User talk:GaspodeNeil
Welcome!
[edit]
Hello, GaspodeNeil, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you are enjoying editing and want to do lots more. Some useful pages to visit are:
- The five pillars of Wikipedia
- Contributing to 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)
- Simplified Manual of Style
- Wikipedia Teahouse (a user-friendly help forum)
- The Wikipedia Adventure (a fun game-like tour to help get you oriented within Wikipedia)
You can sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date.
If you need any help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{Help me}} before the question. We're so glad you're here! All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:45, 26 April 2015 (UTC).
Don't remove references
[edit]In this edit you removed a reference to a newspaper article, saying "Citation link broken".
There are various problems with that edit.
- A reference to a newspaper doesn't need to be online to be a valid reference, so it was a perfectly good reference
- You could just have labelled it with {{dead link}} to alert someone else to look into it, having found that the link was dead. (Add {{dead link}} after the closing "}}" but before the closing "</ref>" of the reference).
- It was very easy to find an archived copy of the reference, and then add it to the article: I've done so. A simple place to look for archived references is https://web.archive.org/. known as The Wayback Machine or The Internet Archive. Just copy the URL into the box which says "Enter the URL...", and it will show you the archived copies of the reference, in most cases. It makes sense to pick the archived copy soon after the date on which the item was retrieved, so it will be most likely still to have the same content. Add it to the reference using "archive-date=" and "archive-url=" and, optionally "url-status=dead" if it goes nowhere or "url-status=unfit" if it now leads to a different page (eg the web address being offered for sale).
Leaving the reference well alone is a valid action. Removing it altogether is disruptive.
Removing the reference altogether damaged another editor's contribution to the encyclopedia by leaving a statement unsourced, after it had been added as properly-sourced content. You removed what was still a perfectly valid reference. Please take care not to do so again. Thanks. PamD 14:23, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
Welcome back!
[edit]I've just had a look at your contributions and find that your edit which I reverted was your first for three years. Sorry about the poor welcome! I hope you enjoy your editing now that you've started again. Happy Editing! PamD 14:25, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
- Yeah think I'll leave it from now on after that telling off. GaspodeNeil (talk) 17:41, 6 April 2024 (UTC)