Wikidrift

Hi welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you enjoy contributing.

Unfortunately, I've had to undo your edit to Mohammed Atta because it was a direct cut and paste of the material in the source. We have a policy WP:Copyvio which disallows this. (If we didn't have the authors of material we copied could sue Wikipedia.)

To help you in future, I'm posting below a standard welcome template which contains some suggested reading and tells you how to get help if you're not sure how to do things. Enjoy your editing.--Peter cohen (talk) 13:46, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, Wikidrift, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion 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 {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome!

Thanks for the reply. I do recognise that you were acting in good faith and dong your best to do things properly. As for how to avoid making the same mistake again, it's quite complicated. Wikipedia:Copy-paste gives a summary and links to longer material but, in summary, there are two separate issues involved.

One is copyright, (see also WP:Copyright and related articles, policies and guidelines,) a legal issue where the Daily Telegraph and/or its journalists have a right to make money from their work and other people should not profit from it without permission or cause the copyright holder to lose the opportunity to make money. The copying of one and a half sentences is unlikely to have done them significant damage but, for all I know, some legislations may be punitive on this. Wikipedia generally follows American/Floridan law, but there may be different legislation that also applies depending on where you and the source are. I know that the National Portrait Gallery is threatening legal action under English law against someone who copied some of their images that would not be restricted under American law.

The other issue is plagiarism (see WP:Plagiarism and related guidelines). This involves passing someone else's work off as your own, or seeming to do so. I'm surre I heard somewhere that universities tend to treat the reproduction of six words or more without indication that this is direct quotation as plagiarism. I also see that there is a policy on WP:close paraphrase which can also be problematic. SO you can't just alter a couple of words.

As far as your original contribution is concerned, then if you think the information is important you could say something like "Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, several of the hijackers, including Atta himself, visited strip joints." There is a paragraph in the "mistaken identity" section which discusses media reports of his drinking and I suggest these the booze and the strip bars are topics that belong together. So you could insert your point there or move this other stuff up to where you think is a better place.

If you have difficulty laying out the reference to match others, I can help with that. One thing that I've done in my suggested wording is remove reference to "atrocity" - Wikipedia has policies on not using subjective terms like that unless attributing it to a notable source George W Bush described the attacks as... The such-and-such centre for the study of conflict said... Ossama bin Laden, on the other hand said... The other thing I missed out is the "Western Decadence". Although the intentions of the Telegraph writer are pretty clear, Wikipedia policies would really need them to have explictly stated that despite their claims to be fighting for the high moral standards expected of devout Moslems, the hijackers actually enjoyed the types of sexual pleasures which they claimed were typical of the decadent West.

I hope this helps and isn't too much to mention in one go.--Peter cohen (talk) 19:25, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry you're feeling intimidated by this. But it's something you can pick up as you go along. It's not that I or other long term Wikipedians are professional, it's that we're experienced. The welcome message I posted above has mentioned how you can post helpme in double curly brackets here to get advice. Also every article has a talk page associated with it. So you can always say on the help page that you think mentioning something is a good idea and people will either give advice or maybe they will do it for you in which case you've still contributed by putting the idea in someone's head. There's also various places you can gert help by following the help link at the bottom of the interaction box on the left. And a final place to get help is through WP:Wikiprojects. There are projects centred on different subjects ranging from The Simpsons to Philosphy. If there are a few subjects that you wouldn't mind contributing to, then find one where there's a project and joint it and make suggestions on the project talk apge and you're likely to find someone who is interested in the subject and willing to help you out until you get more confident.

You're clearly willing to think about things and not push your ideas. My experience is that there are plenty of Wikipedians who are willing to help users like that. (Of course some subjects related to religion or conflict areas such as the Middle East etc generate a lot of argument and aren't the best palces to go while you're lackign in confidence, and there are some rude individuals but you get to know who they are and can ignore them.)

EVen if you're not immediately confident enough to add content, there are other places you can help. ASw you may have noticed, I often mistype things. There are plenty of spellign mistakes or badly written sentences in WIkipedia articles. Some people (WP:Wikignomes) just spend time fixing those sorts of mistakes. Each page you edit and its accompanyign talk page get added to your watchlist and you can thne just follow changes to the articles and conversations on talk pages and pick up how people do things. Then when you feel more confident you can try out doing small additions again. And when you get more confident agian, you can try larger changes or creatig new articles.

I hoep this helps you feel that you can do something useful even if you're not confident enough to do anythign too complex yet.--Peter cohen (talk) 01:22, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of ASIRT

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A tag has been placed on ASIRT requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about an organization or company, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hang on}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion, or "db", tag; if no such tag exists, then the page is no longer a speedy delete candidate and adding a hang-on tag is unnecessary), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, you can contact one of these administrators to request that the administrator userfy the page or email a copy to you. Safiel (talk) 22:10, 11 January 2011 (UTC)