User talk:Msdemetriou

Welcome!
Hello, Msdemetriou, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of your recent edits to the page Amybeth McNulty did not conform to Wikipedia's verifiability policy, and may have been removed. Wikipedia articles should refer only to facts and interpretations verified in reliable, reputable print or online sources or in other reliable media. Always provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed. Wikipedia also has a related policy against including original research in articles.

If you are stuck and looking for help, please see the guide for citing sources or come to the new contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Here are a few other good links for newcomers:
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or. Again, welcome. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 20:58, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

October 2019
Please stop adding unreferenced or poorly referenced biographical content, especially if controversial, to articles or any other Wikipedia page, as you did at Amybeth McNulty. Content of this nature could be regarded as defamatory and is in violation of Wikipedia policy. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Denniss (talk) 15:38, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Email
Hi Msdemetriou, thanks for your email. I hope you don't mind if I respond to your questions here, because I think it would be beneficial for other editors to see some of this.

One of our core editing guidelines is to be bold! Since the beginning of Wikipedia we've always said that as long as you're not breaking things on purpose or being disruptive, any edit can be helpful, and any edit that is made in good faith (meant to make things better) is a good edit, so we encourage you to go ahead and try. But to make sure, you should always write in your edit summary what you're changing and why. If an edit is not quite right, we assume that you meant well but we can revert the edit ("rv" for short), which means changing the page back to the way it was before. If someone reverts your edit they're supposed to explain why, so that you can learn or ask questions. I'm sorry that didn't, someone who has been editing wikipedia for 14 years should know better. (And Denniss should know that I can take away his rollback capability if he doesn't follow the rollback policy).

For the most part your edits to Amybeth McNulty were fine in terms of format and style, but some of the information that you added did not comply with our policy on biographies of living persons ("BLPs"); in particular, you did not provide a source for any of the biographical information you added. One of our fundamental principles is that all information published on Wikipedia needs to be verifiable, that is, you need to say where you found the information, so that a reader can look at what you looked at and make sure that it is correct, or fix it if it's not. For most information in Wikipedia we often just add a "citation needed" flag beside the information to show that it's something we need to fix later, but when we publish information about real people that we haven't verified, it can do real-life harm to those individuals, so we're especially careful about it. There are only four kinds of information that always have to be referenced or they will be removed. Otherwise, Wikipedia is never finished and there is no deadline to do anything, so feel free to experiment. You can also make edits in your sandbox if you want to test before you edit an article, but note that edits in sandboxes are still covered by the BLP policy.

With Amybeth McNulty it's been an ongoing issue for several years that editors, usually newer editors such as yourself, insert a birth date but don't say where they found that information, so we can't make sure it's correct, and so our policy says that we have to remove it. A few years ago I tried to find a source for her date of birth myself but all I found was an article saying what her age was when that article was published, which is why now it says "age 17-18" (a template fills in that number based on the date that source was published and how old it said she was at the time). If you do have a source that has her actual date of birth then we can add it, as long as the source is one that we consider reliable and independent. If you think you do, I can help you add it to the article.

I know there's a lot of information and policies and guidelines on how to edit Wikipedia, but really, if you want to contribute, then contribute. If you do something wrong it can be fixed, and whoever fixes it should say what wasn't right so that you can do better next time. If you have questions you can visit the Teahouse (link above), ask at the help desk, ask on any article's talk page (see the "Talk" tab at the top of the page), or try using the helpme template to ask questions here on your own talk page. I hope this all helps you get started, and good luck! Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:13, 28 October 2019 (UTC)