User talk:Rdcommish

Welcome
Welcome!

Hello, Rdcommish, 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 discussion 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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The text above is a generic welcome message. On a more personal note, it's great to see you here. I was in the stands when you were honored at the Denver Roller Dolls match a couple months ago, and was struck by how gracious, sincere, and affable you were – a real class act, just like the DRD.

I am the guy who wrote about 80% of the content of the History of roller derby article, heavily relying on Frank Deford's book but also gleaning info from newspaper searches. I also co-curate the Roller derby and List of roller derby leagues articles, among others, and was responsible for a large portion of their content. I make it a priority to stay on top of all the edits that come in – for example, I did some minor cleanup of the edits you made to the Jerry Seltzer article today. I don't mean to sound like I have any kind of ownership of the articles, though; don't be afraid to continue editing.

That said, Wikipedia has a lot of policies that we all run up against sooner or later. The biggest one is verifiability: everything (or at least, everything that might be subject to any skepticism) must be attributed to a reliable published source. Blogs and "I was there" are not reliable sources, by Wikipedia standards. And anything that sounds like self-promotion is forbidden, of course.

The other policy/guideline that comes to mind, based on your edits to the Jerry Seltzer article today, is Conflict of interest – basically this is just saying 1. you should either avoid or exercise great caution when editing articles related to you, your organizations & their competitors; and 2. if you do edit such articles, you should go to the corresponding Discussion page and edit it in order to announce who you are and what your conflicts of interest are. So, for example, you should go make a conflict-of-interest declaration on Talk:Jerry Seltzer, since you were editing the Jerry Seltzer article. See Talk:Denver Roller Dolls to see how three of us did it on the DRD article's discussion page.

If you need personal assistance, feel free to leave a message for me on User talk:Mjb (use the New Section button at the top of that page). —mjb (talk) 05:11, 18 July 2010 (UTC)