User talk:OhioGreenWind

February 2009

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Wind power in Ohio do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. --Dynaflow babble 21:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Your account has been blocked indefinitely from editing Wikipedia, because it has been identified as an account used for promotion of a company or group, with a username that implies that this has been done by that company or group. See Wikipedia:FAQ/Organization and Wikipedia:Conflict of interest.

This kind of activity is considered spamming and forbidden by policies, and also violates our username policy.

However, if you feel that there has been a mistake in your blocking, please appeal this block by adding the text {{unblock|Your reason here}} below or email the administrator who blocked you. Your reason should include your response to this issue and a new username you wish to adopt that does not violate our username policy (specifically, understand that accounts are for individuals, not companies or groups, and that your username should reflect this). Please check that your new username has not already been taken by checking this list. Blueboy96 22:11, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia

Hello OhioGreenWind. I am sorry that your first edit on Wikipedia did not meet with success. As you have found, the MediaWiki software that powers the English Wikipedia lets you do just about anything you want, but only later do other users examine your edits and determine that you inadvertently violated all sorts of obscure policies and guidelines you never imagined. The Wikipedia community practices reactive rather than proactive control over what users can do here. While this can be understandably vexing at first, the important thing to realize is that Wikipedia is an extremely orderly and predictable place, with rules in plain writing, sufficiently detailed to enable millions of highly diverse users from all around the world to work together in relative harmony and common purpose. Perhaps the best way to decode the mystery of Wikipedia is to read Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.

Since you obviously have an interest in Renewable energy, and particularly Wind power in Ohio, you can contribute usefully to Wikipedia, but there is a right way to do it. The seemingly obvious approach is to just add what you know, such as links to your company's site. But that is not how we operate on Wikipedia. Instead we look for reliable, published sources which we can cite with footnotes. As you can see throughout Wikipedia, we have many articles about many companies and their activities. See our featured articles, which the Wikipedia community has judged to be our best work. For example, the Microsoft article is a featured article, and it cites a huge number of published sources throughout. Accordingly, if you want to share information about your company and its activities on Wikipedia, the best method is for you to collect reliable sources that we can use to verify this information.

Visit Wikipedia:WikiProject Energy and see my user subpage: User:Teratornis/Energy. A subset of Wikipedia users are working together to build the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia of energy, and some of them work in the energy industry. There are many Wikipedia users who share your (likely) beliefs and goals for renewable energy, as well as other Wikipedia users who do not. Having a commercial interest does not automatically disqualify a person from editing on Wikipedia, but it makes editing a lot trickier. See WP:COI and WP:BFAQ.

You may be interested in other wikis which specialize in energy-related topics and do not have Wikipedia's restrictive rules for content. For example, there is a Great Lakes Wiki which has some wind power pages. However, that is a small wiki, and is obviously being edited by MediaWiki novices, as you can see from the "tag bleed" visible on those pages.

For the most part, though, renewable energy topics satisfy Wikipedia's notability requirements, so almost anything we need to say about the topic, we can say within Wikipedia's rules. For example, the heavy government involvement in renewable energy tends to "legitimize" it on Wikipedia. There is also a lot of media attention to renewable energy, which makes it relatively easy to find reliable published sources. Therefore, those members of the Wikipedia user community who have an interest in energy topics have not been strongly motivated to break away and set up our own wiki solely about energy. It is easier to work within Wikipedia's rules, and benefit from Wikipedia's incredibly well-developed infrastructure. Starting a new wiki from scratch is very hard, because it tends to get junked up quickly by vandals or by well-meaning but naive new users. Wikipedia has already gone through the long process of figuring out how to overcome those problems, so it is a great place to write about energy once you learn the rules. --Teratornis (talk) 21:47, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

You may be interested in Appropedia

Appropedia: is a MediaWiki-based wiki not affiliated with Wikipedia that specializes in original content relating to sustainable development. You are welcome to write about your wind power activities there, with no need to deal with Wikipedia's complex rules. --Teratornis (talk) 18:09, 23 July 2009 (UTC)