User talk:Yellowballoon1

The Now People
Thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. This is a non-notable band according to the criteria set out in WP:BAND. Perhaps Myspace would be a better location for this information rather than an encylopedia, until the criteria are satisfied.  (aeropagitica)   (talk)   23:29, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Please stop adding unwanted edits to other users' user pages without their permission. It is considered vandalism. If you would like to experiment, use the sandbox. Thanks.   Sango   123   23:41, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * [[Image:Stop hand.svg|left|30px]] Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing. However, unconstructive edits are considered vandalism, and if you continue in this manner you may be blocked from editing without further warning. Please stop, and consider improving rather than damaging the hard work of others. Thank you.   Sango   123   23:43, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * 1) [[Image:Stop_hand.svg|left|30px]] This is your last warning. The next time you vandalize a page, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia.  -- Kungfu Adam  ( talk ) 23:47, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I deleted The Now People and it cannot be created again. It doesn't meet our notability criteria. Please stop creating non-notable pages.-- Kungfu Adam ( talk ) 23:56, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Wiki is not HTML
Please don't use raw HTML to format your pages. For inscance italics shouldn't be done as italicized but as italicized please read the links on the welcome message above for more information. -- Drini 21:59, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

The encyclopedia that anyone can edit
Hi Yellowballoon1!

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. That means that we recognise that not all articles are perfect. We encourage our users to edit articles and to contribute. One of the ways we do this is to tag poorly-performing articles for clean-up. We use tags to suggest to passing readers and experienced editors that they may like to format an article to our standards, assert notability for the subject of the article and provide categories for the article so others can find it and read it.

Deleting these tags without providing the information requested by them is frowned upon. Repeatedly deleting them is considered vandalism. You are encourage to add material to Wikipedia in a constructive way. If you simply do things for yourself, rather than doing things for our readers, such as removing tags without following the requests those tags make, you are liable to be blocked from editing and you risk having the article nominated for deletion.

Please don't remove tags from articles in future. Thanks. ➨  Я Є  DVERS  22:06, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Please stop
Please stop removing informational tags from articles. It is considered vandalism. Please contact me if you need any help or advice. Thanks. ➨  Я Є  DVERS  07:34, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

What to do now
Thanks for asking for help. We would genuinely like your article to survive in our encyclopedia, but there are several things that need to be done to ensure this. These are the things the tags were asking editors to do (not just you, anyone! This article is subject to being edited mercilessly by others, corrected, made better, made worse, changed beyond recognition, deleted or expanded. That's what we do.)

The first tag asks for the article to be wikified. This is a piece of jargon that means "make the article look like our house style". We've found over the past 5 years that readers prefer if all articles are laid out in the same manner - articles that differ just confuse readers.

If you want to do this yourself, you need to read the links the tag suggests - Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. These are usually small things, like making sure the name of the subject is in a bold typeface produced using Wikimarkup, not HTML.

Next up, we require all articles to assert a truthful notability for their subject matter. So a person must have a reason for being in this encyclopedia. This isn't MySpace.com - this is a not-for-profit company supported by donations from its readers dedicated to creating an encyclopedia. Our articles therefore need to be encyclopedic and on subjects that you'd expect an encyclopedia to cover.

Therefore, ideally the first sentence should, in as few words as possible, state why this person should be in an encyclopedia. For instance:

Albert Einstein  (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a theoretical physicist widely regarded as the most important scientist of the 20th century.

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is the founder and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation,[1] a non-profit corporation that operates Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and several other wiki projects.

Redvers Kyle (born either 1928 or 1929 in South Africa) was a legendary announcer with ITV in the United Kingdom.

As you see from the above, each of these leading sentences narrow the person down in a few words to being less than one in hundred of the population of the planet - ie, notable in and of themselves. If an opening sentence fails to narrow the person down to that level, either by being very very detailed in an attempt to prove notability or by not providing any information at all that sets the candidate apart, then the article is failing to assert notability.

Instructions on what to do are given in the first link produced by the tag requesting notability be asserted - that link leads to Notability (people).

The third tag you have repeatedly removed is one requesting that the article be put into a category. All notable articles have a kinship with other notable articles. Thus an article about a TV personality would be grouped with other TV personalities, famous people in the media, people famous for what the subject is famous for, by network, by country, even by religion. If an article has no category (and a notable subject would be in 3 or 4 categories without question) then it is technically orphaned - difficult to find for the majority of readers.

Categorization is a hard job. Most editors never get it right, putting article too far up the tree, too far down or just on the wrong branch. Fortunately, evolution has developed a subset of humans who have clear, logical minds that can see how things fit together. Wikipedia has enslaved this race and put them to work at Category schemes, toiling for the rest of us. By tagging an article to say it needs a category, you attract the attention of a group of people who are expert in what they do, who quietly and efficiently and without any credit whatsoever sort the information into the right places that readers will be looking in. Removing the tag that is designed to attract these Wikislaves is counterproductive and detrimental to the health of the article.

Are you still reading this? If so, you'll have found by now that creating an article isn't as easy at it seems. Worse, you have created an article about yourself. That means you need to be objective about yourself and prepared to accept that others may not agree with your assessment of your own talent (this article is subject to people who are not fans of your work coming along and changing it to reflect their views of you. Imagine that.) For this reason, we have a guideline (not a rule) called Vanity guidelines. And, yes, writing an article about yourself is vanity. We will all refer to it as "Steve Stanley's vanity article" and "that article that Steve Stanley's ego wrote about himself". In a short time, someone will affix a tag on the article that points out that it was written by the subject and points readers to this page to read what the subject has to say about themselves (and what other readers and editors have to say about the subject too).

Also, please remember that Wikipedia is owned by a not-for-profit-company and is financed through donations by its readers. If elements of an article look designed to be an advertisement - especially by being in bold and containing a link to another website - then people who donate start to think that the article is, in effect, stealing from them. That article has taken their money, given to a not-for-profit encyclopedia, and someone has used that money to avoid paying Google for some AdWords. That narks people, and the article attracts criticism, critical edits and votes for deletion.

So it is better if the article doesn't contain anything like that if the subject doesn't want to end up persona non grata on the whole internet!

I hope these suggestions make sense to you, and I hope you;ve read them and followed the links rather than assuming that you know what I've said. But you mustn't delete those tags again without addressing the problems your article is suffering from. If you do, you will be blocked from editing next time. And the article will, like as not, be deleted without notice.

So improve, adapt and prepare to be edited like every other subject of an article. And happy editing of the other 1 million+ articles we have on Wikipedia! ➨  Я Є  DVERS  20:09, 8 June 2006 (UTC)