User talk:Amonk

King Maker

I have added a "{{prod}}" template to the article King Maker, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, or, if you disagree with the notice, discuss the issues at its talk page. Removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, but the article may still be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached, or if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria. -- lucasbfr ^talk 14:51, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

AfD

As you can see I listed the above article as an Article for Deletion. You are of course more than welcome to come by there and comment on the process. I feared you wouldn't come back and edit the article again, to be honest. Do you plan on expanding the article further? -- lucasbfr ^talk 16:11, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Aftermath

As if you couldn't tell, I'm a Wikipedia editing newbie. And now that the blood is all settled, I think it should be merged into kingmaker, which already exists. Thanks for your well written comments. Now that I have had a chance to digest them, I can see that you were doing the right thing. I now think I should not have gone about adding an entry until I had something more substantial. I just thought I could edit it live without a problem. I guess I was wrong. Live and learn. :-) Amonk 17:59, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Post mortem

I was not involved in the original nomination for deletion. If I had been, I simply would have transformed King Maker into a redirect (which can be done by any editor) to Kingmaker and left a note on your talk page. You would have seen the existing disambiguation page and everything would have been fine, or mostly so. The person nominating the article for deletion should have used the Search function to look for similar articles to see if there was a suitable redirect, especially since you used non-standard capitalization. I recommend before creating new articles that you do the same, to make sure that you are not duplicating an existing article. Users nominating articles for deletion should, IMO, also check for new users and recently created articles, and should treat a little lighter, while still doing what is needed.

Wikipedia does not use title case for articles. The first word must be capitalized, by nature of the software, but the remaining words are capitalized only if proper nouns. Thus, Civil war for the general thing, but American Civil War for the particular. It can be confusing for newbies.

I wish to explain why I have removed most of your material from the dab page (as we call disambiguation pages). Wikipedia has a very strong policy on verifiability, which means that every assertion needs to come from a reliable source. For anything that is obvious, or involves interpretation, that source should be cited. Sometimes this will require footnotes (<ref>Using this structure</ref>) or Harvard referencing. This is important, as it is the only way to be sure that articles are written from the neutral point of view. The NPOV takes time to explain, so I suggest you read the policy, but the basic idea is that we try to present all responsible viewpoints. Thus, I may believe that global warming is proven scientific fact, but there are otherwise-reasonable people who disagree. I must see to it that both sides of the argument are presented, along with relevant facts, such as the percentage of earth scientists in each camp, that will help readers understand the relative support for each side.

Disambiguation pages and pages of simple lists (like List of Presidents of the United States) that provide links to other articles, and very little other information are exempt from the requirement of references, for obvious reasons of practicality. The articles they point to are expected to have the references. On the other hand, the text that you provided is subject to challenge, and so should be sourced. Accordingly, I have removed it from the disambiguation page. If you feel that you have enough information to write an article on, say, History of kingmakers in American politics, then please feel free to go ahead. Obviously, you would want to link from the dab page.

I hope that this helps, and that your experience has not soured you too much. Robert A.West (Talk) 22:33, 20 January 2007 (UTC)