User talk:Bebop/archive1

Welcome to the Wikipedia

Here are some links I thought useful:

Feel free to contact me personally with any questions you might have. The Wikipedia:Village pump is also a good place to go for quick answers to general questions. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, like this: ~~~~.

Be Bold!

Sam [Spade] 00:31, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Do I answer you here or at your page? I am wondering why you listed the items you listed. I have bookmarked a number of pages including the neutral point of view discussion, the discussion on disambiguation pages and Village Pump already. I just haven't actually talked there yet. I'm not trying to write anything brilliant or do something for my ego. I'm trying to share accurate information. Occasionally I will edit for clarity or grammar. If someone has a question about an edit of mine, I hope they will ask me so that I can explain myself. I liked the discussion on Don't bite the newcomers that I found somewhere at wikipedia. I also like the No personal attacks page here; I wish they'd had such attitudes at some places I've been elsewhere on the Internet.

I do not know what you mean about signing my name? Do you mean I should sign my name "Bebop" with the four tildes? I don't see a signature with your comments though. I am sorry for my confusion about this. When should I be signing things? Maybe you mean in this reply.

I have a lot to learn about uploading photos. I read a lot about copyrights but am very concerned to do it correctly. I have a photo for the Tav Falco entry, but still am not sure about uploading and about formatting the page afterwards. The Cramps entry has been a bit of a model for some of the Tav Falco's Panther Burns information design I used, such as listing band members, as well as for what little I know about including a photo in a design. I'm still afraid of uploading a photo as yet. I'm also very confused about the copyright discussions I read at wikipedia.

I also worry I put too much in the Tav Falco's Panther Burns entry. I felt the long discussion/interview I had with the band leader via email about categories was very appropriate to inclusion in an encyclopedia. I had asked him all those questions because I am one of the writers who has been confused in the past and thought "psychobilly" or "punk music" had been used to describe them. I realize the group isn't as well known as The Cramps, but I felt that the information was needed to help people learn a bit about the musical categorization. Even if some day the information is edited down, at least it's now in the history page, which is a good thing. I wonder how wikipedia has disk space for all the info of millions of history entries in its pages. Bebop 01:24, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)Bebop

Disk space is cheap ;) That said, the history pages may become a concern someday. I don't know much of anything about images or I'd help you more. You can try Wikipedia:Information desk, or Wikipedia:Image. The signature questions I think you answered for yourself. Glad to have you, Sam [Spade] 01:42, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Memphis soul

Hi,

It seems that you know more about Memphis soul than anyone else who has stumbled on to the article, your comments showed that.

I don't know why you deleted your comments, but I hope you do have a chance to update the article at some point. --Ben Brockert 03:50, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

Mighty kind of you, thanks. I removed the talk page comments from me on that entry because I found the article writer's source for their information and started to realize why the person had said what he said, although it didn't read very well. At the same time, I found a similar source on the "Southern soul" category. I have been running around working on so many other articles that I haven't had the energy to try to fix that particular entry. I do think I'd need to take some care before editing it, rather than just make it worse and have to keep re-editing that entry afterward, so I'll try to come back and look at it after I have a little more time. I'm not really as good at defining categories without doing lots of research as I am at having info on hand about particular artists and groups, but I'll try to improve. I appreciate your encouraging note. Bebop 04:27, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Ok, I edited the Memphis soul category, as well as authored several new articles and stubs that needed to go up instead of staying blank pages and dead links for a long time. Bebop 06:51, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

update to my user page

I've added some questions to my User Page, setting them off with a headline with today's date above the entries. Bebop 18:53, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Bebop, welcome to Wikipedia. I'm glad you're giving things like these serious consideration; not everyone does. However, I think you might be worrying a little too much. The great thing about a Wiki is that it's not the end of the world if you make a mistake—someone else will eventually come along and correct it.

I don't have all the answers to your questions (or time to write them all down if I did), but here are a few.

Regarding Tav Falco's Panther Burns: don't move actual article content to an article's talk page. Talk pages are only for discussing what changes should be made to the article. If an article is too long, there are three things you can do:

Delete some extraneous content.
Reduce the length of some content.
Move some content into a separate article.

