User talk:Gingercraft

Welcome!

Hello, Gingercraft, 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 {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Valfontis (talk) 00:19, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

February 2012

Hello Gingercraft. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article Hawthorne Books, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about following the reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:

Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
Be cautious about deletion discussions. Everyone is welcome to provide information about independent sources in deletion discussions, but avoid advocating for deletion of articles about your competitors.
Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).
Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. Valfontis (talk) 02:23, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Hawthorne Books. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Please be particularly aware, Wikipedia's policy on edit warring states:

Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made; that is to say, editors are not automatically "entitled" to three reverts.
Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes; work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Valfontis (talk) 19:19, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This is your last warning. The next time you use Wikipedia for soapboxing, promotion or advertising, as you did at Hawthorne Books, you may be blocked from editing without further notice. The content is promotional in nature, you have issues with edit warring, there might be copyright violations, and there are probably conflict of interest issues. Please stop and discuss your intentions at Talk:Hawthorne Books before you are blocked. tedder (talk) 19:27, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hawthorne Books

Hello, Gingercraft. You have new messages at Valfontis's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Valfontis (talk) 20:18, 6 February 2012 (UTC) [reply]

Hello, Gingercraft. You have new messages at Valfontis's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Valfontis (talk) 20:10, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Messages copied below for convenience/reference

Dear Valfontis,

I am an intern at [Hawthorne Books] and am trying to simply add more detailed facts about the press but it appears someone of something is changing my edits to the page. I would very much not like to get into an 'editing war'. Is there anything I should be doing differently. I don't believe anything I have written is bias in anyway. Thank you and I'll look forward to your response.

Best, Gingercraft Gingercraft (talk) 19:33, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Ginger, thank you for stopping editing and joining the discussion. If you haven't already, please read the information I posted on your page about conflict of interest--the text of which can be found here. You may also want to read our business FAQ. Unfortunately, I see a lot of interns such as yourself get in trouble with the Wikipedia community for doing what they were asked to do by their employer. But Wikipedia is not here to provide advertising space for your organization. Also, Hawthorne books does not "own" the page.

Especially problematic is the huge list of urls that was added to the article. This kind of thing is what we consider spam. If people are curious about the company, a single url will suffice. All the other content in the article should discuss any authors who may already have Wikipedia articles, or who may notable enough to have them. This is what I attempted to do with this edit.

BTW, the "someone or something" that is changing the edits would have been me. You can see the page history here (there is a tab at the top of the page that says "view history"). There you will find a list of all the edits made to the article, as well as edit summaries explaining those edits.

Please read the material you will find by clicking the blue links on your talk page and in this post. Then, going forward, the best way to accomplish your goals and those of Wikipedia would be to post suggested edits on the article's talk page where other editors can weigh in. I hope this explains. Valfontis (talk) 20:17, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hawthorne Books

Dear Valfontis,

I am trying today to cite my references with some of the facts stated about Hawthorne Books. I've read much of the Wiki citing sources page so I hope I'm doing the right thing. As for listing the books Hawthorne has previously published, can I list those without it being spam? I was looking at other press pages that have their entire back lists including links to their wiki pages. Thank you for your help and I sincerely hope I'm on the right path now to becoming a better Wiki contributor.

Best, Ginger Gingercraft (talk) 20:58, 13 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have time to reply right now, except to ask you to please read about "other stuff" to get some idea why it doesn't matter that other publisher's articles have links to their entire back catalogs. Those other articles will need to be cleaned up but it doesn't mean that in the meantime the Hawthorne Books article can contain an entire {{linkfarm}}. Thanks. Valfontis (talk) 21:11, 13 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry I didn't reply sooner, but there are lots of places that you could have requested more help , like the article's talk page as I suggested. I think you're just not getting how the collaborative process works around here. If you get unblocked, I'd suggest you post all of your edit suggestions on the article's talk page, and not edit the article yourself. If you don't understand what any of this means, please ask. Valfontis (talk) 20:09, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A couple of suggestions

About edit summaries

Hi there. When editing an article on Wikipedia there is a small field labeled "Edit summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this:

The text written here will appear on the Recent changes page, in the page revision history, on the diff page, and in the watchlists of users who are watching that article. See m:Help:Edit summary for full information on this feature.

Filling in the edit summary field greatly helps your fellow contributors in understanding what you changed, so please always fill in the edit summary field. If you are adding a section, please do not just keep the previous section's header in the Edit summary field – please fill in your new section's name instead. Thank you. Valfontis (talk) 20:22, 13 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

About show preview

Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. In the future, it is recommended that you use the preview button before you save; this helps you find any errors you have made, reduces edit conflicts, and prevents clogging up recent changes and the page history. Thank you. Valfontis (talk) 20:22, 13 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Blocked

You have been blocked indefinitely from editing for advertising or self-promoting in violation of the conflict of interest and notability guidelines, as you did at Hawthorne Books. If you would like to be unblocked, you may appeal this block by adding the text {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}, but you should read the guide to appealing blocks first. —EncMstr (talk) 19:27, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. to reply on my talk page. I realize that it is sometimes hard to absorb all the rules around here, but I believe we gave you adequate information about how to work on the article about the company with which you are affiliated without running into trouble. Note that your apparent ignoring the reasonable (in my opinion) guidelines that the Wikipedia community has set up reflects very poorly on your company, which is probably the opposite effect from what you hoped your edits would do. Please show this to your supervisors. Thanks. Valfontis (talk) 20:20, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]