User talk:Retrogames

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent contributions seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes. Wikipedia does not allow advertising in articles. For more information on this, see

If you still have questions, there is a new contributor's help page, or you can write {{helpme}} below this message along with a question and someone will be along to answer it shortly. You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! --Siobhan Hansa 21:31, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Reply comment[edit]

No not advertising. :)

Wikipedia has helped me a lot over the past few months with answers to nearly everything. I've started using it more than Google recently. I wanted to be able to give something back to the community. Old video games are really the only thing I know very much about so I thought I would start there. I just made my first article Air Rescue.

It was a little complicated to get started but I think I have figured most of it out. I used the game template and managed to upload the screenshot. I was planning on updating the stub retro game pages. I wanted to practice a bit first though before just jumping in.

I read through the links you provided and I believe I am following the guidelines correctly.

Please take a look at my first article, Air Rescue and let me know if I am going in the right direction. It is a bit short but besides that is there anything that I should have done differently?

I don't know if I am supposed to post this on your name or mine but I hope you find it and reply.

Thank you Retrogames 22:41, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for responding. I was concerned about the posibility of advertising because (when I was looking through) all your edits had been to add a particular site to a bunch of different articles. That's frequently though not always (as you prove) an indicator that someone is promoting a particular site rather than here to build the encyclopedia.

First - Congratulations on your first article! I started editing here because I found it a useful site too. It's great to be able to add back. It looks good - adding the picture and the info box makes it look like you've been doing this for a while.

I suggest you also add appropriate categories (such as Category:Sega Master System games) and some sentence about why the game is important with references to reviews or articles if possible. Categories will help more people interested in the game to find it (and hopefully add more info!), a sentence about why it is important and some external reviews of the game (even if they are references to old print magazines) will help to keep it from being speedily deleted under one of the various criteria for articles that don't seem important to people who don't know the subject, very brief articles can be particularly at risk of this.

You might also want to wander over to WikiProject Computer and video games, which is a place where editors who are particularly interested in editing computer game articles collaborate.

On the site you were linking to (onvgp.com) - sorry for thinking you might be spamming, I'll revert my edits. On the policy/guideline front there's nothing wrong with adding a site you that's useful to mulitple articles when it applies to all of them. There may be some concern about linking to source code of abandonware. Technically it is (usually) a breach of copyright and Wikipedia is strict about not breaching copyright even by externally linking to copyright violations on other sites. Still, with true abandonware many people feel it is an inappropriate to apply the same standard. I don't take a position on that myself as I don't do much editing in areas this affects. So it might help to talk to other editors who frequently edit those articles or at the wikiproject to see what standards are generally applied. --Siobhan Hansa 23:14, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Popular "red links"[edit]

Is there a way to find a list of pages in a category that do not exist ("red link" pages) ordered by how often they are requested or linked to?

Is there a better place to ask this type of question?

Thank you Retrogames 22:55, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Pages in category show up because on the article page itself someone has added the appropriate category link. So articles that don't exist yet won't be listed on a category page. Sometimes there are articles or project pages with lists of articles that should exist. These can have red links. There's also a page for people to request articles. I'm not certain if there are stats on search engine use. Wikipedia's search is a bit iffy so I'm guessing there's nothing useful. Other editors may know more. If you're looking for what would be the best articles to create in a particular subsection, the wikiprojects can be a great way to help focus your efforts on things that are useful.

Appropriate places to ask questions like this can be tricky. You will tend to get better and faster responses if you can find a relevant talk page. But sometimes you want to know what the relevant talk page would be.... Posting on your own talk page may not be great if no-one is watching it. You can get attention by adding the {{helpme}} tag with your question (this makes your talk page popup on a list that experienced editors watch. One of them will come along and try and help you out. Alternatively you can ask a question on the talk page of an editor who you think might be able to answer you. If you do this remember to watch their talk page as they may respond to you there rather than coming here to respond. --Siobhan Hansa 23:29, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]