User talk:MoragCopland

Welcome!

Hello, MoragCopland, 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 {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome!

Alison Wright (athlete)

Thanks for contributing new article Alison Wright (athlete). However, one of Wikipedia's core policies is that material must be verifiable, by being clearly attributed to reliable sources. Please help by adding more sources to the article you created, and/or by clarifying how the sources already given support the material (see here for how to do inline referencing). Many thanks! PS If you need any help, you can look at Help:Contents/Editing Wikipedia or ask at Wikipedia:New contributors' help page, or just ask me. Schwede 66 22:21, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, thanks for your query on my talk page. I'm most happy to help. If you allow, I'll mentor you using your articles.

I see that you are 'brand new' to Wikipedia, a nice online encyclopaedia. When you start, you stumble across all sorts of rules and regulations. But they are not a bad thing at all, because it's those rules that have turned WP into the resource that it is. And after all, you felt that the Wrights deserve their own pages! So, why those tags?

Both pages are Biographies of Living People (BLP for short - WP is full of acronyms), and that's where the most stringent rules apply. In a nutshell, it would be best if each paragraph had a link to a reference at the end. Some references might well be repeatedly referred to. The references don't have to be online - books or newspaper articles are just fine. It's just a matter of referencing it properly, so that if somebody really wanted to check, then they can.

There are two different ways of going about citations the right way:

Use the citation templates on WP:CITET, or
Enable the 'cite' tool on your edit toolbar, as that let's you achieve the same.

If you were to use the former method, you simply copy an appropriate template, paste it into the article where you'd like to have the inline citation appear, and then fill out the details. I suggest that you do that with the citations that you already have in David's article that don't comply with those formats.

The latter method involves going into <My preferences> (top right on the screen), then click the <Gadgets> tab, then check <refTools> and then hit <Save> at the bottom of the page. That will have added a <Cite> button to the toolbar that you get when you are in the <Edit> tab of a page. When you want to cite, click the button, fill everything out and then hit <Add citation> (make sure that the cursor is in the correct location in the edit window). The field <Reference name> is important if you want to cite the source more than once, as this allows you to reuse a 'named reference' later on. But start with the manual method first, because you will see that the outcome is the same, and later on you know how to add something manually to a reference that was produced with the cite tool, for example.

So why don't you start with that? When done, leave a reply here (I've watchlisted your talk page) and I'll work with you on any remaining issues. And if you get stuck, just post a question here. And two more 'rules'

if you post something on a talk page, please add four tildes (~) at the end, as that produces your signature and others know who has posted something.
the colon that you can see at the beginning of this line when you are in the edit window results in the paragraph being indented. When you reply, use two colons (this indents it even further). The asterisk on the other hand produces a bullet point.

Schwede 66 18:33, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]