User talk:Laurajanejackson1984

Welcome!

Hello, Laurajanejackson1984, and welcome to Wikipedia!

Thank you for your contributions. It's great that you want to contribute to Wikipedia - the more constructive editors the better!

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If you have any questions, just click on the Contact Me link after my signature at the end of this section. Alternatively, check out Wikipedia:Questions, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question.

By the way, when you are writing on a discussion page (or someone's talk page), it is considered good manners to sign your comment... to do this, just add ~~~~ at the end of your comment. That will put your user name (Laurajanejackson1984) and the date/time at the end (or you can click on the icon when you are editing. Never sign on an article page - only on a discussion page.

I am now going to add my signature, using ~~~~: -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 13:26, 11 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Your recent edits

First, welcome to Wikipedia from a fellow editor. I have no more authority here than you do (or will once you are auto confirmed), so please take this in the spirit I write it, as friendly advice from a peer. Looking at your edit request at Shinto and your other edits, a number of different problems jump out: copyright issues, conflict of interest and using wikipedia for advocacy are the three most important. Editing while having a conflict of interest is not forbidden, but it is strongly discouraged. It is more difficult to present information in a neutral way and to avoid presenting unverifiable original research, so you will need to go out of your way to limit yourself to verifiable reliable sources and to seek out other viewpoints to include. The copyright problem is just understanding and technique. You need to present the information from the sources in your own words to avoid violating copyright protection and you need to cite the source to give credit for the ideas and avoid an appearance of plagarism. Simply saying that permission was given for copying a portion doesn't work. Finally, Wikipedia is not a forum for promoting an organization of advocating the goals of that organization. To edit here on those subjects, you need to understand Wikipedia's interest in the information and limit yourself to the content that benefits both your employer and Wikipedia. If the organization is notable, which seems likely based on Prince Philip's endorsement, then a neutral article about the organization is in everyone's interest. You can search out information about the organization on the web and in your library to balance with the organization's own information. When adding to other articles, like Shinto, you need to limit yourself to adding information that improves that article and to the amount of information that is reasonable for that article. Good luck and, again, welcome. Celestra (talk) 15:49, 14 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Celestra. I have today (15/09/09) added some writings on Ecology to the religious pages of Buddhism, Bahai, and Zoroastrianism, but I need to clean them up especially in regards to words used and sources as you suggested, and I will do this very soon. I really do not wish to breach any terms but to be helpful, nor do I wish be un-neutral, or to seem like a propagandist for ARC it's just that I am learning about religions and ecology through that organisation. If anyone could help me by editing and improving rather than deleting these secions I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you Laurajanejackson1984 (talk) 11:58, 15 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

- and Daoism and Sikhism. Just as a template to be fully edited later Laurajanejackson1984 (talk) 12:14, 15 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad you found my advice helpful. As you see below, most of your fellow editors will welcome your contributions, but also find trouble with the contribution being a copy of the source. The other editors are obligated to remove copyright problems, but will generally help by improving your words. Could you take a few minutes to capture the sources in your own words before adding to any more articles? Adding the text and then changing it could be misconstrued as concealing a copyright violation rather than avoiding one. Regards, Celestra (talk) 14:13, 15 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Re:Sikhism

Hi Laura, thanks for your contribution to the Sikhism article, and the section on Ecology and Sikhism is welcome, however, I have had to remove it, because it was a copy edit. Feel free to start a section in your own words, with references. Thanks--Sikh-History 13:28, 15 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding this and additions to Baha'i page and similar. First - for major pages consider that they've been reviewed and edited many times. So just jumping in and making major changes invites revision for any of a number of reasons. Consider making an entry on the talk page or review the history of an article to see if you can identify a major editor who watches the page for changes and contact them on their talk page for your idea(s). Second - you can create content in development in a "sandbox" area - add "Sandbox" to your user name - this should work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Laurajanejackson1984/Sandbox - you will get a warning the article doesn't exist but you can create it. It's your space to do as you will (and you can have more than one, just put "1", "2" etc at the end.) Once you've developed the content in the sandbox you copy and paste appropriate part of the content in the article space. Third - a major need in Wikipedia these days is for citable content. It used to be that users could pretty much write what they wanted and over time things would smooth over. Well it got rough instead. So now the drive and requirement of wikipedia is citations. You can see basic forms of citations here. From the format there you can see that sources need to be reliable - that means reviewed journals, published in books, newspaper articles, etc. You can't use someone's webpage or blog as a source unless they are a recognized expert in the field and even then it's iffy. It also doesn't hurt to get a thick skin - even though editing in wikipedia presumes good faith that doesn't mean everyone is especially kind about it. Think of wikipedia as a major newspaper back in the day - many don't take time to chat about things. They just say yes or no and bleed all over the content you worked hard on and so forth. Don't take it personally. If it helps, understand there is a policy designed to help others welcome your input though they have to keep quality high - see Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers. Good luck and ask around for info. My personal project has largely been filling out Category:Bahá'í Faith by country. Smkolins (talk) 16:04, 15 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, for not biting me as a newcomer, I am embarrassed that I had to copy the text as normally I set very high standards for myself especially when writing academic/quasi-academic literature. I have in the last few days been put under enormous pressure to rectify the fact that most faiths don't have a section on ecology- in a very little time. So it has happened that after attempting to learn all of the symbols and constructions behind a wikipedia article, as well as wiki-decorum, I have had very little time to sort out the wording. I completely understand removal of the section/s in question. I shall go play in my sandbox and then submit my suggestion to the talk page. Thank you for your helpful imput Laurajanejackson1984 (talk) 16:07, 16 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]