User talk:Douglas J. Bender

Cast Away

Please refrain from adding references to the talk page to the Cast Away article. Thanks. MurphiaMan (talk) 07:15, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Douglas

I guessed you might be new. Honestly, I am just trying to help. I personally have not removed anything you have written, but I sympathise with those who have. Most of your additions to the Cast Away article have included references to the articles discussions page. This is an absolute no-no on Wikipedia. You must not do this anymore. Sure, fix spellings and punctuations (copyediting is the official term), and make additions to the article if you wish. But any additions must be complete in themselves.

You can see the edit history for the article here where you will note that you have been frustrating some other editors by your actions.

Lastly, when you contribute on a talk page, you should sign your contribution by using 4 tildes like this ~~~~. That will add your name and the datestamp automatically. Good luck. MurphiaMan (talk) 15:55, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again, Douglas

You shouldn't reference the talk page because they are different namespaces and are treated differently. For a start, talk pages are regularly archived and links to the archive replace the original discussions. It just gets messy. I think the other contributors frustration is that if there is a reference to another page, then if they want to edit your contributions (as opposed to reverting it) then they need to look at editing in 2 places.

It's just not done. Sorry. MurphiaMan (talk) 07:39, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Douglas

You may not want your contribution to be 'lost', but its not exactly up to you. Talk pages are archived when they start to get unwieldy - long and disjointed or repetitive. But when archived, a link to the archived page is placed at the top of the talk page. So its not lost. I wouldn't suggest you add the entire discussion to the article. It just wouldn't make sense. Why not formulate a neat piece of prose to say what you want to say in simple terms. MurphiaMan (talk) 21:19, 21 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]