User talk:MWEST1977

May you.

 * Hi, you may expand and improve the article Muhammad Iqbal, but it will be better if you first provide the sources. Search the Google books and write the passages you want and add and cite the sources. Thanks.Justice007 (talk) 14:32, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Editing advice
Hi, MWEST1977. Sorry for taking a couple of days to get back to you on this. The welcome message here on your user talk page is a great list of links that will give you some good information about editing Wikipedia, but there's a lot there. Once you start reading some of those links it gets even more complicated. I'll try to offer some condensed advice based specifically on the changes you made to Muhammad Iqbal. At times, you'll see some acronyms in here and in comments from other users, usually prefixed with WP:. Those are shortcuts to various Wikipedia policy and guideline pages that can help explain why some action was taken. Often edits set those to link to that page, but if they don't, just put the full acronym in the search field and hit search. For example, if you see WP:BRD or just BRD, put WP:BRD in the search field and search. Okay, on to some editing advice!

The first and most important thing to remember is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a blog. Blogs are great places to put your personal views and research, encyclopedia's are not. This is covered in two core policies - WP:OR and WP:V. WP:OR, which means Original Research says that original research or analysis shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. Instead, we should summarize information and analysis from other, published sources and use that for our articles. WP:V, or Verifiability goes along with that and says that anything added to an article should be able to be verified by a reader. We also recognize that some sources are better than others, and we want to only use the best possible sources. We have a guideline on sources called WP:RS, or Reliable Sources to help identify sources we should use and which ones we should avoid. Please take some time to read those three articles as they are extremely important.

When adding to an article, we have some code and templates for sources. You probably noticed at the bottom of nearly every article a section called References. We use some wiki markup and some special template to make it easier to add references in articles and the code will then automatically add the references to that References section and leave a pointer in the article to the full reference. The Citing Sources article has lots of details on how to do this. As a new editor, don't stress too much about getting the reference exactly right, but include all the needed information. Often someone will come behind and help you out from there.

References need to be added after any statement that could be challenged. So something like "Washington DC is the capital of the United States" really doesn't need to be sourced, but most other claims would need to be referenced. On Wikipedia, references should be included immediately after the claim so editors will know what reference to review if they want to verify the claim. If several claims in a row are from the same source (and in close proximity to each other in that source), generally you can put the source at the end of those claims.

Looking specifically at the edits you made to Muhammad Iqbal, the lack of references is the main problem and why it was reverted several times. Parts of your edit also probably belong in one of the sub-sections of the Efforts and Influences section. With established articles, you generally want to work within the existing structure, especially as a fairly new editor.

Two last things. First, please be careful about when you check the "Minor edit" check box. Generally, that should only be used for fixing typo's or layout problems. It shouldn't be used for edits that add information to an article. Second, a really helpful essay to follow as an editor is called WP:BRD, or Bold, Revert, Discuss. It describes the ideal editing cycle that helps various editors work together. Basically, editor A is BOLD, and makes a change to the article. Editor B REVERTS the change for some reason. On seeing this, editor A uses the article talk page and DISCUSSES the change to find out the reason for the revert and goes from there.

Hope that helps you some, and good luck! Ravensfire ( talk ) 16:34, 11 May 2015 (UTC)