in the past). However, you are welcome to contribute, as long as you're careful to keep to a neutral point of view. You might want to read the Introduction and Tutorial if you haven't already. One other possibility is to use the talk page of the relevant article to make suggestions if you're not sure that you can stay neutral, to allow other editors to make changes.
 * As for access controls, Wikipedia very rarely locks down articles, and only then due to heavy vandalism or a content dispute (see the protection policy). The whole premise of Wikipedia is based on collaborative editing and openness (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit), so an article wouldn't be closed off merely due to the wishes of an organisation. (You may be off the hook slightly in this respect; as it's impossible to establish access controls, as you suggested in the comment on the new user log, I'd be surprised if your organisation still insisted that you do so after learning about the way Wikipedia works. You might want to point them to About to help them understand the goals of Wikipedia.)
 * The most helpful thing you can do to help expand an article is to find as many reliable sources for the article as you can; things like newspaper reports (and academic papers, although papers about organisations are often hard to find and/or nonexistent) from sources independent of the organisation itself that mention it. Don't worry too much about messing up when adding these; having the information is more useful than having it correctly formatted.
 * Anyway, welcome to Wikipedia; feel free to contact me or to put helpme back up (helpme's normally faster, because I'm not always online) if you need any more help! --ais523 14:49, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Help?
Exactly what sort of help do you require? Acalamari 18:10, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * To Acalamari: I think you might have a browser-cache problem. I answered the helpme above about 4 hours ago, and ConnieOC asked her question at the same time anyway (as is correct). To ConnieOC: I think Acalamari's browser got confused, so feel free to ignore this conversation unless it's relevant. --ais523 18:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you to Acalamari and User:ais523. I appreciate your responses.

I think there may be some misunderstanding my intent. I don't mean to control the content - that would defeat the purpose of Wikipedia. I would like a little control over structure. I have some experience in collabrative work area's and find it to be similar to the parable about the blind men describing the elephant – the elephant’s description differed depending upon which portion the blind man could feel.

I had users so anxious to post information they would do an ‘information dump’ – everything possible without rhyme or reason – let the reader sort it out. The elephant was not but a giant head – a skull to be exact – a massive bone that contained assundry items such as eyes, a tongue, a brain, with attachments such as ears and a nose, all covered by a layer of skin and stubby hair. Since they were first to post, other readers to our site would assume elephants were giant skull heads.

Others in my elephant group were slow to post, some so slow and meticulous in their work their portion came just days before the site closed. Unfortunetly, their work was the best but never seen since it was the last posting on a page that seemed to stream forever. Their work was a general summary of the animal which would have worked well as an introduction and linkable lead-off to the other topics. But being posted last and at the time I had no tools to move it, it was virtually unread and unused.

The ability to structure the content is what I am looking for. Not the ability to control what comes and what goes. Is this possible on Wikipedia. I would like readers to view the whole elephant - not just the giant head. Lexiconnie 14:12, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Generally speaking, what you've described is less of a problem on Wikipedia than on other collaborative projects because people edit the page as it currently stands, rather than making a new proposal for the whole thing. (It is possible to replace the entire contents of a page, but that's pretty rare, as normally the page will contain useful information beforehand.) If a page is having problems that you can't fix yourself, or don't feel qualified to fix, you could try using a cleanup tag (see: list of cleanup tags). These will act to attract the attention of editors and readers who will hopefully be able to sort the problem out. Also remember that the history of each page is logged; clicking on the 'history' tab at the top of the page will show all previous versions, which will be helpful when trying to figure out what's happened to a page and how to sort out a problem which might have been introduced. I'm slightly worried I might have missed your point again here (it happens), so feel free, as always, to use helpme if I've misunderstood this question or you have any further questions. --ais523 17:04, 27 February 2007 (UTC)