User talk:Sandra247

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Sandra247, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines for page creation, and may soon be deleted.

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Thank you.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

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 have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Ivanvector (talk) 21:32, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of GoForth Institute

You may also wish to consider using a Wizard to help you create articles. See the Article Wizard.

Thank you.

A tag has been placed on GoForth Institute, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article seems to be unambiguous advertising that only promotes a company, product, group, service or person and would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become an encyclopedia article. Please read the general criteria for speedy deletion, particularly item 11, as well as the guidelines on spam.

If you can indicate why the subject of this article is not blatant advertising, you may contest the tagging. To do this, please add {{hangon}} on the top of GoForth Institute and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would help make it encyclopedic, as well as adding any citations from independent reliable sources to ensure that the article will be verifiable. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Ivanvector (talk) 21:32, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Re GoForth Institute

Thanks for your note. First, I've retrieved the material that I deleted and placed it into a "sandbox" or temporary page for you; it's found at User:Sandra247/Sandbox and you can access it by clicking on the link in this sentence. You can work on it there and then copy and paste it into a new page when you think it's ready. You also asked for my advice about how to make the article less like advertising. I assume you have read this article that lays out the basics of a Wikipedia article, so I'll just give you a mind-set that I have found to be helpful for new contributors. Essentially, the idea is to say everything in your article as a quote from an expert as best you can. You should only put things into the article that aren't quotes that are absolutely unambiguously true, like the street address of the organization. Here's an example of how it doesn't work, from the deleted material: you stated that GoForth Institute is a "thought-leader". Who said so? What qualifications did that person have to say so? If I said it, it wouldn't mean much, because I'm not an expert in thought-leaders. But if Jane Smith, the CEO of the Thought-Leader Institute, said it, then it is absolutely relevant. Then you have to give us a link to exactly where Jane Smith said what she said, so that we can confirm it for ourselves if we want to assess Dr. Smith's expertise and know how much weight to give her statements. So the three key areas are notability, reliable sources and verifiability. The GoForth Institute has to be said to be notable by experts who are writing in a reliable source, and those expert opinions have to be verifiable. One further point: if you want to quote what the Institute has to say about itself, that is NOT considered to be a reliable source, and you also run into copyright issues that then have to be resolved, which is time-consuming. My advice is to strictly avoid quoting self-published material, because it will be ruthlessly challenged and probably removed, and focus entirely on arm's-length, third-party experts. Best of luck with your efforts, and if you need help there are a number of ways to get it (including ways in the welcome message above, which I recommend to your attention); one is to click on the word "talk" after my name and leave me a note. Accounting4Taste:talk 22:13, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again, Sandra. Yes, I (and everyone else, if they want to) can look at the page in the sandbox. You have added a bunch of references, but there is still a lot of stuff in the article that sounds distinctly like self-promotion or advertising. When people are reading Wikipedia articles, they expect that they are written in neutral point of view language; if you make an assertion, even with respect to the choice of words you use, you have to be able to back it up by reference to an expert's opinion. So when I see a phrase that suggests that the use of an art gallery as a location for a course is "innovative" -- who said so? Where did they say it? And why are they an expert on that particular type of innovation? Frankly, I bet you can't prove one way or the other whether that is innovative -- I expect you haven't been in touch with every art gallery in the world, or have the published opinion of, say, a university professor in the UofC art department who says it is innovative, using precisely that term. So if you can't prove it's innovative, then it's self-promotion -- you're trying to use language to sway people into feeling that the organization is more reputable. That's the kind of thinking that is brought to every Wikipedia article. I do recommend you go through the article with the neutral point of view concept very firmly in mind, and look at every word -- because if you don't, someone else will. You also asked whether the article is "publishable". I will say that you don't need anyone's permission to repost the article immediately; my advice would be to work on it more first to make it a stronger candidate for retention. There are enough references in it right now that it would probably survive the intense scrutiny (as I'm sure you're now aware) that every new article on Wikipedia undergoes. However, you might not like some of the tags that will almost certainly be applied to it -- tags that suggest that the article needs a going-over to make it more neutral in its language. In fact, someone may decide to work on the article and cut out everything that isn't absolutely neutral, and there's nothing you can do about it. (As it says at the bottom of every editing page, you "irrevocably agree to release your contributions"; it is never "your" article.) As I say, I think the article would now survive, but I also bet it would be edited quite ruthlessly within the next 24 hours. You might want to do that editing yourself. I hope this helps. If there's any further assistance I can provide, I may not be able to provide it immediately, but I will read your note tomorrow. If you require help in the meantime, just put the phrase helpme in between two sets of curly brackets on your talk page, and someone will come to your rescue. All the best. Accounting4Taste:talk 23:05, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]