User talk:Dougburdette

Welcome!

Hello, Dougburdette, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

You may also want to take the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit The Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! RFD (talk) 12:15, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Aldino, Maryland

Please do not added unsource/original research to the Aldino, Maryland article. If you continue to do this, you may be block from editing. Please take your concerns to the article's talk page-thank you-RFD (talk) 12:21, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Understanding Wikipedia

Hello Dougburdette. In response to your query, let me try to clarify what happened. In two separate edits ([1][2]), you added what's known as original research to an article, Aldino, Maryland. One of Wikipedia's basic policies prohibits original research. A complementary policy requires that all content be verifiable.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a repository for recounting people's personal experiences and knowledge. It is possible to use one's own knowledge and experiences when writing or adding to an article, but in order to make the content verifiable, it is necessary to cite reliable sources that support what one writes. This applies to everyone: even Nobel-winning scientists don't get to add their own personal expertise into Wikipedia articles on scientific topics unless it is backed up by reliable, third-party sources.

Please understand that with over five million articles to curate, it's necessary that established editors act quickly when unverifiable content is added. In the thread above this one (grammatically challenged though it is), you were correctly advised to bring up any concerns about the Aldino article at that article's talk page. Here's a link to that talk page: Talk:Aldino, Maryland. I think the warning about being blocked was a little over the top—blocking is unlikely to happen unless you persistently violate policy—so I wouldn't worry about that. If you have any general questions about editing Wikipedia, you can ask at the help desk or I can try to answer them for you at my talk page. Another good place for new Wikipedians to get assistance is the Teahouse; I pretty much promise everyone will be friendly and welcoming there. Good luck! Rivertorch^FIRE _WATER 15:22, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. I notice that the problematic content you added was written in the first person (i.e., using pronouns such as "I", "me", "we", and "us"). Other encyclopedias don't do that, and neither does Wikipedia.

Hello Doug

Doug, I can't argue with the above responses to your writing. I don't like certain Wikipedia policies, but here I abide by them.

The very same thing happened to me when I first came to Wikipedia. I heavily edited and added valuable new material to the article about Richfield, Utah, based on intimate familiarity and good insight, and to the article about Willie Mays, a baseball player about whom I could have written, oh, 30 pages without looking at anything outside my own brain. With Richfield, instead of looking like an article a college freshman spent three hours doing, with no previous knowledge of the place, it had zest and irony and possibly surprising facts the locals knew all about, but not many others. I'd been writing about the American West for many years, and it invariably worked and was often appreciated. Not at Wikipedia!

So I went off to about four of my favorite books and magazines (and a couple more I found on line) on Utah history, religion, social patterns, especially those from well-known authors but not limited to them, and found them saying maybe 40% of my best points. I learned how to put in footnotes, added my 40% back in, which the editors had just flat jerked out because it was "unencyclopedic." In the parts I cared the most about, if I wrote a five-line paragraph, I tried to get at least two footnotes from Wikipedia's famed "secondary sources." It wasn't the article I wanted, but it was sooooo much more than I had started with. And there have probably been 5,000 people read it since, over a few years.

One more note: I also in the early days rewrote an article named something like "Duration of Sexual Intercourse," because I'd stumbled onto ways to slow down or change position, to guarantee that love-making could last 30 to 90 minutes, following two basic principles taught me by my female partners: a) avoid wearing the woman out by communicating, by varying pace, position, amount of kissing and other things to alternate with "doing it" b) avoid getting overheated and erupting after six minutes, which is about when the female is really kicking into gear. My knowledge included things learned from talking to people about love-making over many years. Now if I had just written a book, and then somebody else writing articles or books had used some of my learning, Wikipedia would have been interested. But it wasn't. Wikipedia isn't after truth, as such, if it's not verified by consensus, by time, by repeatedly different sources studying something and separating the reliable from the "one informed voice says it's so" approach.

If you ever read this, written two weeks after your experience, you can respond to me at my link here. Alan Rasmussen — Preceding unsigned comment added by Moabalan (talk • contribs) 18:14, 2 April 2017 (UTC) I forgot to sign my comment with four marks/tildes.Moabalan (talk) 18:19, 2 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Doug, you could also read my comment below yours on the "Your First Article" page of Wikip, which was how I found out about you. Another thought I had is that you may be able to quote from family histories, even if only one or a few copies were printed, as long as you give info that allows me or anyone later on to find that material. But it really needs to be published with a date, publisher (which can be an individual), something verifiable by me if I take the interest to check the source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Moabalan (talk • contribs) 18:23, 2 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]