User talk:Deprincemom

Welcome!
Hello, Deprincemom, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions, especially what you did for Michaela DePrince. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome!  Sandstein  06:20, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
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Your edit to Michaela DePrince
Hi, and thank you for your contributions to our article Michaela DePrince. I understand from your edit summary that you are Michaela DePrince's mother. While we aren't in a position to verify this, I will proceed on the assumption that this is true, and I would like to explain to you why I have undone most of your changes. Thank you for your understanding, and feel free to contact me (by replying here or on my talk page) with any questions you may have.  Sandstein  06:54, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
 * You changed information related to Michaela DePrince's education, and added her exaxt date of birth. Now, I would appreciate it if you read our policies about verifiability and biographies of living persons. They mandate that all information in our articles about living persons must conform to a reliable published source that our readers can check for themselves. As a result, we cannot include the information that you added, because it is not cited to such a source. This also applies to information communicated to us by you as Michaela DePrince's mother (assuming that you are she), even if that information is true. As our policy puts it: "Verifiability, and not truth, is one of the fundamental requirements for inclusion in Wikipedia; truth, of itself, is not a substitute for meeting the verifiability requirement." Now, of course we want our information to be correct, but it first and foremost needs to be verifiable. Is there a published source (i.e., one that our readers can access) for the biographical material you added? For uncontroversial material such as schools attended or the date of birth, even Michaela DePrince's own website (if she has one) would be an acceptable source.
 * You wrote: "As a minor I have the right of final decision regarding all publicity." That is not the case with respect to text others wrote about Michaela DePrince on Wikipedia. Our policy WP:OWN provides that we are a collaboratively edited work, and that no person "owns" a Wikipedia article. This means that even the subjects of our articles, or their representatives, do not get to decide what we write about them. We are also not a venue for publicity, but an encyclopedia dedicated to the public interest; as such, the contents of our articles are not determined by whatever may be best for the subjects but by our core policies, notably neutrality, verifiability and the avoidance of original research.
 * You did not provide a reason for deleting the part about the racial discrimination Michaela DePrince encountered, which is cited to a reliable source. I think this part is relevant to her biography because it allows readers to contextualize and appreciate her success as a dancer.
 * You changed mentions of her last name to mentions of her first name. This does not conform to our manual of style (WP:SURNAME), which provides: "After the initial mention of any name, the person should be referred to by surname only".
 * As a technical matter, your edit broke the formatting of the article because you only deleted part of a reference tag, and this messed up the text because the title of a Guardian article then appeared as part of the article text.