User talk:Daben

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, please be sure to sign your name on Talk and vote pages using four tildes (&#126;&#126;&#126;&#126;) to produce your name and the current date, or three tildes (&#126;&#126;&#126;) for just your name. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! Hyacinth 02:01, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
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Bluegrass music
Welcome to Wikipedia, and thank you for your contributions to the bluegrass music article. (Your comment regarding folk music and citation of Rosenberg is particularly astute.) If this is a field you are interested in, there are a lot of articles to be written or improved. A good place to start might be anything linked from the main bluegrass music article, or the list of bluegrass musicians. If I can be of any assistance, feel free to ask on my Talk page. Cmadler 11:58, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Tips
My suggestion is to Be bold in updating pages and don't be afraid to ask for help. Also don't be afraid to make a mistake; a number of users spend most of their time doing copyediting and the like. If you are overwhelmed, pick one article that is of high interest to you, and work on it. As you expand the article and link to others, then start contributing a little to those others.

For example, one of my favorite bluegrass bands is the New Grass Revival. When I started on Wikipedia they did not have an article. So I wrote that article, and have been working (slowly) on pages for their albums. That article, and also my work on the main bluegrass music article, led me to notice other areas that needed work (i.e. progressive bluegrass). I also really like Druhá Tráva, so I have worked on their article as well as Czech bluegrass.

So don't be intimidated, start with what you know and/or are interested in. Pick an article that is red-linked (the link exists, but the article is not yet written - I have been collecting bluegrass redlinks on my user page) or that needs more work, and then just jump in. Since you wrote your senior thesis on bluegrass, perhaps you can help further improve the main bluegrass article (see Talk:Bluegrass music for discussion of where it is lacking), for example, with better citations and references? Something else that is very useful as you begin to work on more pages is the watchlist. Just some thoughts. Cmadler 18:05, 9 September 2005 (UTC)