User talk:Mikalac53

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Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure![edit]

Hi Mikalac53! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.

-- 14:25, Saturday, April 8, 2017 (UTC)

A word of advice[edit]

Copying an article into a user space page, editing it, and then posting it back to the article is not advisable; it is much better to make edits to the article directly. There are several reasons for that, including the fact that while you are editing your copy of the article other editors may edit the article itself, and by copying your version back to the article you will destroy their work. Not only is that destructive to their work, but it is also likely to lead to your work being reverted, to undo the damage to other editors' contributions. Also, since your changes will eventually be posted to the article as one huge edit, it is more difficult for other editors to separate out different part of your editing, and the result is that very often in this situation if an editor thinks there are problems with the massive change, the whole lot will be reverted. That may seem unfair, but it is unrealistic to expect others to put a huge amount of time into searching through a large rewrite to pick out which bits need changing from bits which don't. Another point is that a new editor very often edits in good faith, but lacking knowledge of Wikipedia standards, so that his or her editing is unsuitable in one way or another, and so it is reverted. If the editing is a large amount of work on which a very large amount of time has been spent, that can be very disheartening, whereas if it is just one small edit that took a few seconds, it can be either a trivial setback or even a useful learning experience. For all those reasons I very strongly recommend lots of small edits to an article rather than one big one. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 21:26, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]