User talk:Dakota1955

I'm new to Wikipedia. I edited the ethyl mercury page and a "dubious" was placed within a portion of the edit. I have no idea how to discuss this with that person or anyone else for that matter. Give me some time, I'll get this all figured out.

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Your addition to Ethylmercury has been removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without permission from the copyright holder. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other websites or printed material; such additions will be deleted. You may use external websites or publications as a source of information, but not as a source of article content such as sentences or images. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:46, 26 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm assuming I respond here. So were the text authored wholly by me using the article as a reference it would have remained, is that correct? Dakota1955 (talk) 16:52, 26 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Well...maybe. Directly copying text is strictly out of the question except under very limited circumstances.  Brief quotations (set off with quotation marks) are sometimes acceptable, as long as they are kept to the minimum necessary, and used only where properly-referenced paraphrasing is insufficient.  For copyrighted text (almost everything you're going to find on the Internet or in print today), copy & pasting substantial blocks of text is a copyright violation, and virtually always against our rules and against the law.  Wikipedia is distributed under a free license, the GFDL, which means we have to be sure all of our contributions are free of copyright encumbrance; we can't give away other people's work.  For material in the public domain (very old works, and many U.S. government publications), there isn't a copyright issue; we're free to use such content.  However, directly copying text without proper attribution (including quotation marks for verbatim copies) is plagiarism, and equally to be avoided.  I strongly urge you to read through some of the links in the welcome notice above; they provide more detailed guidance about how to contribute to Wikipedia.


 * Looking more closely at the material that you were trying to add, I suspect that you would be more interested in our articles on thiomersal and thiomersal controversy, and possibly Mark Geier. I think that those articles address the same points, and you can see how the references there have been incorporated into the text.  (My understanding is that editors in this area don't want to have to repeat the same text and arguments across a large number of articles, so hypotheses about vaccine toxicity are discussed in detail primarily within thiomersal controversy.)  Before you dive into a contentious topic, it might be wise to visit each article's talk page (click on the 'discussion' tab above the article) to propose any substantial changes, and allow other Wikipedia editors to evaluate your proposals.  TenOfAllTrades(talk) 17:28, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, sincerely. I'll accept all the help I can get. These issues are of great importance to me. Just give me the time to read and understand all of the rules. Perhaps I should be editing after that, which would have prevented this unnecessary confusion. Dakota1955 (talk) 17:40, 26 September 2010 (UTC)