User talk:Millerowski

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Alberto Blanco, Mexican Poet
Hi there. You asked on the New contributors' help page for assistance with this article, so I'm going to try to point you in the right direction. The two main issues you need to worry about with an article are content and style. Poor content can get an article deleted and so it's the first thing to deal with, whereas poor style just means the article gets a lot of tags on it telling you to clean it up.

Content issues
The first thing you need to look at is whether your article will be speedily deleted, and I would say that it's safe from that since there are clear claims of notability. However, taking a quick look through the article there are still some problems:


 * Verifiability - The references provided are questionable as reliable sources, since there don't seem to be any that aren't from Blanco himself. Generally, we like references to mostly be from secondary sources - newspaper and magazine articles and books that cover the subject, rather than things the subject themselves has published, or contributed to. I think the interview is fine for some of the information, but articles that don't have multiple (i.e. more than one) external reliable sources are at risk of deletion.


 * Neutral point of view - Mostly the article seems to be ok with this - the only praise about Blanco is in quotes from critics. However, I find it hard to believe that his reviews have been completely positive. If you know of any more critical reviews of Blanco and his work, it would be worth including them for balance.

There are probably other content issues, but these are the main ones I saw from a quick look through the article.

Style issues
Like I said, style comes second to content, but obviously if you dream of turning this into a good or even featured article, then style becomes a big concern. The main guide for this is the Manual of Style, but that's pretty daunting to begin with. I think to start with these are what you should look at:


 * Help:Wikitext examples - this shows you the basics of how to format an article on Wikipedia. I can see you've made a start of it, but this will get you a little bit further. (One hint: spaces at the start of a line do strange things involving big gray boxes.)


 * Citation templates - These are used to make references and footnotes look a little better, and to make them easier to navigate. You'll also want to take a look at Citing sources and Footnotes - in particular, the latter seems to be the only places that explains how you can use the same reference in multiple places.


 * Disambiguation - I see there's already an article at Alberto Blanco about a football player, which I would guess is why you titled the article the way you did. This isn't really the preferred style, though, and when your account is four days old you will be able to move pages (up the top of a page you'll see a tab labelled "move" in between "history" and "watch"), and I would recommend that you move it to Alberto Blanco (Mexican poet) or even just Alberto Blanco (poet). Then, you can add a "hatnote" template to Alberto Blanco that will tell people who come across the footballer's article where the poet's one is.

I hope that these links, along with the welcome template above, will help you. If there is anything you don't understand, please feel free to ask at my talk page (click on the "Say hi!" link in my signature, then click on the tab up the top that says "new section"). Good luck, Confusing Manifestation (Say hi!) 05:55, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Alberto Blanco photo
Hi again. I'll start by saying that the article looks a lot better now - I certainly wouldn't put it up for deletion. I agree that a photo is almost always an essential part of an article, but to actually get it there is one of the hardest things you can do. The reason it's so hard is because of copyright law and the Wikipedia license - the GFDL. The basic problem is that since Wikipedia content is supposed to be freely usable and copyable by anyone, we can't put a photo up unless it can be freely copied as well. I will try to cover the basics of getting an image up here.

For pictures that are in the public domain (e.g. ones made by the US Government, or that are very old) or have been released under a copyleft licence, like the GFDL or Creative Commons, you can upload them to Wikimedia Commons. Since you are not the photographer, you would have to convince him to release the photo under such a license, preferably something like CC-BY-SA. This is actually probably the hardest bit, because this license means that:


 * Anyone can copy the photo
 * Anyone can modify the photo
 * Anyone can use the photo for commercial purposes

And all of this without paying for it - you can see why most photographers are generally unwilling to go with this. However, it may help to point out that the license also means that anyone doing the above must:


 * Credit the photographer
 * Release their own work under a similar licence (the CC-BY licence doesn't have this condition)

If you can get the photographer to agree to this, then you can do the following to get the photo into the article:


 * 1) Go to Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org) and register an account (they're working on a system where registering on one project gives you accounts on all projects, but that's still a ways off)
 * 2) Click on the "upload file" link in the navigation bar on the left
 * 3) Follow the instructions there to upload the photo
 * 4) Add the appropriate licence tag (as I suggest, CC-BY-SA is probably the best)
 * 5) Get the photographer to email the Commons OTRS to say that he agrees to the licensing

The photo will now be on Commons, and will credit the photographer there. You will then be able to use that photo on Wikipedia - or, in fact, on any Wikimedia project. An explanation of how to do that is in the Picture tutorial, but if you get the picture on Commons and can't follow that tutorial, I'll be happy to help again.

It is possible to upload images directly to Wikipedia, which is what you have to do if they aren't freely licensed. However, you then have to go through the issues of writing a fair use rationale (basically, a statement of why using the picture is believed to comply with the "fair use" clause in the US copyright laws), and you can only do it if the image is "not replaceable" - i.e. it is not possible to obtain a freely-licensed equivalent. In the case of living people, photos are always considered "replaceable" since, in theory, someone could go and take another photo and give it a free license, so you can't do that for Alberto.

I hope you have success in talking with the photographer. Confusing Manifestation (Say hi!) 14:23, 18 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Oh, and as to your question about whether the rules are deliberately dense - it's mostly a side-effect of Wikipedia being based on ideals (like the free sharing of knowledge), but having to coincide in the real world, where people are stupid, countries have byzantine laws, and nobody understands anybody else. If we could just detach Wikipedia from reality, I'm sure everything would run perfectly smoothly. Confusing Manifestation (Say hi!) 14:30, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Not to fear - the only error you made is that the text you put in the first part of the image link must be the exact title of the image page - in this case, the image is at, and so the code needed is. I have made the necessary change for you, and you should now have the photo on the article. If you look at the "diff" of my edit, you can see how it works. I hope this helps! Confusing Manifestation (Say hi!) 06:47, 28 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm glad I have helped. Editing Wikipedia can be extremely confusing sometimes. If you haven't come across it already, the Editor's Index to Wikipedia is a helpful collection of some of the most important policies, guidelines and other project pages (and I believe it forms the basis of the Missing Manual), and of course New contributors' help desk and Help desk are always available if you have questions (I have both pages on my watchlist). Also, here's a useful piece of advice - if you see an article that has something in it that you'd like to use in another article (like an infobox, or some special formatting), try opening up the edit view for the page so you can look at how it's done in code. This is often the best way to learn some of these things. Good luck, Confusing Manifestation (Say hi!) 23:26, 28 May 2008 (UTC)