User talk:Nicolahancock

Welcome!


Hello, Nicolahancock, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome!
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Welcome and also the article you started: The Way of St Andrews
Welcome Nicolahancock, welcome to Wikipedia. And thanks for the new article you created on The Way of St Andrews. I noticed the article had been tagged that it needed Wikipedia blue links (it had none) and that also no articles linked to it (which is a problem because it means that not many people will find the article unless they search for it directly), so I fixed both of those things and removed the tags, although the article still needs more work. I also wanted to explain that the reference you used is just one primary source. Is it possible that you can add some more references? A quick Google search seems to show that this pilgrimage route has been written up on other websites. Another thing to make sure of is that the article reads like an encyclopedia entry, not a magazine article or a helpful pamphlet or leaflet about the pilgrimage trail. Please do feel free to drop me a line on your talk page if I can be helpful to you in any way as you start on Wikipedia. All good wishes, Invertzoo (talk) 17:32, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Hello again Nicola. I see you have added more books to the article. I put them into a bibliography section. These days when we do an article we try always to put in inline citations to back up the facts mentioned in the article. The inline citations will show up automatically under the heading References. If there are no inline citations, then soon probably someone will start putting in "citation needed" tags in the text wherever they feel you should have a citation to back up what you have written. Listing a whole bunch of sources is all very well, but it does not explain what information you got from where, so that means someone else cannot check what you have said against your sources. Thanks. Again if you need anything explaining, drop me a line on my talk page. Invertzoo (talk) 21:23, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the note
Honestly Nicola, you are actually doing pretty well for a beginner! It's really not easy to learn how to do a Wikipedia article properly from scratch, especially these days, when the standards are pretty high, higher than they used to be in 2007! I usually recommend that beginners start by making a whole lot of small edits on pre-existing articles, and do that for a several months before they try to start a new article.

Two small things you might like to know about WikiMarkup (our software, which is not the same as HTML): you can make a new paragraph happen by simply leaving a blank line on the edit page. Also you can sign your messages by just putting 4 of those wiggly things on your keyboards upper left, tildes, in a row, and then, after you hit save, the software will automatically turn those wigglies into your name, the time and the date.

Actually if you want to experiment with what creates what, you can hit the button at the very top of your page that says "Sandbox", and play around on there as much as you like. That's your little experimentation area.

Your friend is more or less right that the important thing is to get the article up and then try to fix it up... however, if the article doesn't: 1. "establish notability" for the subject matter, and also 2. have some decent references in it, it may simply get deleted by someone during the first few days it is up. However, I think this one will be OK; I marked it as page-patrolled, which should mean it will not immediately get deleted. All good wishes to you, Invertzoo (talk) 23:47, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Please check blue links
Hello again Nicola. I put a lot of blue links into the article The Way of St Andrews but in some cases I had to guess what you meant, so I would ask you to please check all of the blue links by clicking on the one by one, in order to make sure that they all link to the actual relevant article and not to somewhere else. For example, I was not certain which St James you meant, or which kind of Cardinal you meant, and so forth. Best wishes, Invertzoo (talk) 20:52, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

File permission problem with File:The Routes of the Way of St Andrews.png
Thanks for uploading File:The Routes of the Way of St Andrews.png. I noticed that while you provided a valid copyright licensing tag, there is no proof that the creator of the file has agreed to release it under the given license.

If you are the copyright holder for this media entirely yourself but have previously published it elsewhere (especially online), please either
 * make a note permitting reuse under the CC-BY-SA or another acceptable free license (see this list) at the site of the original publication; or
 * Send an email from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-en@wikimedia.org, stating your ownership of the material and your intention to publish it under a free license. You can find a sample permission letter here. If you take this step, add OTRS pending to the file description page to prevent premature deletion.

If you did not create it entirely yourself, please ask the person who created the file to take one of the two steps listed above, or if the owner of the file has already given their permission to you via email, please forward that email to permissions-en@wikimedia.org.

If you believe the media meets the criteria at Non-free content, use a tag such as non-free fair use or one of the other tags listed at File copyright tags, and add a rationale justifying the file's use on the article or articles where it is included. See File copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have provided evidence that their copyright owners have agreed to license their works under the tags you supplied, too. You can find a list of files you have created in [ your upload log]. Files lacking evidence of permission may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. You may wish to read the Wikipedia's image use policy. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 11:46, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

The map image
Hello again Nicola. Do you think you can try to get Hugh Lockhart to send an email giving permission to release his image to permissions-en@wikimedia.org ? Or maybe he can send a permission email to you, and you can forward it to that email address? You have until Saturday 16 November. If the permission email is not received by then the image will be deleted. Thanks, Invertzoo (talk) 15:14, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Edit summaries
Me again. Just wanted to say that when you are working, it would be really great if you can remember, each time before you hit the "save" button, to write something in the "edit summary" slot, which is at the bottom of the edit page. You could put things like: "copyedit", "fixing prose", "small correction", "adding an image", little notes like that. That way when another editor looks at the "history" of the page it is easy for that editor to see who did what when. Many thanks, Invertzoo (talk) 15:28, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Your note, and some new notes for you
Thanks for the nice note Nicola. No need to apologize, there is a lot to learn about WIkipedia when you are a new editor. Three things I should explain:

1. You were not logged in when you left me that note, so it was registered as being from your IP address instead of your user name. Try to check and see if you are logged in next time when you go to Wikipedia, and if not, log in before you start editing. We all have to log in freshly about once a month.

