User talk:Mdavid9

Welcome!

Hello, Mdavid9, 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 complete 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! Ian.thomson (talk) 22:43, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

April 2011

Welcome to Wikipedia. We welcome and appreciate your contributions, including your edits to Alchemy, but we cannot accept original research. Original research also encompasses novel, unpublished syntheses of previously published material. Please be prepared to cite a reliable source for all of your information. Thank you. Ian.thomson (talk) 22:43, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Alchemy do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used as a platform for advertising or promotion, and doing so is contrary to the goals of this project. Because Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Ian.thomson (talk) 22:43, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not add or change content without verifying it by citing reliable sources, as you did to Alchemy. Before making any potentially controversial edits, it is recommended that you discuss them first on the article's talk page. Please review the guidelines at Wikipedia:Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:22, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did to Alchemy. Wikipedia is not a collection of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Because Wikipedia uses the nofollow attribute value, its external links are disregarded by most search engines. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:22, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A summary of some guidelines you may find useful

Always cite a source for any new information, using <ref>reference tags like this</ref>, containing the name of the source, the author, page number, publisher or web address (if applicable). It is your responsibility to add sources to any info you add, not someone else.
Reliable sources typically include: articles from magazines or newspapers (particularly scholarly journals), or books by recognized authors (basically, books by respected publishers). Online versions of these are usually accepted, provided they're held to the same standards. User generated sources (like Wikipedia) are to be avoided. Self-published sources should be avoided except for information by and about the subject that is not self-serving (for example, citing a company's website to establish something like year of establishment). "Search for it on Google" does not cut it.
"Truth" is not the criteria for inclusion, verifiability is.
We do not publish original thought nor original research. We're not a blog, we're not here to promote any ideology.
Articles are to be written from a neutral point of view. Wikipedia is not concerned with facts or opinions, it just summarizes reliable sources.
Inappropriate external links include: most sites selling stuff, blogs (except those by recognized authorities), and social networking sites. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:22, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A great way to look for sources

Although I may have sounded like I was knocking Google, http://books.google.com/ has digital copies of various real books, many of which you can cite. You can search for alchemy, click "preview available" to eliminate books you can't view, and then look at different books. When you open a book, check the "About this book" section to make sure the publisher is not pay-to-print (we rarely allow self-published sources). When you find something in a a book you want to add:

paraphrase the text (we take copyright seriously)
take the name of the book, the author, the page number, and the publisher, and stick them in a reference tag like this: <ref>Book Title, by Author Name, p. 123, Publisher name.</ref>.
It's also nice (but not necessary) to make a book name a link to the book, which can be done by putting the address and the book name in brackets like this [http://www.website.com Book Title]. So all together, it looks like <ref>[http://www.website.com Book Title], by Author Name, p. 123, Publisher name.</ref>

If you want to cite offline books, it's pretty much the same deal, <ref>just put the name of the book, author, page number, and publisher in reference tags.</ref> It can be worthwhile to check google books to see if they have a copy first, though. Ian.thomson (talk) 12:36, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]