User talk:Imparo
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[edit] Welcome!
Hello Imparo, and welcome to Wikipedia. I understand that you want to expand the biographies of the current members of the government caucus in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. That's great news. I'm going to spit a bunch of policies at you, but one of our most important editing guidelines is be bold - most of the time, your common sense will probably steer you right, and if it doesn't it's really easy to undo changes. That said, two of the most common mistakes I see from novice editors - especially novice editors writing about subjects they know a great deal about - are
- Not sourcing their edits. It's a core policy that all content in Wikipedia should be verifiable from reliable sources. This means that if you only know a fact because it came up in conversation with an MLA, it can't be included (however, if you can get the MLA to add it to their MLA biography...). It also means that you should use footnotes in the articles. The procedure for this is slightly different depending on the nature of your sources (website, news coverage, book, academic paper, Hansard, etc.), so I'll just help you with that aspect as it comes up.
- Using unlicensed photos. Unfortunately, the only photos Wikipedia can use of living people are those that are either in the public domain or licensed by the copyright holder under a free license that allows for unlimited re-use (including derivative works) by anybody for any purpose, with only the right of attribution retained by the copyright holder. If you think you might have access to such photos, or that you know people who hold copyrights to such photos who may be willing to so-release them, let me know and I'll help you with the uploading/tagging process as well.
Besides that, there are a couple of very important core policies that will apply to the articles you write (although they're also both pretty common sensical, so I wouldn't worry too much about going through them with a fine-toothed comb). They are the policy on neutral point of view, which states basically that articles shouldn't be biased in any particular direction (either in tone, choice of facts, or emphasis of facts) and the policy on the biographies of living persons, which states basically that the neutral point of view policy and the verifiability policy are extra important when we're writing about living people, since bad articles can have consequences for people in real life in those cases.
That's the important part. Rather than trying to explain everything about wikimarkup to you at the outset, it will probably be easier to help you with that as you go along. One of the projects I'm currently engaged in is expanding the biographies of the members of the 26th Alberta Legislative Assembly; proceeding alphabetically, I'm done Wayne Cao and have barely started Mike Cardinal. Any of the ones I've done should give you a general idea of what such articles should look like, although you should feel free to make changes if you think they're warranted. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them either here or on my talk page. Cheers, Sarcasticidealist (talk) 19:18, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
