Welcome! edit

Hello, Rtcahilljr, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

I noticed that one of the first articles you edited was Hauptmann's Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping, which appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article. Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

To reduce the chances of your contributions being undone, you might like to draft your revised article before submission, and then ask me or any other editor to proofread it. See our help page on userspace drafts for more details. If the page you created has already been deleted from Wikipedia, but you want to save the content from it to use for that draft, don't hesitate to ask anyone from this list and they will copy it to your user page.

One firm rule we do have in connection with conflicts of interest is that accounts used by more than one person will unfortunately be blocked from editing. Wikipedia generally does not allow editors to have usernames which imply that the account belongs to a company or corporation. If you have a username like this, you should request a change of username or create a new account. (A name that identifies the user as an individual within a given organization may be OK.)

Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{Help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Drm310 (talk) 05:10, 9 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Response to your post on my talk page edit

Hello Rtcahilljr. In response to your post on my talk page, I do not believe your editing privileges have been blocked. Any kind of block or action that would prevent you from editing would be done by an administrator. For the record, I am not an administrator and it's beyond my power to determine if any administrative action has been taken. An admin would be required to leave a notification here on your talk page if this occurred, so the absence of notification infers that your privileges are intact.

If, on the other hand, you meant that your edits have been challenged, reverted or your articles tagged with maintenance templates, then yes - this has occurred. This is the normal editing cycle on Wikipedia, where articles are built by consensus. You should not view this as a personal affront, but rather the usual way in which business is conducted here.

If you are an expert on the subject, you should consider identifying yourself on your user page and list any credentials and experience you wish to publicly divulge. It is difficult to maintain a claim of expertise while being anonymous. Keep in mind, though, that Wikipedia does not grant users privileges or respect based on subject-matter expertise. Consult the expert editors essay for more about this topic.

I strongly advise you to read Wikipedia's plain and simple conflict of interest guide, as you have already strayed into this territory by creating an article about your own book. An author who creates an article about his own work is too self-promotional. It would have been better to let a disinterested third party create an article about it instead. Regardless of who started it, the book must pass Wikipedia's notability guideline for books to be considered for inclusion. The article about the book is also without sources. Like everything else on Wikipedia, it must be verifiable with citations to reliable sources that are independent of the subject.

Your edits to Richard Hauptmann and Charles Lindbergh have remained intact, but your paragraph about your book's release in the Lindbergh kidnapping article was reverted for being promotional. When you made your additions, it was several months before your book's release, and that paragraph was clearly meant for publicity and to drive traffic to the book's website. A vehicle for promotion is one of the many things that Wikipedia is not.

I hope this has given you some insight, and I hope your future experience here is a more positive one. Good luck. --Drm310 (talk) 06:26, 11 March 2014 (UTC)Reply