User talk:Geoffrey Hayward

Welcome!


Hello, Geoffrey Hayward, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The Wikipedia Adventure (a fun interactive editing tutorial that takes about an hour)
 * Wikipedia Teahouse (a user-friendly help forum)
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
 * Simplified Manual of Style

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, or you can  to ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! We are so glad you are here! Sadads (talk) 22:14, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Minor edits
Greetings! I see that you're fairly new at this editing business, so I hope you won't mind my calling your attention to a minor solecism that you've unwittingly committed.

In all of your edits so far, you've checked the "This is a minor edit" box, even when adding content. In fact, the minor-edit box should only be used when the edit is really, really, really minor—adding a missing period to the end of a sentence, or correcting "teh" to "the". Any edit that any other editor, at any time and for any reason, might dispute should not be marked as minor. Adding content, however innocuous, should not be marked thus.

This is all explained at WP:MINOR, one of several hundred policy pages that you probably haven't yet encountered. If you've got the time and inclination, you might look at it; among other things, it explains why marking non-minor edits as minor is a problem.

If you don't really feel like wrestling with the details of the minor-edit policy, the simplest solution is to ignore the existence of the minor-edit box. It does no harm to leave it unchecked, even when your edit genuinely meets the minor-edit standards.

Hope that your new editing career is going well. It can be a bit confusing at first, especially when people like me start throwing Wikipolicy around, but with a bit of practice you'll learn the essentials quickly enough. If you've got questions about this or any other editing practice, I'd be glad to try to answer them; just leave a note at my talk page. (Click on the "talk" after my username, and start a new section for your question or comment.) Good luck! Ammodramus (talk) 12:52, 11 February 2016 (UTC)