HKbrit

Welcome!

Hello, HKbrit, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome!

Editing, poor and absent referenced, COI

(cropped from User talk:Lexein for extended ongoing discussion) My most recent observation is in connection with Purchase order finance, which is not wrong, but is nearly devoid of references and could be more complete. I am a regular and long time used of Wikipedia and very new as an "editor". I am not comfortable editing, and would like to be part of a solution rather than part of the problem. As such, i would like to work with an existing editor until I get a more solid grasp of protocol.HKbrit (talk) 12:03, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

You caught me in a good mood. I hereby encourage you to begin editing, but also to read a few things linked above in the Welcome message, just until your eyes start to glaze over. Anyways, per WP:BRD, be Bold; if you're wrong, your edit will be Reverted (hopefully with a helpful WP:Edit summary), and/or be Discussed on the Talk page. It sounds like you want to contribute by adding information with references to WP:Reliable sources, or by just adding refs where sources are missing. This is great. In that light, please read WP:V, WP:RS, and WP:References for beginners.

Notes:

• FYI, in wikilinks like Purchase_order, we remove underscores (e.g. Purchase order) to match the wiki article name.
• I use the word "claim" to refer to all statements or groups of statements made in an article; it's just shorter.

In the article Purchase order, where you find an unsourced claim, first decide if it needs an inline citation - see WP:BLUE. All claims on Wikipedia, whether a sentence or several paragraphs, must cite a reliable source. So, try searching for that claim or topic with a search engine like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Metacrawler. Look for results older than the Wikipedia article - that's pretty much the only way to avoid mirrors or quotes of Wikipedia. Use books, journals, magazines, maybe newspapers, not wikis, forums, social media, occasionally news-related blogs. If you find what seems like a WP:reliable source, cite it just after the end of the claim in the article using this general format (one of several styles):

<ref>Smith, Dave (July 17, 1992). [http://examplejournal.org/articles/3848572.html "On the Flatness of the Earth"]. ''Journal du Example''. Retrieved August 18, 2013.</ref>

The <ref></ref> tags enclose all inline citations on Wikipedia. So, there's your first homework: a buncha reading, find a source or two. See you back here later. If I'm unavailable or if you're in a hurry, you can get editing help live online from Wikipedia editors at https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikipedia-en-help . --Lexein (talk) 15:03, 18 August 2013 (UTC)