Hello, Swrussel! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! Peaceray (talk) 01:17, 20 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not really asking for help because it's plain to me that my limited time (and I mean in my life--cancer started a fight with me this year) will not allow me to penetrate the mysteries of Wikipedia. I see my edit adding my name to a list of Indian writers disappeared. I thought a link to my bio on Indian Country Today Media Network would prove it. The other thought I had was my Amazon author page. https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Russell/e/B001H6W5Z4/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1490004728&sr=8-1 The way I rationalize what looks like tooting my own horn is that I'm not trying to say anything about the quality of my writings--just that they exist. When I got my diagnosis, I made a public promise to write something autobiographical if I survived the first surgery. Plainly, I did survive, and most of my writing time is spent trying to keep that promise. The purpose of writing about my life is to reach other dropouts who have been told they can't do anything because they didn't finish high school and explain how I made three careers, any one of which would satisfy most folks.
My purpose here is to explain why I'm giving up so easily. I have to stay focused on my promise and my health issues have made it urgent. I noted when surfing around trying to understand this stuff that there's a list of Indian essayists. I do not appear on that list after getting paid for my essays for most of my professional life. As odd, I could name a dozen Indian essayists currently writing without breaking a sweat, none of whom appear on that list.
When I was an active professor, a reporter from the student paper asked me what I thought about students citing Wikipedia. I said they should not but was careful to add that was not a comment on Wikipedia but rather a comment on encyclopedias. The use of encyclopedias is to get a general overview of a topic you know nothing about so you know where to start your research. I said Wikipedia was every bit as good and as bad as Funk & Wagnall's. I'm not sure I think that now. Swrussel (talk) 10:45, 20 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
If you check the list of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas you'll find that we have articles about every single person on that list (or we should have - if there's someone on that list without an article, they should be removed). We don't have an article about you, however - Steve Russell is just a disambiguation page linking to articles on various people of that name, and I rather doubt you're among them. Our lists very often are not meant to be exhaustive, but only to cover subjects that meet Wikipedia's guidelines of notability and that we have articles about. Your addition was reverted because it did not meet that standard of inclusion.
You seem to take this episode as an indication of Wikipedia's flaws. Yet Wikipedia is far more inclusive regarding the topics we cover than any paper encyclopedia you can name - does Funk & Wagnall's have an article about you or about a single one of that dozen of essayists you could name? That does not, however, mean that we don't have any standards whatsoever and every Joe, Dick and Harry can have a Wikipedia article. Whether or not you meet the inclusion criteria I cannot tell, but neither your author page at the Indian Country Today Media Network nor Amazon are the kinds of reliable third-party sources we'd need for an article about you. Huon (talk) 20:39, 20 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
