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Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent edits, such as the ones to the page Dorothea Tanning, do not conform to our policies. For more information on this, see Wikipedia's policies on vandalism and limits on acceptable additions. If you'd like to experiment with the wiki's syntax, please do so in the "sandbox" rather than in articles.

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Dorothea Tanning edit

My recent edits were all rejected -- some were grammatical corrections -- changing a comma between two sentences to a period, for example. Others were updates and removing links that didn't work. Can you please identify which changes were not conforming to the guidelines? Thank you.

If you look at the article history, you will see that the editor who reverted your recent edits gave an edit summary: "Unexplained removal of a great deal of content" and indeed this edit of yours removed the whole section headed "100th birthday" with no explanation but "Updates". It will help if you too use informative edit summaries to explain your edits - see WP:Edit summary for more about them.
The way Wikipedia works is described in WP:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle - if you see a change you think will improve the encyclopedia, be BOLD and make it; but if it is then reverted, do not just make it again, which can lead to WP:Edit warring; instead, discuss it on the article talk page and try to reach WP:Consensus with other editors. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 18:15, 1 November 2011 (UTC)Reply
OK, thanks. I think rejecting all the edits as "vandalism" was a bit heavy-handed. Would it be Ok if I re-do the grammatical changes and make the straightforward edits with more explanations of each one? I'm happy to discuss the removal of the few lines of outdated content. Thanks for your help.
Thanks to JohnCD for responding here, as I was distracted and did not see your message, Olliverclark. I agree with everything he said above. It was the large removal of content with no explanation that got my attention. Looking at your edit history, though, I see that you have made large scale, and positive, contributions, to the article in the past. With that in mind, I know that you are not a vandal. But, please, in future, use an edit summary that explains your changes, especially if you are removing a large amount of text. And, please, let me know if I can be of any help. Cheers! ---RepublicanJacobiteTheFortyFive 18:31, 1 November 2011 (UTC)Reply
(edit conflict)Nobody said "vandalism", but that may well have been in the other editor's mind, because removal of content without explanation is a very common form of vandalism, and Recent Changes patrollers are so busy that it it is easier to revert a suspicious series of edits than to investigate each one in detail - if they were genuine, reversion can lead to discussion, as in this case. JohnCD (talk) 18:37, 1 November 2011 (UTC)Reply

September 2013 edit

  Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to Dorothea Tanning may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "()"s. If you have, don't worry, just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:
  • bio/dorothea-tanning Dorothea Tanning, 1910-2012], online biography, accesssed 18 May 2013.</ref>), Tanning began to write her own poetry in her eighties, and her poems were published regularly in

Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 12:28, 3 September 2013 (UTC)Reply