User talk:Alicemaguire

Welcome!

Welcome!

Hello, Alicemaguire, 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:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Manual of Style

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! Amalthea 22:56, 17 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Help creating my first real article

Hello,

I am a journalism major and have been wanting to create an article for a few months now. However, I am afraid it will not "stick". I heard articles get deleted very fast. Can you help me learn the ropes so I can have my article stay strong and untouched? I don't want to put all this time and effort for it to disappear! :) Thank you.

-Alice —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alicemaguire (talk • contribs) 22:14, 17 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Alice,
welcome to Wikipedia, and thank you for wanting to help building it!
If an article is deleted its topic is usually outside this project's scope, i.e. not of what's considered "encyclopedic notability". I would advise you to have a look at WP:My first article which should give you a few pointers, or use the WP:Article wizard which tries to guide you through a few steps to starting an article.
What's the topic of your article?
Cheers, Amalthea 22:56, 17 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I want to write my first article on Shawn Sedlacek. I have always been very into the Event Production world. (ever since I was 8 years old I told my parents I wanted to plan parties and be a writer...so why not do both?) Anyways, I have heard and researched a lot about Shawn. He started a company at a very young age and now plans mega events. I saw an article about him in the Best Events magazine and have been looking into him ever since. I noticed a lot of in the limelight entrepreneurs have wikipedia articles and in my earlier stage of looking into how he built his company (as it is something I aspire to do), I had come to wikipedia hoping to get further insight on who he is, where he came from, etc. and there was nothing. Now that I have found a lot of information on him, I would love to make an article about him so that others who are interested in that world can easily access some information on him and not have to do the searching I did.

Thank you so much for your quick response! I look forward to learning more about wikipedia and working through this with you! Thank you again, Alicemaguire (talk) 00:07, 17 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there. From what you have described, it sounds like a likely subject for a valid article here. Did you find those sources online and if so, could you link them here, so we can help you determine whether they are sufficient for Wikipedia? Regards SWM (SoWhy[on]Mobile) 06:43, 18 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! Here are a links to any sources I found online regarding his company and progress. Other information I found was in magazines or interviews. Im glad you think it sounds like a valid article, that is great news! because I believe it is too :)

Hopefully some/most are sufficient? Thank you for your help, it's very appreciated. Alicemaguire (talk) 20:03, 18 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Let's see. First a tip: You can create a numbered list by adding "#" in front of a new line. The same way you can create a bullet-point-list with "*" and indent the text with ":". I changed it above so you can see, what I mean. If you want to link to external pages, remember that you can do so using single square brackets ([ ]), e.g. [http://www.example.com] to get [1] and [http://www.example.com Example] to get Example.

That said, let's look at the sources:

Variety is a reliable source, but that source only mentions Sedlacek in passing and could rather be used to write about his company. It's useful for little details though.
NY Post is also a reliable source but mentions Sedlacek only in passing, i.e. the source is not about him
Is a press release and thus unsuitable. See Wikipedia:SELFPUB
See #3
Provides no coverage about Sedlacek.
See #5
Reliable source but most of it is about the company
See #3
Is a primary source, can only be used in certain ways
Only mentions Sedlacek but nothing else
Contains nothing but the name
See #11
Is a blog (see Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published sources (online and paper))
See #14

Unfortunately, most of the links you mentioned are unsuitable for Wikipedia for various reasons although #1, #7 and (in limited ways) #9 may be useful in writing such an article. To be safe, you should probably find more though. This customized Google News search might be helpful in doing so, it is preset to ignore major sources of press releases and mentions of baseball. Unfortunately, since there is a baseball player with the same name, most hits will not be about the Shawn Sedlacek you had in mind. Nevertheless, it's a more focused way to start looking. Leave me a message if you need more help. Regards So Why 08:59, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just a thought (sorry for butting in, I have SoWhy's talk page on my watchlist!): wouldn't a better prospect be an article on the company which mentions Sedlacek and gives some detail without being primarily about him? The company seems to have received quite a lot of coverage and probably meets the guideline for organisations. Alzarian16 (talk) 10:12, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah disappointing, but understandable. How many credible sources do I need bare minimum? cause now I'm down to three...is that not a sufficient amount? Also, once again thank you so much for your help and going through this with me. This guidance is unbelievably helpful. Do you think an article on Shawn may still be valid? :/ :)

Alzarian- do not apologize for joining in! the more help and opinion I get the better! I appreciate every piece of advice I am getting. You make a valid point about forming an article about the company. A huge positive is the fact that more articles are about the company itself. But as I stated in the beginning of this thread, I have done so much digging into the life of Shawn. I would want to use that. If writing on the company itself, would it be unorthodox to have background on the founder (Shawn) as a chunk of the article? ..with this possibility I could still include all my information on who he is, how he came to be, etc. ..I mean that correlates with how the company grew..?

Once Again, Thank you both! and if anyone else is reading this, feel free to throw out ideas! I am excited for where this article can go! And hopefully I can still accomplish my original hope of an article about this man who has a company that has inspired me to one day do something along the same lines. As an aspiring writer this could not be a more exciting topic for me as my first official wikipedia article, as it is what motivated me to want to make one months ago when (to my shock) found no article about him on wikipedia. Creating an article for him/his company would be great for others looking into his world as I was. Alicemaguire (talk) 16:40, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As Alzarian said correctly, an article about the company can of course include information about its founder. Especially when the founder's notability arises from founding this company. In fact, there are a number of precedents where articles about living people were merged into the one about their books/companies/etc. for those reasons.

