ColeDryden

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. The following links will help you begin editing on Wikipedia:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Editing tutorial
• Picture tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Naming conventions
• Simplified Manual of Style

Please bear these points in mind while editing Wikipedia

• Respect copyrights – do not copy and paste text or images directly from other websites.
• Maintain a neutral point of view – this is one of Wikipedia's core policies.
• Take particular care while adding biographical material about a living person to any Wikipedia page and follow Wikipedia's Biography of Living Persons policy. Particularly, controversial and negative statements should be referenced with multiple reliable sources.
• No edit warring or sock puppetry.
• If you are testing, please use the Sandbox to do so.
• Do not add troublesome content to any article, such as: copyrighted text, libel, advertising or promotional messages, and text that is not related to an article's subject. Deliberately adding such content or otherwise editing articles maliciously is considered vandalism; doing so will result in your account or IP being blocked from editing.
• Do not use talk pages as discussion or forum pages as Wikipedia is not a forum.

The Wikipedia tutorial is a good place to start learning about Wikipedia. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and discussion pages using four tildes, like this: ~~~~ (the software will replace them with your signature and the date). Again, welcome! Dougweller (talk) 12:57, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello I have just begun to be a member of Wikipedia hoping to give some of my own contributions on some pages/articles. I am a college student currently and I am trying to expand my horizons. If you would like to talk with me, I'll do my best to join your conversation or address any issues.

ColeDryden (talk) 22:29, 12 July 2014 (UTC)ColeDrydenColeDryden (talk) 22:29, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia and copyright

Hello ColeDryden, and welcome to Wikipedia. Your addition to Augustine of Hippo has had to be removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder. While we appreciate your contributing to Wikipedia, there are certain things you must keep in mind about using information from your sources to avoid copyright or plagiarism issues here.

• You can only copy/translate a small amount of a source, and you must mark what you take as a direct quotation with double quotation marks (") and a cited source. You can read about this at Wikipedia:Non-free content in the sections on "text". See also Help:Referencing for beginners, for how to cite sources here.
• Aside from limited quotation, you must put all information in your own words and structure, in proper paraphrase. Following the source's words too closely can create copyright problems, so it is not permitted here; see Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing. (There is a college-level introduction to paraphrase, with examples, hosted by the Online Writing Lab of Purdue.) Even when using your own words, you are still, however, asked to cite your sources to verify information and to demonstrate that the content is not original research.
• Our primary policy on using copyrighted content is Wikipedia:Copyrights. You may also want to review Wikipedia:Copy-paste.
• If you own the copyright to the source you want to copy or are a designated agent, you may be able to license that text so that we can publish it here. However, there are steps that must be taken to verify that license before you do. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.
• In very rare cases (that is, for sources that are public domain or compatibly licensed), it may be possible to include greater portions of a source text. However, please seek help at the help desk before adding such content to the article. 99.9% of sources may not be added in this way, so it is necessary to seek confirmation first. If you do confirm that a source is public domain or compatibly licensed, you will still need to provide full attribution; see Wikipedia:Plagiarism for the steps you need to follow.
• Also note that Wikipedia articles may not be copied without attribution. If you want to copy from another Wikipedia project or article, you can, but please follow the steps in Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia.

It's very important that contributors understand and follow these practices, as policy requires that people who persistently do not must be blocked from editing. If you have any questions about this, you are welcome to leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Dougweller (talk) 12:58, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

I hope these links help. Please read carefully the one on close paraphrasing. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 12:59, 13 July 2014 (UTC)