Golucid

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--TheParanoidOne 11:54, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

January 2009

Welcome, and thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test on the page James Rollins worked, and it has been automatically reverted. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you would like to experiment further, please use the sandbox. If you believe there has been a mistake and would like to report a false positive, please report it here. Thank you.
SoxBot III (talk | owner) 21:27, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

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James Rollins article

Hello David! I saw the huge amount of work that you did on Jim's article. I worked on cleaning that page up in the past, and you are right that it still needs a lot of work. I reverted your changes (don't worry, they are all still available under the edit history of the page, so your efforts were not wasted or lost).

Many of the changes you made do not follow follow Wikipedia's Manual of Style (MOS), which differs from pretty much any other MOS you may be familiar with. For example, you moved the introductory paragraph into a subheading called mini-biography. That initial paragraph is used by many automated process here to provide the summary for the entire article, Google searches, popup previews, etc. By moving it into a subsection, Jim's article didn't have any preview and looked like an empty article. Also, the tone of the article sounded like an advertisement or promotional piece. It didn't read like an encyclopedia entry on a person from history. The fact that you are Jim's personal assistant would very likely be seen as a conflict of interest here, and combining that with the tone of the article, the whole issue could blow up into an ugly P.R. nightmare. I've seen it happen before, and I don't want to see that happen to Jim or to you.

There were also many unsourced references and references to future events (like his forthcoming books, including his unnamed one), and without a very reliable source that documents a fixed date in writing, Wikipedia won't allow that information to be included. (Even then, future events are not particularly tolerated, since an encyclopedia records what happens not what could happen). The structure of the article and the flow within the article also doesn't follow standards for organizing information within author-related articles (though there is a lot of variation). There are a lot of incoming links within Wikipedia that will be broken by such a large article reorganization. The section headings are used for in-page linking, and since nearly every heading was changed, it broke several of those links. It's okay to rename section headings, but it's also best to follow the incoming links and fix any that get broken by your changes.

You're probably feeling a little overwhelmed and a lot of frustration/irritation by this. I am sorry for that. I have been an editor here since 2007, and I have gone through a lot of stress and frustration over articles in the past. It's part of the collaborative wiki process. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it's just the way it is.

I love Jim's work, and I am very willing to work with you to renovate the article so that it both fits your standards and Wikipedia's. Even after that, people will continue to edit and tweak the article--or even completely redo it after we finish redoing it. That's the nature of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. But I think together we can create something really good that people will like, and then future edits will only improve upon it. Ideally, I'd love to get the article up to Good Article standards or even a Featured Article on the front page. That's something I couldn't do by myself, but it's something that we working together, along with input from Jim, and probably a dozen or so other Wikipedians could get it there. It's quite a challenge and an honor to achieve that status, but even if it never gets there, the article will only be improved in the process.

You can reply to me on my talk page or by e-mail. Jim should also have my other contact information since I review some of his stories for him prior to publication. Thanks for understanding, and I look forward to collaborating with you and improving the article. --Will Murray a.k.a. Willscrlt (Talk) 07:13, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Possibly unfree File:Author james rollins 2008.jpg

A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Author james rollins 2008.jpg, has been listed at Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at the discussion if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. --Abigor (talk) 21:08, 20 March 2010 (UTC)