But to answer your question: Biographies of living people are more tricky than other articles. You need to be extra careful that everything can be attributed to reliable sources and that neutrality is preserved. So three sources that mention a person in passing are a start but you need to find some that focus (at least in part) on Sedlacek as a person rather than on his company or his job (e.g. a biography in a newspaper). But since we have something to start with, I'd suggest your create a userpage draft (= a draft of an article in your userspace that is not live and thus allows you to work on it with less restrictions. A good place to do so would be User:Alicemaguire/Shawn Sedlacek (don't worry, when it's done, we can rename it easily). Click on this (red) link and start the article based on what you know so far. If you need basic help, you can copy the layout from other, existing articles and refer to Wikipedia:Your first article as a guide. Once you have written the article to the best of your ability (so far, we all learn ;-)), leave a note here or at my talk page and one of us will check it and give you tips and corrections. That way you can learn by doing and we as helpers don't have to tell you "boring theoretical stuff" :-) Regards So Why 22:45, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Okay,first of all, thank you for creating my userpage and now I have taken the first step! I put the article I had been creating on a word document into the userpage. I tried to edit it with bolds and big words like I have seen on other wikipedia pages. I tried the "#" before the reference links but they were all numbered as "1" so I manually just put in 1,2,3. There is so much technical things to still learn! I know we discussed changing my angle to the company, which is still possible, but here is my original short article on Sedlacek that I had hoped for. Let me know if you think it could work with the original plan. If not, I must try more and do more research! :/ :) Oh, and I understand what you said about the difficulty on writing an article on a living person due to reliability and neutrality. However, I am just stated facts I have dug up, so that is neutral, is it not? If so, at least thats one down out of the two negatives? haha ...I will keep looking for articles such as a biography in newspapers, but if none exist? does that mean I must change to the company because an article on him alone will not have enough reference links? Feel free to critic me away! I want this to work :) Thank you again! Really appreciate it!Alicemaguire (talk) 16:34, 21 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Opps I had a few typos/bad grammar in that message! Let me correct..."I am just stating (not stated) facts I dug up"..."There are so many technical technical things to still learn! ..not there is so much" Sorry :) Alicemaguire (talk) 16:37, 21 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've made a few formatting changes to the article, and added some inline citations to support a few facts. Optimally, all sentences with "material challenged or likely to be challenged" should be followed by such a reference tag pointing at a reliable source where the material can be verified. With biographical material this is even more important, so could you try and do this?
The first question I had when I read the article is where you know all that stuff from? "Captain of the tennis team"? Since I haven't found that on the web I'm guessing that you got that from a personal conversation, which will make it hard to source those bits properly.
Amalthea 09:52, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Don't worry about typos and bad grammar, especially not when replying to me. I'm German, so my English is not native-level anyway and I probably won't notice ;-)

As for the page you created, you will notice that Amalthea has made some changes to it (he will probably explain them here, so I won't do so in detail). Using a "diff", you can compare your last version to his (click me!) and will notice what he did to make it look like a real article (for example, headers are generated by "==" (and "===", "====" etc.) and references use a special system of tags). I think such diffs allow you to understand which formatting you need to learn/change for Wikipedia. You can use the Wikipedia:Cheatsheet for a quick reference on formatting "wikistyle". As for numbered lists (#): They will restart numbering if you separate them with newlines, so you can avoid that by not doing so.

As for the article itself: Wikipedia nowadays (it was different in the "good old days") is very strict that the fact that something is true and neutral is not sufficient, others also need to be able to check that themselves, if they wish to do so. So more sources would be a good idea. The essay Wikipedia:But it's true! explains that in greater detail. So you can do this: Try to add as many sources as you can and if you fail to find any more, you can request some feedback on it at Wikipedia:Requests for feedback, including an opinion whether it is notable enough to survive on its own. Regards So Why 10:09, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And, as a bonus lesson, you now know about edit conflicts, which happens when someone edits and saves a page while you do so. In this case, Amalthea wrote his reply after I started mine but finished first, rendering part of my reply outdated ;-) Regards So Why 10:09, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you so much for all this information and guidance! Sorry I have been absent the past few days, life got very busy! However, I think I have decided I am going to change my whole angle. I will do as suggested and create an article on the company. It seems that will be much easier? So I may just ignore my first article/userpage and I am going to do some digging for information and start sort of from scratch. So it may take a few days or week or so, I'm not really sure. However, once I get new/more information and a new article going, may I come back here and show you all what I have got/where I am headed?? I would love to continue working through my first article with you (though now a different article, kind of) It would be great to make this one work and continue to get help, this way I can finally get an article up! :) As I say each time, THANK YOU!! SO APPRECIATED!! I feel like we are making so much progress! Alicemaguire (talk) 23:32, 26 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and also...I like this "request feedback" page...Should I try seeing if the article would survive as is, with 3 sources? or that is probably very unlikely and a waste of time? At this point, I dont want to look for more links for it because I want to look into finding more links about the company, as that will be my new article. I would only try the feedback page if the article with just those 3 sources had a chance. But Im guessing you will see dont bother, I just figured I would ask :) 128.223.222.66 (talk) 23:37, 26 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Opps, I dont know why it did not sign as my name but my IP address. strange. anyways, here we go: Alicemaguire (talk) 23:39, 26 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm happy to continue to help you (and I think the others as well). :-) Take your time and tell us when you are ready. Remember, to create a new subpage, add "User:Alicemaguire/<name of the page>" in the search box on the left or enter "User:Alicemaguire/<name of the page>" after the "/wiki/" part of the URL in your browser. You'll reach an empty page which you can create by clicking "edit this page" and then saving the page. Then post the link here once your done. In case no one of us replies, you can add {{helpme}} here to get someone to help you or leave one of us a message at our talk pages.

As for the request for feedback, what have you got to lose? Just start a request, more eyes won't hurt and since all of us do everything voluntarily anyway, no one is forced to comment on it, if they don't want to. ;-) Regards So Why 19:19, 27 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]