User talk:Sadsignal/Archive 1

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, Sadsignal. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the article University of the People, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. Editing for the purpose of advertising or promotion is not permitted. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:


 * avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, company, organization or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the request edit template);
 * disclose your COI when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
 * do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. Theroadislong (talk) 13:52, 20 January 2018 (UTC)


 * I have no COI for any contribution I have given for wikipedia. If I did have a COI, I would disclose it as per the procedures designated by Wikipedia. I appreciate your concern. -- Sadsignal

January 2018
Please do not add or change content, as you did at University of the People, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. Theroadislong (talk) 14:53, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I believe I have fixed all issues leaving only credible sources. Thank you, Theroadislong, your feedback is much appreciated. -- Sadsignal

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

 * Hi Sadsignal! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
 * The Teahouse new editor help space
 * Wikipedia Help pages

-- 05:49, Thursday, January 25, 2018 (UTC)


 * I must suggest that the "The Wikipedia Adventure" be mandatory for new editors. I have learned so much. Sadsignal (talk) 01:55, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Howdy Sadsignal, thank you for your edits on University of the People. Came over to your talk page to thank you and saw this message from Theroadislong and so I started looking at your edit history. You are really passionate about getting it right, you have gone through the Wikipedia Adventure game which is really cool, I recommend it to new editors often. What concerned me was that you show a lot of passion for really just one page, University of the People. I see why Road cautioned you for COI. Some editors start with a topic and stick with it until it is completely done. I get that. What I would suggest, as you are still in the beginning of your "career" here and seem to have a lot of energy and ability to "get it right" that you expand your editing into a completely different area. There are thousands of pages here on WP that would require your touch. It's fine if it is something you find interesting, in fact it is a great idea. But make it not related to this page. A diverse edit history is really cool here on Wikipedia. So thank you for your help, and I hope to run into you again here on WP. Keep editing!Sgerbic (talk) 03:04, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Hey Sgerbic! Yeah, Theroadislong has been a great help in watching my copyedits and contributions on other pages. They have been a big help to me in learning proper editing techniques, I learned so much from their corrections.  As for the University of the People page, I have an interest in Distance Education. When I started contributing to the University of The People article I didn't know much about it outside of my small contribution. I kept getting notifications due to a user who was Edit Warring with other's reverts.  After that, I read the whole Talk page and took a general interest in the article as it seemed particularly disputed.  After trying to help, Theroadislong warned me that I should disclose any COI and I assured them I have no COI via Theroadislong's talk page.  After explaining the situation they seemed to understand the predicament and even fixed most of the issues regarding the University of the People page.  The article is now on my watchlist and I am doing my best to help resolve the remaining disputes. I haven't editted it in a while except for copyedits. Recently I have just been contributing to the talk page and letting others do the edits.  As for other pages, I have been working on other contributions for articles involved in Distance Education and copyediting others.  I save my bigger projects in word documents until they are ready, and then post the whole thing fully cited, etc.  More of those are coming in due time, but they take me a while to write.  It all boils down to, I want to contribute to pages I find interesting and help with disputed information in articles.  I hope this clears up your concern.  I very much appreciate your support and advice. :) Also, if you know of any other articles with significant disputes I would be very interested in helping (it's pretty fun), topic does not matter.  Thanks again.  --Sadsignal (talk) 13:29, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Wonderful, I thought this might be the correct story, lots of editors get involved in one page and they stay with it, esp when there is a lot of discussion. But it just so happened that you came along when there was a lot of drama about COI that got taken care of once I had a stern talk with them. Now that everyone there is on the same page I just want to see it cleaned up. As far as finding more, you can probably join some kind of group here on WP that posts alerts when there are problems, or I'm sure someone can suggest places to find them. I belong to a few, but they are mostly dormant. Do keep in mind that WP likes to see you adding content, and not a lot of time on user pages and talk pages. One more thing, use your sandbox and not a word document, much handier and then you have more transparency. I have heard from people before that they like using Word documents because that is what they are used to, so it is a bit of a change to use a sandbox. It's best to just get used to it now, you eventually will need to make that change, so sooner rather than later. Please send me a message or email if you have questions in the future.Sgerbic (talk) 18:34, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks Sgerbic! I will try to contribute more to articles over talk pages. Before you go, I hope you wouldn't mind answering some of my questions; 1. How can I email users? (the Emailing users page was confusing). 2. Am I allowed to hit "publish" when using the Sandbox? When I tried using it before I had no "Save" button (in both edit-source and visual mode).  When I hit Publish I freaked out that I did something wrong lol.  After this trouble with Sandbox I moved to the word documents.  I would like to use Sandbox and any help would be great.  Thanks. --Sadsignal (talk) 22:39, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not far. So to email someone, I have only done it one time I think, on the person's user page I think there is an option that allows others to email. They want everything in the open on talk pages, so I think it isn't a big button or anything. I'm susangerbic@yahoo.com and don't mind if people know it, and you can find me on Facebook, most WP editors aren't as public as I am, so don't be surprised if people freak out if you try to contact them that way. Best to leave messages for others on talk pages, me I don't care. Hum, now that I'm looking I can't see where the "email" button is. I'm sure it's Googleable. So for the sandbox, I actually know this answer as someone asked me this the other day. Because you have a brand new account, you have not created your sandbox yet. So go ahead and hit publish, it will be the last time you will be asked that. Once you have done it the first time, it will look like a normal WP page with a edit summary, show preview and publish changes. I promise you will not blow up the Internet or anything. You can ask me all the beginner questions you like, don't worry.Sgerbic (talk) 22:59, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * @Sgerbic Fantastic! So glad I didn't almost break Wikipedia by hitting Publish lol. I'll work more on practicing with the Sandbox. Thanks for all your help, I'll probably be contacting you again with future questions. So nice to have met another friendly veteran here, I almost started to feel that I had jumped into a lion's den. haha. Best regards! --Sadsignal (talk) 23:10, 2 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Head to sgerbic's user page or talk page. On the left hand side menu under the heading "tools", you will see a link "e-mail this user". It will work on other editors' user or talk pages too ;). The code to e-mail Sgerbic is (e-mail me)  gives you this  (e-mail me). 8&#61;&#61;8 Boneso (talk) 07:53, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks so much 8&#61;&#61;8 Boneso, I hadn't noticed the tools section before, lots of useful options. Thanks for the email code too, your help is much appreciated! --Sadsignal (talk) 12:21, 3 February 2018 (UTC)