2. Next time you leave a note on a talk page (either an editor's talk page or an article talk page), if you can remember, please sign it by leaving 4 in a row of the wiggly symbol (called a "tilde") which you can find near the top left corner of your keyboard. If you do that before you hit "Save", our software will automatically render it as links to your page, your talk page, and also automatically give the time and date. That's a lot from just 4 wiggles! :)

3. When you are working on an article, try always to keep an eye on what is happening (if anything) on its associated talk page. In this case you can find the talk page here. Or... if you look at the article page, at the top of the page there are tabs; the one on the left says "Article", next to it there is "Talk". If you hit that you will get the talk page. That's the same on any article. If you look at this article talk page you will see I left a note on 29 October explaining that I took out that "missing" section, and explaining why I took it out. if you don't really understand the points I was making, I don't mind explaining them in more detail. The article must read like an encyclopedia article, not like a pamphlet or a magazine article. Please don't be discouraged, you are doing well for a complete beginner. Thanks again, Invertzoo (talk) 15:57, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Changing edits back again?
Ah yes, me again. I wanted to explain that when you see that an article you started has been changed in some way, you need to click on the tab at the top of the article that says "View history" and look at the edit history page here.

In this case you should be able to see all the edits I made to the piece since your first draft, and you also should be able to see from my edit summaries at least an indication of why things were changed. If you disagree on any changes I made that are even vaguely debatable, you need to write a note on the talk page about it so we can discuss it, rather than simply restoring the original version. That is called "reverting" edits and is not considered very polite or appropriate to do in a wholesale manner.

I should explain that from what you have said, I suppose it might be the case that Hugh Lockhart is the one who actually wrote this piece originally, not you, and he may strongly feel it should stay exactly as he wrote it. However there are two very significant problems with that:

1. Firstly if he wrote it, technically he owns the copyright to it, not you, so you yourself cannot give it away to Wikipedia. If you are editing here, what you insert into the encyclopedia is supposed to be all your own writing, not someone else's, unless you are putting a short quote from a published work into an article.

2. The second thing is that anyone who contributes to Wikipedia (especially as a newbie) has to be ready to accept the fact that their "version" is going to be edited ruthlessly by other people, people who are attempting to make it more suitable to the encyclopedia, or more helpful, or more accurate, more concise, making sure it has a neutral point of view, and so on. If someone cannot deal with the idea that "their prose" is going to be changed around, sometimes in drastic ways, then Wikipedia is not the place to put the prose. The encyclopedia is a joint effort, a collaboration, not a private publishing concern.

I put quite a lot of careful work into the changes that I first made on the piece to make it more suitable. However, I am not going to change all my previous edits back again until after I have heard from you so we can discuss this. Either that or I will wait 4 or 5 days first. Going back and forth with the same edits more than once is very frowned upon here, and called "edit-warring". If it happens 3 times in 24 hours it can lead to an editor being blocked.

It's very hard to know what the rules and guidelines are when you first start on WIkipedia, so don't feel badly. Invertzoo (talk) 21:46, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi - sorry for the radio silence, have had a crazy final few weeks at my work and was away on holiday/working weekends too so it's been a busy time.

Hopefully I'll cover everything in the following notes before I wrap up my role in this article: Hugh Lockhart asked for me to create the Wikipedia page as he did not how to do it himself and gave me the permission to do so - if there's an issue with copyright would he need to email in again about me having the right permissions? I did do this for the image but I see it's now been taken down, this is really frustrating as I did what you said - emailed in his permission to use the image, got no response from the address given and have now come back for the image to be removed. I understand that there are reasons for copyright to be strict for such a widely used site but it is quite discouraging as a poster.

I've now created an account and given Hugh a tutorial in how to make edits as he sees fit, he understands that anyone makes changes but he wants to ensure that they're still relevant/correct as he is an expert in the topic so if you have any further questions about contributions they're unlikely to be from me anymore - except with trying to upload images! Do you have any further advice if I was to try this again?

Thanks for your help, Nicolahancock (talk) 15:03, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Response?
Just wanted to know if you have any response to my recent messages. Thanks, Invertzoo (talk) 02:12, 16 November 2013 (UTC)