User talk:Pflesher90

Welcome and introduction
Hi, Pflesher90. This is NOT some automated message...it's from a real person. You can talk to me right now. Welcome to Wikipedia! I noticed you've just joined, and wanted to give you a few tips to get you started. If you have any questions, please talk to us. The tips below should help you to get Best of luck!  Chzz  ►  00:01, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

When correcting vandalism
Hi, and welcome to the exciting and glamorous world of Wikipedia editing!

Okay, so it's not so glamorous. It really can be exciting, though, and rewarding -- in non-monetary ways, at least.

It's always good to see new editors joining in the fight against vandalism. It's a good idea to always click the History tab first, though, and make sure, by comparing the vandal's edit to the previous edit, that you're catching all the changes the vandal made. (In fact, many people revert vandalism by viewing the edit immediately prior to the vandal's, clicking the Edit tab while viewing the older version, and saving the older edit as-is. Since pages are occasionally vandalized by multiple users without a "good" edit in between, though, it's best to also compare what you hope is the last good version to the version before it, to make sure you're not just reverting to an equally-vandalized version of the page.) Here's a link to the comparison page for the version of the Azande article you edited, compared to the previous, good edit.

Several people who edited the article after you missed the other half of the vandalism, and I even almost missed it... despite the fact that it significantly changed the meaning of that section of the article, and introduced not just obvious vandalism in the form of the inappropriate pop-culture reference, but a factual error which would be easily mistaken for correct by someone reading the page who was not already familiar with the Azande. Deliberately-introduced factual errors like that are actually a worse kind of vandalism than obvious ones, because they're less likely to be recognized as vandalism by people trying to use the article as a source of information (and thus more likely to be repeated off-site) who would immediately recognize something like "(Giggity)" and leave it out of any information they were quoting. In some cases, even on much less obscure articles, deliberately-introduced factual errors have gone unnoticed for months, even over a year in rare cases.

Thanks again for signing up to start contributing to Wikipedia! 75.16.161.119 (talk) 22:35, 14 May 2010 (UTC)