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Hello, Brodieshady496! Welcome to Wikipedia! You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking   or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! HiLo48 (talk) 21:39, 6 December 2014 (UTC)Reply
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Intelligent design edit

The wording of the lead of that article is long established and is the result of extensive discussion. Please don't change it again before you get agreement to do so on the article's Talk page. HiLo48 (talk) 21:42, 6 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

What I said above is important. The wording in Intelligent design is the result of a long established consensus. Please don't change the article again until you raise the matter on the article's Talk page and establish a new consensus there. HiLo48 (talk) 22:13, 6 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

Avoid edit warring by following BRD edit

 

Your recent editing history at Intelligent design shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you get reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the article's talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See BRD for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in your being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you don't violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly. -- Brangifer (talk) 22:12, 6 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

some advice edit

You are new here and you don't understand the rules very well, much less the spirit that informs them - it is very very unwise to jump straight into a heated dispute as you have on the Intelligent design article.

I am sorry about this, but if you really want to get involved, it turns out that Wikipedia is a pretty complex place. Being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" means that over the years, Wikipedia has developed lots of policies and guidelines (PAG) to help provide a "body of law" as it were, that form a foundation for rational discussion. Without that foundation, this place would be both a garbage dump of random content and a wild west - a truly ugly place. But with the foundation, there is guidance for generating excellent content and there are ways to rationally work things out - if, and only if, all the parties involved accept that foundation and work within it. One of the hardest things for new people, is to understand not only that this foundation exists, but what its letter and spirit is. (I keep emphasizing the spirit, because too often people fall prey to what we call "wikilawyering") The more I have learned about how things are set up here - not just the letter of PAG and the various drama boards and administrative tools, but their spirit - the more impressed I have become at how, well ... beautiful this place can be. It takes time to learn both the spirit and the letter of PAG, and to really get aligned with Wikipedia's mission to crowdsource a reliable, NPOV source of information for the public (as "reliable" and "NPOV" are defined in PAG!). People come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead to WP:TENDENTIOUS editing, which is really destructive. WP:ADVOCACY is one of our biggest bedevilments. Anyway, I do hope you slow down and learn. There are lots of people here who are happy to teach, if you open up and listen and ask authentic questions, not rhetorical ones.

PAG are described and discussed in a whole forest of documents within Wikipedia that are "behind the scenes" in a different "namespace", in which the documents start with "Wikipedia:" or in shorthand, "WP:" (for example, our policy on edit warring is here: WP:EDITWAR not here EDITWAR). You won't find these documents by using the simple search box above, which searches only in "main space" where the actual articles are. However if you search with the prefix, (for example if you search for "WP:EDITWAR") you will find policies and guidelines. Likewise if you do an advanced search with "wikipedia" or "help" selected you can also find things in "Wikipedia space". The link in the welcome message above the "Five Pillars" points you to our most important policies and I recommend that you read them all, if you have not already and if you intend to stick around! They guide everything that happens here.

With all that in mind, here are some things that I suggest you read (I know, I know, things to read... but like I said, Wikipedia can be complicated!)

  • WP:SPA - please read this - right now your account is what we call a "single purpose account")
  • WP:NPOV - this is our policy defining what "neutral point of view" really means in Wikipedia (it is not "fair and balanced"!)
  • WP:VERIFY - another policy that says that everything in Wikipedia must be based on a reliable source (see WP:RS for what a "reliable source" is here in Wikipedia)
  • WP:OR - this is another policy, that says that no original research is allowed here - again, everything must be based on what mainstream scholarship already says
  • WP:NOT - Wikipedia is an encyclopedia - there are a lot of things it is not - and it is especially not a vehicle for promotion of companies or views (see WP:SOAPBOX for that in particular)
  • finally WP:CONSENSUS - Wikipedia has plenty of policies and guidelines, as I mentioned, but really at the end of the day this place is ... a democracy? an anarchy? something hard to define. But we figure things out by talking to one another. CONSENSUS is the bedrock on which everything else rests. So please talk - please never edit war (see warning above). If you make a change to an article and someone else reverts it, the right thing to do is to follow WP:BRD (please do read that) - but briefly, when you are reverted, open a discussion on the article's Talk page. Ask the reason under policy and guidelines why your change was reverted -- and really ask, and really listen to the answer, and go read whatever links you are pointed to. Think about it, and if there is something you don't understand, ask more questions. Please only start to actually argue once you understand the basis for the objection. If you and the other party or parties still disagree, there are many ways to resolve disputes (see WP:DR) - it never needs to become emotional - because we do have this whole "body of law" and procedures to resolve disputes.

Anyway, good luck!Jytdog (talk) 22:46, 6 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

Your recent edits edit

  Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. When you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion (but never when editing articles), please be sure to sign your posts. There are two ways to do this. Either:

  1. Add four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment; or
  2. With the cursor positioned at the end of your comment, click on the signature button (  or  ) located above the edit window.

This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is necessary to allow other editors to easily see who wrote what and when.

Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 23:36, 6 December 2014 (UTC)Reply