User talk:Mmboyd

Welcome!
Hello mmboyd, and welcome to Wikipedia.


 * Getting started : Make a short userpage! Everyone's wary of a redlink.  Edit your preferences to verify your email and set up email alerts, say for when someone leaves you new talkpage messages such as this one.


 * Helpful links : Editing || Writing a great article || Naming and Merging || Style Manual || Policies Reassigning old edits || What Wikipedia is not


 * Maintenance : Deleting articles || all maintenance tasks (see also open tasks, below)

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I hope you enjoy being a Wikipedian on en:. Drop us a note at New user log so we can meet you and help you get started. You can also leave questions on my talk page. :)

Regards, +sj +

I have always depended on the competence of strangers...
Community watering holes:
 * The Village Pump is a many-headed beast and good way to find a samaritan
 * The Reference Desk is a place where wiki-librarians hang out
 * WikiProject Librarians is a more explicit project...

Some guidelines for new editors (a few are repeated from the lists above)
 * Ten Things you may not know
 * What Wikipedia is Not
 * Style: Citation & Verifiability | Links
 * The 5 Pillars (ware Ignore all rules)

Cheers, +sj + 20:32, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Community tasks
Some of the things community editors do all the time, to give you a taste (this is a dynamic tasklist, that updates constantly as tasks are finished): —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sj (talk • contribs) 20:48, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

links: useful v. not useful v. spam
links from brilliant sources can be spam, or more often simply ill-advised. the quality of the archive doesn't guarantee the quality of a link in context; just as the quality of a pedigree doesn't guarantee the accuracy of one's writing. It does however rank highly among useful indicators... Consider this discussion from a few months past (an early, incisive comment before it spun off into tangents):
 * many of the pages you edited already contained biographies equal in scope to the biography on the archive page you linked. In instances where biography is lacking, it might be worth linking, but as a reference. Better yet, add some of the content (in a non-copyvio way) and link the reference. That is how Wikipedia gets better - through the addition of well-referenced content (not linking to external websites). Take for example your last link (diff). The article already contains even more bibliographic info than your link (and the external link section already has link to his congressional bio. Linking the archive for the bio doesn't make sense here. The only other info on the linked page that has to do with the subject of the article is the description of one box of photographs - a small amount of highly specialized information of little use to most readers. I do believe that your heart is in the right place - you want to share the excellent resources of your library with the world. But, external links need to be kept to a minimum and your links (for the most part - I certainly haven't checked them all) don't meet the requirements... This shouldn't be a discouragement to libraries, but rather an encouragement to engage Wikipedia constructively - with an emphasis on improving the quality of the articles rather than driving traffic to library websites. Nposs to Mdazey, WikiProject Spam archive, Jul 2007, "library links discussions"

Mdazey here is clearly contributing productively, but in my estimation makes a few mistakes: includes some links that don't belong (as per the above; a link to less comprehensive material, which was neither a reference used in writing the article nor contained any extra information). This started a somewhat off-topic discussion about the too-general question of 'are library links spam'. Some are, some aren't. Some that aren't nevertheless do not add to an article and get removed as the article is improved.

+sj + 21:00, 31 October 2007 (UTC)