User talk:JOhnjon24

April 2010
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page BLACKOUT (improv group) has been reverted. Your edit here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline from Wikipedia. The external link you added or changed is on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. I removed the following link(s): http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?d=1195005839&ref=ts/. If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 21:54, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Your questions
Hi, and sorry that your introduction to Wikipedia has been so challenging. :) Launching a new article can be difficult for anyone, and doing so without any real experience on Wikipedia is doubly challenging.

Although I am not participating at Articles for deletion/BLACKOUT (improv group), I saw your question there and wanted to try to explain.

This particular article would be governed by the the notability guidelines on groups and entertainers. The rule of thumb here is noting whether the group has received significant or widespread coverage in sources that are reliable and independent of the group (excluding group press releases and information solely available on the group's websites&mdash;these sources may be used for additional information after notability has been established by independent sources). All material must be attributable.

If you are closely associated with the subject, our conflict of interest guideline provides some guidance on how you can best contribute to the article. Although these rules apply to all contributors, you'll want to be particularly careful if you are connected to approach it neutrally and without undue promotion. You also will need to avoid putting material in the article that you know is true but can't prove. We call this "original research" on Wikipedia, and it is forbidden. As a "tertiary source", Wikipedia is here to explain what others have said about the group, not to say anything new about them ourselves. This is one of the aspects of contributing to the project that many people connected with subjects find most strange, because it's so different from the way most websites work.

In terms of saving this article, the best thing you can do is make sure that the content is neutral and provide as many links to reliable sources that talk about this group as you can. Show performance listings don't count; what's wanted here are things like reviews or profiles in magazines or newspapers...basically any kind of indepth coverage to show that other people are talking about this group. Without that, the article is unlikely to be found appropriate for Wikipedia at this time. If that happens, the best thing to do is to wait until the group has plenty of that kind of coverage and then create a new article about it. (You would want to be sure it has plenty of coverage in that case, though, because if articles are repeatedly created on subjects that the community doesn't think should be included, the topic can be basically blocked from creation at all. We call that process "salting". Getting a new article on it after that can be a challenge.)

In either case, please remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The content as originally written in this article, here, would probably have been deleted as advertisement if had not been tagged for copyright concerns. While not the most stellar articles on Wikipedia, you might see for example The Hollow Men or The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. They are somewhat dry, but somewhat dry is what we go for. :) (See Tone).

If you have questions, you're welcome to come by my talk page. We also have a couple of help desks: one for experienced contributors and one for those who are not already familiar with the environment at New contributors' help page. You can even put a question right here on your talk page with the code Helpme next to it (curly brackets and all), and somebody will soon appear to answer.

Anyway, I hope this helps, and good luck to you. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 14:16, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

thanks and more question
thanks for the response it was helpful but with providing examples of other pages, also provided are more questions.

The Hollow Men was an example i was told to look at. i'm sure what makes are page more of an "advertisement" than our page. also their page has no references at all. not to call them out. i'm a fan of the hollow men as well

also, i'm not sure how this is a biased article. everything seems to be neutral except for the quote from a review from a credible news source. are review quotes not allowed? i'll double check the rules on that.

thanks again. much appriciated.Helpme--JOhnjon24 (talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.96.204.130 (talk) 17:06, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Re your post
Re your post on the afd, a couple things you could add to the article are actual reviews or mentions in newspapers. I noticed you had one but it was a dead link and thus removed. Also fleshing out the main part of the article so there is actually something to read rather than just the accolades, coaches and festivals (which are basically just lists). The "Where are they know?" section is the part referred to as sounding like an advert. I would also recommend cleaning up your sources as most appear to be blog/forum like etc. mauler90 (talk) 06:22, 17 April 2010 (UTC)