User talk:Anonymous777985

Welcome

Welcome to Wikipedia Annon. And, congratulations for being the first to add your name to the list of usernames in our course. I did make a correction, however, by using the template. John.Farquhar (talk) 23:48, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Welcome

Hi! I just wanted to stop by and quickly welcome you to Wikipedia. I'm helping out a bit as the online Ambassador for the "Reality Check" course, so if you need any assistance just give me a yell. You can leave a message on my talk page, or send me an email - both should work well, and I'm really happy to receive questions. I'm in Australia, so our time zones will be out of sync a bit, but I'm normally online during the mornings and evenings your time. At any rate, it should be an enjoyable course. :) - Bilby (talk) 05:41, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Anon!

Hi. Vkdh (talk) 15:47, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

October 2011

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia, but at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to Residual haunting, did not appear to be constructive and has been automatically reverted (undone) by ClueBot NG.

• Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Note that human editors do monitor recent changes to Wikipedia articles, and administrators have the ability to block users from editing if they repeatedly engage in vandalism.
• ClueBot NG produces very few false positives, but it does happen. If you believe the change you made should not have been detected as unconstructive, please read about it, report it here, remove this warning from your talk page, and then make the edit again.
• The following is the log entry regarding this warning: Residual haunting was changed by Anonymous777985 (u) (t) ANN scored at 0.877825 on 2011-10-18T21:29:09+00:00 . Thank you. ClueBot NG (talk) 21:29, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Residual haunting with this edit. Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted or removed. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. Trusilver 21:55, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, as you did to Residual haunting with this edit, you may be blocked from editing. Trusilver 21:59, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

This is your last warning. You will be blocked from editing the next time you vandalize a page, as you did with this edit to Residual haunting. Trusilver 22:01, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Residual haunting

Hi! It seems that you've run into one of the difficulties with editing live wikipedia entries. :) Don't worry about it too much - the mistake was a common one that we almost all make when starting out. Wikipedia has had a bit of an ongoing issue with references. As people can potentially add anything, possibly with very poor sources, there is a requirement that all text be sourced to "reliable sources". In terms of Wikipedia, this roughly means academic papers, books, newspapers, and online sources that have editorial control, preferably by experts in the field, and more-or-less in that order. I'm not sure what the source was you were using, but it looked like it was a forum entry, and they're not considered reliable.

In this case, you could source your text "Residual haunting is the most common style of haunting toward humans" to Back, Cecilia (2009) Ghosts of the McBride House: A True Haunting, Llewellyn Worldwide, isbn 9780738715056, p. 3, but you would be better off doing a search on Google Scholar and look for something a tad more academic. If you need some help there just let me know. :)

For the rest of the text you can probably pick up other sources, but it might be better to find a couple of good papers and read them first, then see what is needed in the article. The other suggestion that I would like to make is to write with a dose of healthy scepticism: for example, "This energy typically arises a significant and/or traumatic event which occurred to the spirit" reads like a claim that it exists. Wikipedia needs something a tad more neutral, so if you had a reliable source to support it, I'd probably go with wording such as "This energy is typically described as arising from a significant and/or traumatic event which occurred to the spirit", or something similar.

Anyway, if you have any trouble let me know, and I'll keep an eye on things so I can help out where possible. And if you want to run anything past me before adding it, feel free to add it here and I'll have a look. :) - Bilby (talk) 19:10, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I'll add that I don't think the edits you made should have been regarded as vandalism. They clearly don't fit the definition. However it's a good idea, when being repeatedly reverted, to stop and ask someone to tell you what you're doing wrong. Otherwise, you may run afoul of WP:EW. --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 21:10, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Edit to article

Residual haunting is the most common style of haunting toward humans. The spirits aren't actually present during the haunting but the energy is. This energy is typically described as arising from a significant and/or traumatic event which occurred to the spirit. This why people who experience residual haunting hear screams or any type of sound.

A few tips: Wikipedia has a huge and complex rule structure that is heavily weighted to support mainstream scientific viewpoint. Since the mainstream doesn't acknowledge that ghosts exist (much less that their behavior can be studied and classified) it's important to find the most independent and reliable sources available. "Independent" means independent of the subject; for example, an academic author or a news reporter dispassionately writing about "what adherents say, do, or believe", rather than authors/adherents who are actively promoting their belief as fact. Attributing is also important. Phrases such as "According to ghost hunters...", "...say ghost hunters", and "Paranormal authors describe...." are useful to prevent stating the fringe argument in the encyclopedia's voice. Hope this helps. - LuckyLouie (talk) 14:38, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi. That looks good, especially if you can reword it a bit per LuckyLouie: one of the main policies is to maintain a neutral point of view, so it is important that wording doesn't presume that something is true when it might be in doubt, as is the case here. - Bilby (talk) 13:10, 21 October 2011 (UTC)