User talk:JoshuaRaw

Richard Towneley
Hi Joshua, Yor quite right, I created the Richard Towneley article completely from internet sources, using what I could find and I'm glad to see that you are trying to improve the article. You appear to know more about the subject than I do but I see that you seem to be fairly new to editing. Of course you are quite right to challenge something that you think is wrong but there are a number of wikipedia conventions that you need to follow. First of all wikipedia is supposed to be a distillation of published information so, you shouldn't remove anything that is properly referenced but rather add some text to say that there is a different view, say what it is and give a proper reference for your source. I appreciate that you have given your reasons on the talk page, and of course that's what discussion pages are for, but you need to give the alternative view in the article itself rather than remove large chunks of someone else's text. You then need to give a full reference in the article with page numbers etc. Also, you seem to have removed a number of other chunks of text and changed things without any explantion at all. It's important that if you are going to edit someone else's work that you give reasons in the edit summary box, although of course this could point to the discussion page for a longer explanation. Again all of my text has been distilled from published sources, for which I've given references, so again, if there is an alternastive view you should say so and give the references with page numbers etc. Some of this came from the burnley.gov.uk website which is the sort of site that would be considered reasonably reliable. The only time it's ok to remove text is if it's from a really dubious amateur website or if it's not referenced at all. I am reverting the edits you made for the reasons I've given and if the information is wrong, by all means give an alternative, but please do it the correct way. Again, I'm assuming that you are acting in good faith so don't feel that you have upset me in any way. Richerman (talk) 20:18, 10 February 2008 (UTC)