AugustWesley found out that I was an experienced editor on Wikipedia (though largely lapsed for the past couple of years), and he asked me to help him restore the article that had been created about him before. The earlier article had been been written by parents of athletes on his team, and it was AfD'ed for obvious reasons (tone, style, content, lack of verifiable third-party references, etc.). He had found the deleted article in a Google search, and he reached out to someone at Wikipedia to help, but that did not result in much actual help. A year or so later, he asked me to help him. First, I gave him a lot of education about the Wikipedia process, the policies, etc. I explained to him about CoI, the type of edits that he should do (like upload his own personal photos that he has the copyrights for as well as to help provide the references, since he has a large number of newspapers and other published materials that are difficult or expensive to find online.) I also, obviously, explained about the types of edits that he should not do, especially to his own article. Second, I used the original article as the basis to develop a new article in my sandbox. There was some good information buried in all the non-encyclopedic content. Once I got it structured, we worked together to find sources and add new source information. Once ready, I published it live to the wiki at August Wesley (wrestler).
August has been very receptive and helpful in all ways concerning his article, and, as he gets more comfortable with the visual editor, he will continue to add more verifiable, third-party material to the article. As I said, he has a large number of newspapers and other articles, and he will also begin adding some of that information to other wrestlers who are mentioned in them as well.
All that being said, here are a few templates to welcome August Wesley to Wikipedia.
—Willscrlt( Talk | com | b:en | meta )00:41, 7 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, AugustWesley and a belated welcome to Wikipedia! I see that you've already been around awhile and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may benefit from following some of the links below, which help one get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are interested in learning more about contributing, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Happy editing! —Willscrlt( Talk | com | b:en | meta )00:41, 7 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
