User talk:Sam1957

Hello Sam1957, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

Welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you enjoy the encyclopedia and want to stay. As a first step, you may wish to read the Introduction.

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Good luck, and have fun. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 13:31, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion of "Musician template"

A page you created, Musician template, has been tagged for deletion, as it meets one or more of the criteria for speedy deletion; specifically, it is a test page. Use the sandbox for testing.

You are welcome to contribute content which complies with our content policies and any applicable inclusion guidelines. However, please do not simply re-create the page with the same content. You may also wish to read our introduction to editing and guide to writing your first article.

Thank you. — Insanity Incarnat e 03:31, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

August 2008

This is the last warning you will receive for your disruptive edits, such as the one you made to Template:Infobox Musical artist/doc. If you vandalize Wikipedia again, you will be blocked from editing. Libs (talk) 10:09, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can I help?

Hello Sam, I noticed you got the big "last warning" but I suspect you did not intentionally do anything wrong, and just didn't understand what you were editing, or what you should be doing.

Just to let you know what you did do... You made changes to the instructions for using a template which is used in many articles. One of the changes you made was to change

Name =

to

Kenny Marks =

First, what you eventually want to do is copy the template to an article, and fill in the parameter so it reads:

Name = Kenny Marks

Second, instead of editing the instruction page, you want to create a new article. Since it will take a bit of work to complete it, you should not create a "live" article immediately, but instead, create a user sub-page. Click on this link (which is now red, meaning the article does not exist yet; later it will be blue or purple-blue):

User:Sam1957/Kenny Marks

which will take you to a new page where you can begin creating the article. For now, the article will be in your own private space. When you have completed it, you can turn it into a "live" article.

Some pages you should read are:

WP:Your First Article

WP:Notability (people)

The latter article will help you to understand whether your article will be accepted at Wikipedia. It's best to check this before taking the time to write an article that could be rejected.

You may find other helpful articles in the big box I inserted at the top of this page.

When you're ready to start, I suggest writing the article itself, and leave the fancy stuff like infoboxes and templates until last.

If there is anything I can help you with, post a message on my talk page, which you can get to by clicking the word "talk" in my signature.

Best of luck! --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 13:31, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Part 2

It looks like you've made a good start on building a discography. You need to look at how these are formatted on Wikipedia. You can look at the instructions at WP:WikiProject Albums, but a better first step might be to just pick some established artists and look at how their articles are formatted. Look at the Beatles for example, or at a set of articles I created myself (for an obscure French band you've probably never heard of): Clearlight.

You should create an article with a biography of the artist, with a simple list of album titles, and put more detail about each album in separate articles.

Copyrighted text is not permitted on Wikipedia, which means lyrics cannot be included, so you will have to remove any lyrics you have inserted.

--A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 00:35, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Part 3

Your article page is still not formatted like an encyclopedia entry, and is getting further away from it. It now reads like a blog, and therefore stands a good chance of being deleted. User space on WP is not supposed to be used for purposes like this. I strongly advise you to delete the blog-like and autobiographical entries.

You also have not addressed the problem of notability. I advised you to read the guide called notability (people), because an article will not remain on Wikipedia (not even in your user space) if it cannot demonstrate that its subject is notable. See the guideline for an explanation of what notability means, and how to demonstrate it. Also note that Wikipedia is not to be used for advertising. I recommended that you read this guide (actually both guides in the links above) before writing your article, so you don't waste time writing something that will be deleted. If you haven't done that yet, please read them now. Also read the article on what is permitted on a user page.

If your article is not acceptable for Wikipedia, there are many other websites where it might be more appropriate, such as Myspace and Facebook. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 04:50, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]