User talk:Pileobunnies


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Hello, Pileobunnies. I hope that this is the start of a successful time contributing to the encyclopaedia. However, unfortunately your first edit is not in line with Wikipedia policies. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information about anything, and requires content to satisfy particular standards. In particular, it is required that content satisfy Wikipedia's notability guidelines. In most cases, something such as a festival organised by a student society in a university will not satisfy those guidelines. Also, Wikipedia policy is that content should be supported by reliable independent sources. If you add content about, for example, an improvisation festival, it is not sufficient to add sources connected to the festival, such as the festival's own web site, or a student newspaper from the university where the festival takes place, as these are not independent sources. The fact that someone connected with a festival has written about it does not provide any evidence whatever of notability, as anyone organising any event at all is likely to write about it and publish information about it. Likewise, sources such as blogs are usually not acceptable, as anyone can set up a blog and write more or less anything they like, so most blogs are not reliable sources. I have checked every reference for every entry that you re-added to List of improvisational theater festivals. I have given the benefit of the doubt to any reference which might possibly be considered a reliable independent source, and have removed only those entries which unambiguously do not have references to reliable independent sources. If you can find any suitable sources for any of the entries, then please do restore those entries, together with references to the sources. However, please don't make a blanket restoration of all the entries without checking each one of them. Please note that suitable sources are not optional: the section of Wikipedia's verifiability policy on the burden of evidence requires that any content which is challenged or removed must not be restored without provision of references to reliable published sources.

I hope that this rather negative outcome of your first attempt at editing Wikipedia will not put you off from continuing to contribute. The reason that I have taken the trouble to spend a significant amount of time composing and editing this fairly long message, rather than simply spending a few seconds dropping a ready-made standard message on this page, is that I hope this will help you to understand better what Wikipedia's requirements are, so that you can edit successfully from now on. I am posting a "welcome" message at the top of this page, with links to various pages of information on editing Wikipedia. Don't try to read and learn all of them before you do anything, as there is far too much material there for that. Do, however, have a look at the pages that seem most likely to be relevant to your current needs, and of course you are free to come back to it in the future, as different aspects of it become relevant. Finally, please feel welcome to contact me on my talk page if you have any questions. JamesBWatson (talk) 10:04, 12 May 2013 (UTC)