ArcTech

August 2007

Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. I've noticed that you've been adding your signature to some of your article contributions, such as you did to Gas tungsten arc welding. This is a simple mistake to make and by now should have been corrected. For future reference, the need to associate edits with users is taken care of by an article's edit history. Therefore, you should use your signature only when contributing to talk pages, the Village Pump, or other such discussion pages. For a better understanding of what distinguishes articles from these type of pages, please see What is an article?. Again, thanks for contributing, and enjoy your Wikipedia experience! Thank you. • nancy • 19:14, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Signing article edits

Hi there. I appreciate that it is an easy mistake to make but please can you 'stop adding your user signature (~~~~) to article pages you are editing; you have now done it at least a further two times since you were first made aware of the problem and it is making a lot of work for other people as someone has to go in and remove them manually. The record of your edit is taken care of by the article's edit history so there is no need to worry about attribution. Kind regards, • nancy • 19:41, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

GTAW

It's great to have someone with your expertise! I wrote the articles on welding, gas metal arc welding, gas tungsten arc welding, and shielded metal arc welding based on my readings in several general welding textbooks, but I have little formal education in the area, and even less practical experience.

All four of those articles are featured articles, which means that they have passed through a review process by the general Wikipedia community (though few of those people have any experience with welding either). You can look at the criteria for featured articles at Wikipedia:Featured article criteria.

Basically, the most important thing when adding information is citing sources. One of Wikipedia's greatest shortcomings is its unreliability (because anyone can write articles), so to make up for this, we try to make sure that all information, especially information in featured articles, is backed up by a page number from a published work (book, journal, magazine, newspaper, etc.). If a general reader would come along and see information you added to the article, he wouldn't know who put it there--for all he knows, it could have been some high school student pulling a prank. Thus, Wikipedia policy requires that everyone provide a source for all the information they add.

Of course, this means that you'll know things from practical experience that can't be put in the Wikipedia article. We recognize that Wikipedia can lose valuable information as a result, but that's something we're willing to sacrifice in order to ensure that the information we do have is accurate.

Wikipedia can be a complex place, and there's always something new to learn, but I hope you'll stick around. Feel free to add things to articles, but when you do, try to leave a source. The easiest way to do that is to type <ref>Page 5, General Welding Textbook, by Joe Smith, ISBN 155395960</ref>. There's a special way to format citations, but I or other people can fix that pretty easily, so long as the basic information is there.

Feel free to ask me any questions you might have. I've been on Wikipedia for almost three years, so I know how the place operates pretty well. Oh, one more thing--signatures (the four squiggly lines) are only used at the end of talk conversations; never in articles, and never at the beginning of comments. Hope that helps.

Thanks for your contributions! --Spangineer^ws (háblame) 23:19, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

To see all the previous versions of any article, click on the "history" tab at the top of the page. There you'll find a listing of each version, along with radio buttons on the left side. By clicking different radio buttons you can see all the changes between two different versions. Most of your edits are still in the article, but some of your earlier ones I reverted, as you'll be able to see based on my edit summaries (something you should always use to describe what you're doing in each edit).

Regarding inaccurate information, most of the time the things you know by experience have been written up by other people; the hard part is finding out who. I suspect that somewhere someone wrote a welding manual with that information about preheat in it; I'll keep an eye out for it. Until finding a proper source, it's probably best to simply remove the inaccurate information. When information is available in bits an pieces from a variety of sources, it's acceptable to combine that into one coherent message, and use all the sources as references, assuming you don't have to take large liberties with the individual works to make the required point. I hope that clarifies things; if you have any other questions let me know. --Spangineer^ws (háblame) 01:25, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Hmmmm... interesting points. First, help me understand what you're saying—would you agree that when a particularly high-quality weld is necessary, that, all other things being equal, the engineer would tend to lean toward specifying a GTAW weld rather than one produced by GMAW or SMAW? While I agree that a GTAW weld and a SMAW weld that are rated the same are of equivalent quality, my brief education led me to believe that GTAW affords a greater control of the weld and less contamination, allowing the process to high quality welds more easily than other processes (less specialized equipment, etc.). Am I incorrect on this? What do you think of the sentence in the lead that says, "The process grants the operator greater control over the weld than competing procedures... allowing for stronger, higher quality welds."

In any case, when faced with these questions of detail, we have to weigh the benefit for the average reader in explaining the detail. Most people use Wikipedia as a general informational resource, and for such people, the distinction between what the article currently says and what you are saying may not make sense even if it were explained. On the other hand, we can be flexible in wording—if a particular point is important but is not clearly stated in any one source, we can cite several sources (such as Deming and Crosby) and briefly summarize what they said. In this case, I think that even textbooks that say that GTAW produces high-quality welds also say that GTAW is a highly versatile process that is capable of things that other processes cannot accomplish, and perhaps we need to simply modify the wording to focus on this rather than on the "high quality" part.

At the end of the day, we can never get away from editorial control—the person summarizing more complex works always must make decisions about what to include and what not to include, and this necessarily introduces bias and inconsistency. Wikipedia contributors strive to avoid this, but in general bias is only reduced when someone points out a fault, such as you are doing now. If the community of contributors agrees that your observation is correct (based on your argument and what the available sources say), the article is changed accordingly.

No need to worry about bothering me, I'm excited that someone with significantly more experience than I is taking the time to challenge things written by an armchair amateur. --Spangineer^ws (háblame) 02:38, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Adoption

I could adopt you if you want. You can reply on my talk page at User talk:Phoenix 15--Phoenix 15 20:27, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

So you want to be adopted? well, it's very simple. Put this on your page: {{adoptee|Phoenix 15}}

Which displays:

I would encourage you work away on subjects you know about and I will help you with anything you need if you ask on my talk page. I would also encourage you to visit the community portal regularly. It's basically the main page for editors, rather than readers, pointing out articles that need work etc. You might want to visit Wikipedia:Deletion debates and give your opinion on whether stuff should be kept or deleted. Users who regularly participate in these deletion debates, especially Wikipedia:Articles for deletion are generally well respected by the rest of the community (P.S. you signed your email with for tildes!)--Phoenix 15 20:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

You might want to read the Wikipedia:Manual of Style aswell--Phoenix 15 20:50, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Woah! I've been looking at your contributions and you've got a great knowledge of welding related subjects. It's great to have you aboard!--Phoenix 15 20:50, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Help

I had a look at the oxy-acetylene page. The bit that concerns you, oxy-gasoline cutting does indeed have a reference but I don't know how good it is. You can tell if something has a reference if it's got a number like this

you can click on the number to see the source

Wikipedia:User:ArcTech

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