User talk:Wikistatman

Welcome!

Hello Wikistatman, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your interest in "The Free Encyclopedia" - I hope you like what you see and decide to stay. To help you get more comfortable with things, here are a few links with helpful information for newcomers:

Also, when communicating with other users on talk pages, please sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date, and make conversations much easier to follow. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, or feel free to ask me on my talk page. Cheers, and happy wiki-ing! --P e ruvianLlama^(spit) 02:17, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ronald A. Smith[edit]

Please do not remove Articles for deletion notices from articles or remove other people's comments in Articles for deletion pages. The notices and comments are needed to establish community consensus about the status of an article, and removing them is considered vandalism. If you oppose the deletion of an article, you may comment at the respective page instead. Thank you. --Allen3 ^talk 11:25, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The primary complaint against this article is that the information is currently unverified. The best way to resolve this is by actually citing some sources to back up what is stated in the article. Please see Wikipedia:Citing sources for information on common formatting information. It should be noted that the policy at Wikipedia:Verifiability places the responsibility for providing references on the editor who adds information to an article. --Allen3 ^talk 12:45, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your help and we are going to do that. However in the meantime we cannot have Mr. Smiths reputation destroyed with accusations. So we removed the article and left the notes. I understand the point regarding verification. But the question is how to do that. How do you verify a birthdate? how do you verify a father and mother or missionary work and other items listed? which things require verification and which do not? I guess the policy will outline that, but really can't this become extreme? What are we supposed to do to verify things? Which things need to be verified? How do you verify his name? How do you verify every single thing? It doesn't seem that you do that with other articles? The article on the NRCC has Tom Reynalds listed as the chairman when it's Tom Davis and I can list other examples... so to what degree are we supposed to do this? There must be some reasonable limits? That's the concern at this point...Wikistatman 12:52, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You verify with external sources. Be sure to read through WP:NOR, as well. Basically, if you can't point someone to an article or book or reference somewhere that backs up your claims, you can't include those claims on wikipedia. As for your question of how to verify a name, father, mother, missionary work, etc, a good thing to use would be wherever you found that information. One example would be a press release detailing him winning the Republican of the Year (VA) award. I'm assuming it says there somewhere that "Ronald A Smith, born of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, recently won the RotY Award for virginia. In his past, he has worked as a missionary...", and if so you just need to list that article as a source. If you've included information that you only know first hand (i.e. it's not printed anywhere, but you've heard it from Ronald Smith himself), it should be left out according to the no original research policy.--jfg284 ^{you were saying?} 13:30, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks... that's a major help. There are a lot of sources on this since there are articles on him from newspapers, tv shows such as msnbc, cnn and others, and articles in USA Today as well and the press release by the NRCC. I just have to get dates and etc. and I'll note them as required once I figure out how that's done with the wikipedia formatting rules... and then put it back up. Thanks for your help. Wikistatman 02:14, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just one more quick thing: looking through the AfD page, it seems most people are voting delete not because it's unsourced, but because its non-notable. Take a quick look at the guidelines for notability to see whether or not Mr. Smith should be included. --jfg284 ^{you were saying?} 16:52, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Refund Anticipation Loan[edit]

Hi Wikistatman, back in January, you created articles Inventor Advance Rapid Refund and Inventor Advance Rapid Tax Refunds by copying and pasting the article Refund Anticipation Loan. In the future, if there is an alternate name or search term for an article, please use redirects. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-08-10 02:54Z

Philanthropist[edit]

I've added the "{{prod}}" template to the article Philanthropist, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, or, if you disagree with the notice, discuss the issues at Talk:Philanthropist. You may remove the deletion notice, and the article will not be deleted, but note that it may still be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached, or if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria. — Sebastian (talk) 03:51, 8 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]