EdwardCullen II

Welcome!

Hello, EdwardCullen II, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome!  Musical Linguist 22:18, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Image policy

I'm afraid I had to remove the images from your page. Only freely-licensed images are permitted in user space. See Wikipedia:Fair use. Thanks. Musical Linguist 22:18, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

i love you!!!!

I don't understand.

Greetings. This is Edward Cullen II. I have no ill feelings towards you for removing my images. But after reading the fair use policy, I still do not see why they were removed. Could you perhaps explain in your own words why they were removed and what I can do to prevent this from happening again? Also, I was unable to enter your talk page Musical Linguist. --EdwardCullen II 23:14, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

You'll be able to edit my talk page in a few days from now. It's semiprotected, because of harassment, which means that unregistered users and newly-registered accounts can't edit it. I'll see any questions you put on your own talk page, anyway, because I have it watchlisted. Regarding the images, when people upload an image to Wikipedia, they have to put a tag on it. If it's a photo that they took themselves, they can release it into the public domain, by using {{PD-self}}. Or they can release it as {{GDFL-self}}, which allows free distribution, although the owner retains some very limited rights. However, if someone uploads an image to which he does not hold the copyright, our policy is very strict. We have a Fair Use policy, which means, for example, that the person uploading the image says that the use of that image in a particular article would qualify as fair use, if it contributed significantly to the article, rather than serving a decorative purpose. For example, if we didn't have any freely-licensed images of John Lennon, we could use a Fair Use one in the article about John Lennon. But you wouldn't be allowed to use that same image on your user page, saying that John Lennon was your favourite singer. And our policy about this is really very strict. User pages may only have freely-licensed images. Hope that helps. Musical Linguist 23:08, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I am sorry about all the bother but...

I truly am sorry for all of the trouble I must be causing you, but I just wanted to make something clear. For my user page, any pictures I upload will be for decorative purposes. I saw the images that I put here on Wikipedia on the page for Twilight. I downloaded them to my computer straight from this website. So if whoever downloaded those images was able to download them without any trouble, why are they "illegal" for me to put on. If I want to upload those same images, should I do it from the same website that they got there images from? Thank you for taking the time to help me and I will try not to bother you with anymore questions. --EdwardCullen II 23:28, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Don't worry about the bother. The simple answer is that unless the images are freely licensed (which could be the case if the copyright holder was dead for 70 years, or if he or she had released the images into the public domain), then, under Wikipedia policy, we can't use them anywhere except in articles. So, if you found an image of John Lennon on a website, and if there were no free image of him in existence, it might or might not be acceptable to upload it to Wikipedia as Fair Use, but only for use in the John Lennon article. You couldn't (and I couldn't) use that image on a talk page or user page or user talk page. We could perhaps justify the use of it in the article about the singer, if we felt it significantly improved the article about the subject of the photo. But we couldn't use it in articles where it was only vaguely relevant, for example, the article about Music. So, regardless of where the photo comes from, if it's a copyrighted image, it can't be used except in an article about the subject.

And, no, you couldn't upload those photos and then use them on your user page. You see, you don't hold the copyright. Only if you took the photos yourself, or if the person who took the photos had given you the copyright, could you upload them under a free licence. Musical Linguist 23:44, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I completely understand now. Thank you very much. But I do have one final question. Since I cannot have pictures that aren't mine on my user page, how can I get a "userbox" on my page? (I am not sure if this is the correct term, but I have seen these on other userpages) --EdwardCullen II 23:54, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The userboxes are designed by people on Wikipedia, and therefore may be freely used. Very occasionally, someone puts a copyrighted image into a userbox, which is not allowed, but usually people notice that pretty quickly, and remove it. I'll leave a message for someone else to come and help you with the userboxes. I don't think he's online at the moment, but I'm sure when he comes online, he'll be happy to give you whatever information you need. Oh, and I think you're confusing the {{help}} template with the {{helpme}} one. If you want someone to come along and answer questions, it's the {{helpme}} one you should use. But if it's just a question addressed to me, you don't need to, because I'll see any reply you post for me, if I'm online. Musical Linguist 00:05, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi. Musical Linguist told me you had a question about userboxes. The two best places to find them are Wikipedia:Userboxes#Gallery, for more project specific ones, and Wikipedia:Userbox migration (scroll down to the orange box at the bottom of the page), for a more eclectic selection. On the first of those two pages, if you scroll up to the top, you can read all about userboxes and even how to make your own.

I hope that information helps. If I can help you with any other questions, please feel free to leave me a message. -GTBacchus^(talk) 02:14, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you both for the help. I will contact you if I come across any trouble :) --EdwardCullen II 03:44, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

A word of caution

Please don't give too much personal information about yourself. The web is a dangerous place, and there are some very nasty people "out there". Things like your favourite subject is geography, and you like hamburgers would be fine. Your date of birth, the name of your school, etc. would not be a good idea. Any time you want to put something about yourself on your user page or in a post on a talk page, ask yourself will this help a criminal to find out who I am and where I live. It might be a good idea to talk to your parents about this. I'm not trying to frighten you, and, indeed, most of the people on Wikipedia, in my experience, are good, decent, kind people. But some are not, and these are just sensible precautions we should all take, especially people who are under eighteen.

Regards, Musical Linguist 10:03, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Vampires

Hi you asked in the Vampires discussion thread for information about the origin of the vampire legend to be put here for you to read

The most in depth discussion of vampires can be found if you're willing to dig deep in vampirerave.com - I am library historian and I actually use that cult site to point me in the right direction. The members articles there are usually very good but, as a warning, don't believe everything that you read in there - like everywhere on the net a lot of it is just people's opinions

Your question is a good one, but you will have to start by trying to define what YOU mean as 'vampire' : there are blood sucking mythological creatures going right back to 3000 BC (shown in cave pictures) but does blood-sucking make a vampire?

Bram Stoker's novel Dracula was a work of pure fiction loosely based around Vlad the Impaler, don't confuse this with the creatures of myth

Good Luck SuzieT 11:33, 22 February 2007 (UTC)