User talk:Friedle

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Hi Friedle, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

Welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you enjoy the encyclopedia and want to stay. As a first step, you may wish to read the Introduction.

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Good luck, and have fun. ----VS talk 08:56, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] re: References

Hi - I noticed this question you posted to user:Marskell's page. It is not just allowed, but highly encouraged, to add references to any unreferenced facts you find in Wikipedia (whether you wrote them or not). You might find Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check interesting. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:00, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hello

Hi Friedle. You seem to be off to a good start, wikifying and using summaries off the top. Making good faith mistakes will not get you banned, so don't worry about that. The welcome note at the top provides some pointers for you to start with. See also Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines. Don't expect to digest them all at once. The most important are WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, and WP:BLP, all of which you should read. While being bold is encouraged, don't leap in and edit a policy page; ask others on talk pages if you don't understand something.

You are indeed allowed to reference a fact you have not written yourself. See WP:CITE for info. The Wikipedia:Citation templates provide a format for you to use. Note the templates themselves are not required (some editors find them clunky) but the form they provide to the citation is encouraged. Basically, author, date, title, and publisher are needed in your citations, as you would do in a school paper. For books, add page numbers and ISBN if you can; the templates provide other options (language, quotes, publication location etc.). Web sources should have their URLs linked to, and a retrieval date provided. Here are two examples from Bobcat, which I'm working on:

Hope this helps. Marskell 15:06, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I have had a look at the pages Rick Block and you suggest. It does look quite hard to understand. I think I will just start by finding a short historical biographical page and see what I can do. I am quite interested in the Irish peerage so will try and find a page there. Thanks for the advice. Friedle