User talk:Ojcookies

Welcome!

Hello, Ojcookies, 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:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! --Robdurbar 19:09, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Stub

Hi, sorry about replying slightly late! A stub page is simply an article that contains very little information; I think the official policy defines them as pages that cotain no more information than could be found on the first page of a google search. For example:

Cheesecake

Cheesecake is as dessert based upon cheese. It normally consits of a pastry or buscuit base, on which a cream cheese is placed. This is then topped by a flavuoring, such as strawberry or chocolate.

There are a number of different styles of cheesecake, originating from different parts of the world

would be a stub. It should be pointed out that stubs could extend to three or four paragraphs - it depends on the subject and what is said in the article.

Stubs are tagged by using a template at the bottom of the article. There are a number of stub categories, which attempt to divide Wikipedia's many stubs into smaller, managable groups. The generic categorisations is {{Stub}} which produces the line:

This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Far more specific ones exist e.g. {{cumbria-geo-stub}} which produces:

This Cumbria location article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

If you can find a specific category for a stub, then use it; if not, other people will come along and place it in one.

I study geography at university, which normally results in a response of 'oh'; but I enjoy it! Robdurbar 10:03, 19 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Surrey Police

Please note that it is not normal procedure to add external links to an article unless they are directly relevant to that article. The IPCC has its own article and the link is therefore only appropriate there, not from Surrey Police or any other police force. The other website has no specific link to the Surrey Police or any other British police force - it has tangential relevance to many articles connected to British law, so I'm not sure why you have chosen to add it specifically to this article. We could endlessly add links to sites that had tangential relevance to the subject, but Wikipedia is not designed to be a collection of links. Why is Liberty relevant to Surrey Police in any way? -- Necrothesp 19:47, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Again, please stop this. These links are not relevant to an individual police force. The Liberty article doesn't even mention the word "police", let alone Surrey Police in particular. If you have an axe to grind, this is not the place to do it. If you don't, then I'm not sure why you insist on adding these irrelevant links. What possible use are they to a reader interested in Surrey Police? -- Necrothesp 19:56, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In reply to your first sentence, why are Surrey Fire and Rescue Service and the South East Coast Ambulance Service linked on this article then? For consistency in your argument, and having looked at several other police force articles, surely they shouldn't be on there? I have removed them for now but if you want to put them back, I have to ask why other emergency services are more directly relevant to this article than the IPCC? After all, if a reader was interested in looking at this article, it may be because they were unhappy with Surrey Police and were hoping to find out what they could do about it. That has to be a more likely scenario than them simply wanting to know what emergency services there are in Surrey. Ojcookies 00:39, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fair compromise. I didn't put them there and I'm really not bothered whether they're there or not. However, I think the assumption that people are going to come here to find out how they can complain about Surrey Police instead of because they're just interested in Surrey Police is a bit of a strange one. I think most, if not all, readers will be here for the latter reason. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not an instruction manual for people with a grievance. -- Necrothesp 08:10, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well it's obviously not the case that all readers that look at the Surrey Police article do so simply because they have some random interest in Surrey Police: witness the anonymous user. And yes, Wikipedia is not an instruction manual for people with a grievance, but then what is? Do you know of such an instruction manual? I would have thought that many different things spur people to look at articles, and in the case of Surrey Police, discontentment is a very plausible reason. By the way, you don't need to respond to this paragraph - you will obviously disagree with it - but I just hope that you can accept that not everybody thinks the same way that you do. Ojcookies 23:18, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I shall respond nonetheless. The anonymous user was a vandal, whether he had a grievance or not - this was not the place to air it. And this is an encyclopaedia. I think if you check out other encyclopaedias you won't find instructions about how to complain about a grievance. That's not the job of an encyclopaedia. It's not about what I think, it's about what Wikipedia is not, a policy formulated not by me but by numerous editors over the last few years. -- Necrothesp 10:06, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]