User talk:Valters

Welcome!

Hello, Valters, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Hu 20:14, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bond gadgets

This page needs serious work. If it can be made into encyclopedic content, I suggest merging it into the "Development" section, which already needs to be trimmed. Mentioning a couple cars does not qualify as needing its own section. Bignole 00:41, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

RE:Casino Royale

Crap! Thanks for letting me know...I usually pride myself on double checking for older vandalism, but I guess I missed this one. Thankfully, you were on the ball. :) Gzkn 01:33, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The case was somebody not reverting the article proper, but simply erasing the vandalism (which, in first place, had replaced entire section with just few words) - by glance it would seem that article is fixed, but in reality somebody just covered up deleting a section. Wikipedia should track if somebody has removed section entirely, since it is easy to miss! Valters 09:33, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Notability

First, thank you for correcting the mistakes on your User page. Second, when the Amy Loftus article was nominated for speedy deletion, it did not properly assert the notability of the subject. Read the official policy, which has been hammered out by many people over many months in the face of relentless and huge pressure from hundreds of thousands of people eager to put dozens of articles about their friends and relatives into the encyclopedia, which when you multiply it out would be tens of millions of bogus articles. Without a tough exclusionary policy at the front door, so to speak, Wikipedia would get swamped and it would be hundreds of times as much work to weed out the junk articles after the fact. So as part of that policy it is necessary that new articles convincingly assert the subject's notability. Even if a subject is notable, the article must assert it believably. Please check the New Articles listings and help us out by nominating article for speedy deletion. When you see the rate at which bogus articles are created, you will have a greater understanding. Hu 19:17, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Right now I cannot believe the assertion "Wikipedia would get swamped and it would be hundreds of times as much work to weed out the junk articles after the fact".

I think welcoming attititude towards new people is much more important. However, Wikipedia is trying to become something else right now. I have no idea what that is, I didn't get the memo. It seems that Wikipedia is going to conduct itself like a "real" encyclopedia, only having entries that have wealth of information in other mediums (on the internets, academia). But such encyclopedias are not useful anymore, because any information there is on the Net, Google will find for you. The days for directories (what encyclopedias used to be), are over and such directories of fact are only useful if there is no Net access.

On the other hand, if the information is scarce, subject matter experts would have written an article in Wikipedia. Such article is now deleted, because it can not be sourced through Google. Valters 19:28, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Spend some hours tagging bogus articles in the New Articles list and you will see how many there are. Seriously. You need a lot more experience. Use your positive energy and dive in! When we say, Be Bold, we mean it. But civility and assuming good faith (until proven otherwise) are requirements. You won't win all the things you advocate in discussions and votes and debates here, so it is important to be cooperative and get along with people even on occasions when you don't get your own way. With experience you will get your way most of the time. You may think you, as a new editor here, are smarter and wiser than the tens of thousands of experienced editors at Wikipedia (out of over one million editors), and you are welcome to propose a change in the policy in the appropriate Wikipedia policy pages (they are not hard to find: start with WP:BIO). Be sure to read some of the prior discussions before you get too involved. New ideas are always welcome, but you have not proposed a single idea that hasn't already been tried. When Wikipedia started, it was as wide open as you would like it to be. Problems soon developed and the policies were hammered out after a lot of trial and error and discussion. I hope you don't start going around saying that people here are evil for not listening to you, that they hate new people and new ideas, etc. That kind of behavior is very typical of a certain percentage of people who get involved in social software or forums and is extremely unfortunate. In the end, it hurts them more than it hurts the organization. You really do need to do a lot of reading of the policies (easy to find!) and some of the discussion (easy to find!) before you can have a hope of convincing anybody that we are fools. Finally, nothing is stopping you from posting welcome notices on the Talk pages of new users. It is an old tradition here. I do it from time to time, especially if I see a new editor trying to do the right thing. I have rectified an oversight and placed a Welcome here on this talk page, and I mean it, Welcome. Hu 20:15, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for kind encouragement! As a personal policy, I do not fight uphill battles (try not to swim against the stream). I simply do not enjoy that. The treatment of Talk:Danah_boyd by User:Elonka really makes 1984 blush. Very Kafkaesque. I hope this does not become the reality of Wikipedia. I take the Notability debate only started somewhere on April. There still may be chance. Valters 20:46, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]