User talk:Tatoosh

Vandalism and Grumpy Comments
You wrote in the Occupation of Luxembourg Talk Page;

''Sorry, I am unfamiliar with your sites interface, which for me, is so very non-intuitive. But that is not my problem at the moment, what I would like to comment on is the entry "Tom Brady is bad quarterback" found just above the contents sidebox. Tom Brady's abilities may be worthy of debate, but I can not imagine how it would relate to the German occupation of Luxenburg. As a parting thought, calling an interface page a "Talk Page" but labeling it as "Discussion" may be apt for many, but it is simply misleading to much of the users. Sorry for wandering off topic.''

First of all, welcome to Wikipedia, your contributions are valued.

I hope you don't mind me giving you some advice. I hope this will help you to contribute easily to Wikipedia.

Vandalism
On the issue of the vandalism to the article, the article history shows me that it was reverted inside one minute by another editor. That is, faster than you could write your comments on the Talk page. If nothing else, this shows that it is a lot easier to edit Wikipedia than you seem to think it is, once you are used to it. There is a lot of this kind of vandalism on Wikipedia but mostly, as in this case, it is spotted pretty quickly. It was helped in this case in that there are an unusually high number of people editing this article today for some reason.

If you spot any in the future, feel free to delete it yourself. Most often, the vandalism will be the last edit that was made to an article. To delete it, do this; click on the "History" tab of the article which will display a list of the most recent edits. The vandalism will most likely be the top entry and will most likely be authored by an anonymous user (IP address only, no user name). You can verify this is the culprit by using the "diff" function which will give you a side-by-side comparison of two versions of the article. The easiest way to remove the vandalism in these cases is to click on "undo" after the entry you want to undo, write something appropriate in the edit summary and click "Save page".

The normal convention is to write "reverting vandalism" or just "rvv" in the edit summary and state the author and date of the version you are reverting to. You can find more information on vandalism and how to deal with it here.

There is no need for a discussion or explanation when dealing with vandalism. However, if you are reverting for a reason other than vandalism you should discuss it first, or at least give an explanation, on the articles Talk page.

Talk v Discussion Page
You are right that this is off-topic for an article discussion page. A better place to take this issue is Village pump (proposals).

Signing
It is the convention (and polite) to sign your user name after making an entry on a Talk page (but not main article space) by adding four tildes after your comment like so "~". This will automatically be converted to your username and time and date when you click Save page, just as my details have been added below.

I hope you have found this helpful and are encouraged to contribute to Wikipedia. If however, you have found anything objectionable in my comments, please don't blame it on Wikipedia. I am only an ordinary user like yourself.

Spinningspark (talk) 20:32, 23 December 2007 (UTC)