User talk:MilBenedict

Welcome!

Hello, MilBenedict, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! GirthSummit _(blether) 10:37, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

October 2018

Hello, I'm Girth Summit. Wikipedia is written by people who have a wide diversity of opinions, but we try hard to make sure articles have a neutral point of view. Your recent edit to Historicity of the Bible seemed less than neutral and has been removed. If you think this was a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. GirthSummit _(blether) 10:17, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Also, upon closer inspection, the text you changed was from a direct quote taken from one of the references on the page (Ennis (2013)). You can't insert your own words into the text of direct quotes for any reason. GirthSummit _(blether) 10:21, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That was better, but there are a few things you need to learn about editing articles. I'm going to put a welcome template on your page, with some links to policies and procedures - please read them. My specific concerns about the latest edit were:

The source wasn't cited according to WP:CS
The source wasn't reliable for the content it was supporting - see WP:RS
The content was added to the lede, which should only summarise the body of the text. You should insert information in a suitable location further down the article, which could then be mentioned in the lede.

CheersGirthSummit _(blether) 10:36, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not add or change content, as you did at Historicity of the Bible, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Wikipedia:Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. GirthSummit _(blether) 10:59, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:BRD. You edited the article, which is fine; I disagreed with your edit, which is also fine. Now we are expected to discuss it before the material is added again. I'm going to start a section at the talk page, where we can thrash this out - I invite you to discuss this rationally, rather than edit warring with each other.GirthSummit _(blether) 11:02, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Using talk pages

Quick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting (see WP:THREAD) - when you reply to someone, you put a colon in front of your comment, which the Wikipedia software will render into an indent when you save your edit; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons in front of your comment, which the WP software converts into two indents, and so on, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment. Threading/indenting also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread. I hope that all makes sense. And at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~~~~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages when you save your edit. That is how we know who said what to whom and when.

Please be aware that threading and signing are fundamental etiquette here, as basic as "please" and "thank you", and continually failing to thread and sign communicates rudeness, and eventually people may start to ignore you (see here).

I know this is unwieldy, but this is the software environment we have to work on.

You may be interested in reading user:Jytdog/How which provides an orientation to what we do in Wikipedia, how we do it, and why we do things as we do. Jytdog (talk) 15:20, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]