User talk:Runckencong

Talk pages

I took the liberty of moving your talk page discussion at Talk:Douglas Wilson (theologian). Ordinarily, no one should edit or otherwise touch another editors discussion. However, in this case, it seems that you are a newer editor and may have been having some trouble (noting the edit summary indicating trouble with signatures). If you wish to move it back (although I don't see why you would), simply revert my edit. But where you started your discussion was at the top of an previous/old discussion. Unless you're responding to an existing discussion, just start a new section. Sign your name with four tildies ("~~~~"). That will automatically insert a signature. There are some good talk page guidelines as well as some links to further help here: WP:TALKDD. ButlerBlog (talk) 02:15, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you again for your help. I have been reading a lot, but there is still much to learn about how to properly contribute you Wikipedia. Thank you for your suggestions.Runckencong (talk) 03:33, 25 February 2022 (UTC)Runckencong

Some editing guidance

Looking at the discussion and edits for Christ Church (Moscow, Idaho), I'm sure you're wondering why another editor so aggressively reverted your entire set of edits. It's primarily because you removed a significant portion of properly cited content, and after review, I think I can give you a little guidance to help avoid this in the future. If you look at your second edit here, you removed the citations for two named references that are used elsewhere. Then in your subsequent edits, you removed content that was cited by those same refs as being broken. But the reason they were broken is because you removed them earlier.

A similar problem may have arisen from editing an individual section. If you don't understand how named references work, if a named ref is used and the cite is in a section other than the one you are editing (when editing a single section as opposed to the entire article), then it may appear that there is no citation. That was the case in this edit. The cite for that named reference was in the lead paragraph.

Both of those kind of spilled over as you removed more and more content based on broken references that either were not actually broken or were citations you removed. You might want to look at how named references work. The ref tag includes a name, and then the actual citation only needs to be included once and can be repeated by only using a ref tag. So be careful when removing things because if you remove a citation, make sure you're not removing a named reference used elsewhere.

One other thing to point out is primary sources. In this edit you noted The citation for this section is from a primary source and therefore is very reliable. That's not actually the case. A primary source that is self published can say whatever it wants about itself. That makes it not reliable because it is biased. In this case, the content was innocuous, so a primary source is probably fine. But that's not always the case. For encyclopedic content, we prefer secondary sources. When something cited by a primary source has a better source needed tag, we're looking for a secondary source. See: WP:PSTS.

This may be a lot to absorb, and most editors know that it takes time to really understand how to contribute to Wikipedia. It can be discouraging when everything you do gets reverted for one reason or another. The best thing (IMO) to do is to not embark on a big series of edits all at once. Pick something you want to work on and do a little bit at a time. And if you try to learn things as you go, and stick with it, it can be very rewarding. ButlerBlog (talk) 06:11, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

This is very helpful. Thank you! There is a lot to absorb as you said, but your recommendations are correct and encouraging.