User talk:VanessaBrickton

March 2015
Welcome to editing Wikipedia. Unfortunately, your first contribution, User:VanessaBrickton/sandbox has been deleted, in accordance with Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion. There were two reasons for this, either of which alone would have been sufficient for the page to be deleted. Firstly, the page was unambiguously promotional in tone: Wikipedia is not a medium for promotion of any sort. Secondly, its text was assembled from various existing web pages, making it a clear copyright infringement. It is possible that you may be making one or both of two common mistakes about copyright. Firstly, some people confuse copyright with plagiarism, and imagine that acknowledging one's sources is a defence against a charge of copyright, but it isn't. Secondly, you may work for the organisation you wrote about, and think that means that you are free to use contents of its web site. There are several reasons why that is not so, including the fact that it is highly unlikely that the organisation is willing to license its web content under the very free re-use terms which are required for publication on Wikipedia.

My advice to new editors is that it is best to start by making small improvements to existing articles, rather than creating new articles. That way any mistakes you make (which you will, because we all do) will be small ones, and you won't have the discouraging experience of repeatedly seeing hours of work deleted. Gradually, you will get to learn how Wikipedia works, and after a while you will know enough about what is acceptable to be able to write whole new articles without fear that they will be deleted. Over the years I have found that editors who start by making small changes to existing articles and work up from there have a far better chance of having a successful time here than those who jump right into creating new articles from the start. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 17:13, 10 March 2015 (UTC)