John L. Andrews

Hello, John L. Andrews, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

I notice that one of the first articles you edited appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article. Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

To reduce the chances of your contributions being undone, you might like to draft your revised article before submission, and then ask me or any other editor to proofread it. To start creating a draft article, just click your user name at the top of the screen when you are logged in, and edit that page as you would any other. If the page you created has already been deleted from Wikipedia, but you want to save the content from it to use for that draft, don't hesitate to ask anyone from this list and they will copy it to your user page.

The one firm rule we do have in connection with conflicts of interest is that accounts used by more than one person will unfortunately be blocked from editing. It is also worth noting that Wikipedia generally does not allow editors to have usernames which specifically link them to one company or corporation. If your username does have such a name, it would be advisable for you to request a change of username.

If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! You can also just type {{helpme}} on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

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 have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Best regards, Cind.amuse (Cindy) 14:58, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

• Hi, Cindy. I am somewhat bemused by your immediate intervention, as this is not my first editing attempt - althought my previous edits were some time ago. We have two Wiki databases on our website, and I am so used to using them that to find myself under somebody else's control, so to speak, is rather unusual, to say the least, to say nothing of being accused of a conflict of interest! GOMJohn (talk) 15:21, 13 January 2012 (UTC) BTW why does my name show as GOMJohn? GOM=Grand Old Man?
  • Hey there! If you need help, please feel free to ask. When an organization goes through a name change, we generally provide a redirect or link to their article, rather than create a second article merely to reflect the change. I've gone ahead and pruned the Institute of Broadcast Sound‎ article due to lack of sourcing to support any of the claims made in the article. At this point, the article fails to substantiate notability for the organization. You can find notability guidelines for organizations here. Specifically, notability is established through significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the organization itself. As far as the GOMJohn, most likely, you set that up in your signature a while back and forgot about it. If yours is "Grand Old Man", I'd probably be "Grand Old Chick". ;) You can change it by editing your signature under the "My preferences" link at the top of the page. Again, if you need assistance, please feel free to contact me. Best regards, Cind.amuse (Cindy) 15:43, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi, Cindy. Thanks. I just remembered that my username was meant to be Grumpy Old Man, but I condensed it. I have now edited it. Questions: 1) Why does my name show "no page" in the listing in the RH box on the IPS page? What is the difference between my user page and this page. I am totally confused about these pages. 2) I tried to edit the References but it doesn't work. I want to add a reference to the article in the Institute of Videography http://www.iov.co.uk/showarticle.pl?id=81852 GrumpyJohn (talk) 16:43, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

I posted some questions (above) in January but have had no response. A helpful user has added two more references to the IPS page but not in the right page. Please help me sort this out.GrumpyJohn (talk) 15:15, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi John. I can explain a few things but I have no idea what an "ISP page" is, nor what an "RH box" is. I'll leave this question open so someone else who may know can answer that aspect of your question (or maybe you can provide links to what you meant?)

Every user account is automatically assigned two pages associated with their account: 1) a user page; and 2) a user talk page. See Wikipedia:User pages. User pages are where you can describe a bit about yourself, list tasks to do, place reminders to yourself, useful tools, your Wikipedia accomplishments, etc. This page, your user talk page, is where users communicate with you and if you want to contact a user, you would go to their user talk page (you'll note when you're left a message on this page you get the        orange banner        informing you; everyone else does as well when their talk page is edited). What helps in understanding some background here is a knowledge of what a namespace is. Essentially, the encyclopedia is broken up into handful of different, separated "spaces". Articles are in the main space and are the only types of pages that take titles without any prefix indicating what namespace they are in. All pages in other namespaces contain a prefix of the namespace as part of their title, in the form namespace:title. So user pages are in the form User:Name. Their talk pages are at User talk:Name, and the same holds true for article talk pages, templates ("Template:Name"; "Template talk:Name"), administrative pages ("Wikipedia:Name"; "Wikipedia talk:Name") and for a few others.

Regarding references, please start out by reviewing Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners. To target one aspect you are confused about, though it is covered at the page I just linked, when you are reading an article and see a references section near the bottom populated by a series of numbered citations, you might think that if you edit the page, you will see those citations typed in that section and be able to edit them. However, normally what you will see is code similar to this:

     ==References==

   {{Reflist}} or <references/>

The text of citations is actually in the body of the article, directly next to statements or paragraphs the citations support, using <ref>(citation)</ref> tags, which display as footnotes (e.g.^[1][2]) when you are reading an article. The template code shown above in the references section colates and displays all of the citations within the article in a numbered list in which the numbers correspond to the footnote numbers in the text. By clicking on the ^ symbol next to a citation display, you can easily find exactly where in the body of the article the citation text appears in order to edit it. Hope this helps.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Many thanks. Some thought needed!GrumpyJohn (talk) 16:22, 10 March 2012 (UTC)