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 and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! --NapoliRoma (talk) 13:29, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Each editor here at Wikipedia, including yourself obviously, has a talk page. These pages are the place to leave messages for any given editor. Thus, if you wish to communicate with User:NapoliRoma, you would got to User talk:NapoliRoma, and leave him/her a message, just as I have done here for you. Depending on her/his preferences, he/she may respond on that talk page, or right here. I hope this helps you participate in this great project. (Incidentally, if I read your help desk question right, you were trying to write an article about software still under development...? I'm afraid such projects almost never meet our standards of notability.) --Orange Mike 20:06, 15 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Stefania,
Hopefully this is all a little less confusing now, but just in case: as someone else mentioned, I'm not an admin, just another editor like you. Also, no articles got deleted.
However, I did ask (as anyone can) for a couple of redirects to be deleted as no longer being necessary. Redirects can be thought of as "symlinks" to articles, and in the two cases I asked for the links were not useful.
When an article is renamed, a redirect is automatically left behind linking the original name to the article's new name. Often this is useful, but in the case of "Open Solaris Virtualization and Research Control," it is not.
I did do one thing that may still be confusing -- I moved the article named "Network Virtualization" to "Network virtualization". By convention, Wikipedia article titles should be in "sentence case" -- that is, an article about table tennis should go under the name "Table tennis" not "Table Tennis." When I made the move, I also updated the two articles with wikilinks that pointed to it.
(By the way, this convention means the article "OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control" should really be named "OpenSolaris network virtualization and resource control", but I figure at this point I'll refrain from renaming it; you may want to take care of this yourself at some point. As someone else mentioned, you may also want to brace yourself for the article being tagged as non-notable; one way to make your case for notability is to provide clear references, as well as add appropriate links to your article from other articles, and add it to appropriate WP categories -- the key word here being appropriate...)
Anyway, hope things are becoming clearer; please feel free to get in touch with me on my talk page if you have any questions. Sorry for the confusion.--NapoliRoma 22:51, 15 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Everyone -
Last month I got a message from Wikipedia asking me to improve my article according to Wikipedia standards. Okay. I read the Wikipedia standards guide and am scratching my head. All I can say is, "Could you be more specific?" I have a lot of terms underlined in red, which may have been picked up as misspellings. But what else? I'll check it out. Wikipedia's style is different from that employed by my company, so I may have erred in slipping back to the style I'm more used to using.
Hi Stefania,
I just added a welcome message to the top of this page that includes some other links you might explore.
...but I've found that the best way to learn how to do things in Wikipedia is by example; poke around and look at well-established articles where there have been several contributors, and see how they're constructed. You can even use the "edit" tab at the top of the screen to look at the source of the article and see how it was actually marked up. Try the "history" tab to see the record of edits for articles, to see how people interact. (The short answer: sometimes very well, sometimes quite badly :-/). Use the "diff" links to see the incremental changes to articles over time.
Wikipedia is going to be different from corporate writing. First, it's an encyclopedia, not a manual, so the purpose of the content is going to be different. Second, it's a wiki, and the method of adding material for a wiki is different from that of more formal documentation tools. Third, it's a collaborative project among equals, so there's no clear hierarchy of who "owns" material and who is "right" about various edits, other than the rules laid out for the project.
This can get confusing. For example, you said you "got a message from Wikipedia." Strictly speaking, there is no "Wikipedia" for you to have gotten a message from, just a bunch of editors (and you're an editor, too!), one of whom apparently sent you a message. That message was probably signed, so if you have questions about their message, you may want to leave a message on the talk page of the person who sent it to you.
I'm not sure which article you're referring to, or I'd offer some advice. Looking at your contribution list (I clicked on the "user contributions" link in the left column of your talk page to see it), I see you've worked on Network virtualization and OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control. Usually on Wikipedia, "terms underlined in red" are what are known as "redlinks", which are wikilinks to articles that don't exist, but I don't see any on either of those two articles. So, I'm guessing you're using Firefox or a similar web browser that automatically underlines terms that aren't in its dictionary when you're entering data in a text box. That's probably not too surprising, since you're writing about technical subjects that would not be in a generic dictionary (for example, as I'm typing this in, Firefox has underlined "Wikipedia", "OpenSolaris" and "Virtualization"). This isn't a Wikipedia feature specifically, it's just part of how your web browser works.
Hope this helps. If I can offer two more pieces of advice: first, don't worry if you make mistakes; it's part of the learning curve, and they always can be fixed. Second, be prepared for people to edit your work, or even choose to delete it outright if it doesn't meet WP guidelines. It's part of the process, too. Regards,NapoliRoma (talk) 13:29, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