In this case, I think #2 is indicated. The "Discussion on Categorizing the Group's Music" section of the article currently includes a lot of quotes and a lot of examples that kind of talk around the subject but aren't really essential. As I see it, there are three critical pieces of information:

Here are some of the names critics and the public have given the band's style.
Here's what the band thinks of that.
Here's what the band members themselves say about their style.

You could probably boil that down to one, maybe two paragraphs. The rest could be deleted.

I don't think you really need to worry about being accused of vandalism. Vandalism is any edit made in bad faith, with the specific intention of disrupting or lowering the quality of Wikipedia. Honest mistakes don't count, and you can tell that to anyone who might accuse you of vandalism.

Regarding a disambiguation page for someone named "Robert Palmer" who isn't Robert Palmer, what you want to do is create a new page named something like Robert Palmer (author) or Robert Palmer (musician) or Robert Palmer (producer) (but do a search first to make sure such an article doesn't already exist—click the "Search" button rather than the "Go" button to make sure). Since this particular person seems to have a lot of job titles, try to pick one that's a more general description, that he is best known for, or that will most easily help readers to know just which Robert Palmer the page is about. Then add a link to that page at the top of Robert Palmer.

Citations of source is something that most articles ought to have eventually. If not every article has them right this minute, my understanding is that that's okay. But if you have sources you can cite for any articles you've contributed to, then by all means, do so. It will especially help if anyone doubts the veracity of any information you've contributed—they can look up the facts in the cited source. On the other hand, if any part of your article Pompadour haircut is taken word-for-word from a dictionary, then that part of the article is in violation of the dictionary's copyright. You should rewrite the text in your own words. As a general rule, copying text from another source is a violation of copyright, but writing your own text based on information you learned from another source (or multiple other sources) is not.

Saying that TFPB refer to their music as "art damage" is fine as long as it's a true, verifiable fact. Having an article entitled Art damage is a different matter. The term must gain significant currency and notability before it merits an article, and I suspect that as yet it has not. There's also the question of whether enough can be written about it to make it an encyclopedia article as opposed to merely a dictionary definition.

I hope these answers are of some help to you. By the way, you shouldn't hesitate to ask any questions you want at Wikipedia:Help desk; that's what it's there for. —Triskaideka 22:50, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Very helpful, thanks for taking me under your wing on these. I think my last troubles will be with learning to upload photos and dealing with learning whether a photo is ok with copyrights or not, since the copyright sections here confuse me. I will adjust the music article you discussed tomorrow. Also will try to do the Palmer article soon. As for word for word copies, I don't believe I've done that, but I'll check. I certainly rewrote another entry in my own words that was doing that ("Memphis soul") to help edit something someone had lifted from another source. Bebop 02:28, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

More friendly advice

Hi there! Welcome to the 'pedia. I'll echo two things that people have already said. First, it's good that you care about making the project better and not messing things up. Second, you're probably worrying too much. This is a serious project but it's meant to be interesting and fun, not stressful. Sounds like you've read a lot of policy pages, but you may not have read Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages yet. Since this is a wiki, it's totally OK to make mistakes. If you don't correct them someone else eventually will.

Regarding your question on image copyrights: the important point is that anything added to Wikipedia is released under the GFDL license, a form of copyleft. That means that if you're going to upload an image for which someone else holds the copyright, you should first make sure that they understand what the GFDL means and are OK with it. It's not the same as releasing something into the public domain, but it does allow reuse and modification. Most importantly, it allows the image to be used outside Wikipedia provided that certain rules are followed. You can find more info on Wikipedia:Copyrights.

Good luck and happy editing! Never hesitate to ask questions. Isomorphic 15:18, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, I did read the copyleft and GFDL stuff already but it just really confuses me. If the main thing the person wants others to do note "Copyright" and his name with the photo, but doesn't care who uses it, would that be good enough? And there's another situation where the person is dead and it's a photo that used to be on her website. I guess I could try to contact her son and ask him about my uploading it, but I don't understand what it is I'm supposed to tell him the license would allow be done with the photo. It would allow them to "modify" it, so I'm not sure whether most people wouldn't like that or not. Sorry I'm so confused about this.

User talk:Bebop/archive1

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Welcome to the Wikipedia

Memphis soul

update to my user page

More friendly advice

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