John M Wilkins RFD*
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Hi John M Wilkins RFD*! Welcome to Wikipedia!
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Hello – I came across this article today under its original title. I moved it to Navy League of Australia because the other articles on Navy Leagues use that style of title.
I appreciate the work that must have gone into creating this text. However, I urge you, as its creator, strongly to take the text in the article and cut it by at least 75%. Wikipedia articles, even the long ones, generally are less than 30KB in size because readers with dial-up Internet connections can't load pages quickly if they are longer than about 30KB. Navy League of Australia is 67KB, or more than twice the desired length. If readers can't load the page, they won't read the article.
A second reason to heavily edit this article is that Wikipedia readers will take one look at it and move on. As the article stands, it's one long block of letters with no headings, no paragraphs, no style. For example, the dozens of apparent references near the end of the article must be reformatted; Wikipedia has a standard method of citing sources. Please familiarize yourself with the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, then add the appropriate headings, wikilinks, and so forth. The MoS will also show you how to remove the dash-outlined box you mentioned on the talk page – when text is indented in this software without the appropriate code, that box is the result. Removing the indented space in front of that sentence will remove the outlined box. I don't have time to search through 67 kilobytes of text to find it – another reason to heavily edit the article. Busy readers and admins like me can't edit such a large file without difficulty.
You can also take some hints from the articles on other Navy Leagues and their affiliated organizations – Navy League of Canada and Navy League of the United States might be good places to start. As you will see, those articles are much shorter and more concise. We're looking for brilliant prose, and less is more. The Featured Articles index to which I've linked (click 'brilliant') are our best work, and the Featured Article criteria (click 'prose') are the gauge by which we judge all our content.
For example, get the important information into the piece, like how and when it was founded and significant events, and remove the long lists of chapters, the lists of contributions to chapters during the 1920s, the year-by-year summaries of the 1920s, and so on. It's not that nobody cares about that kind of thing, but it's not important in the big picture, and we're interested in the big picture.
Please let me know if you need assistance or have questions. When I was a new editor, I used the tutorial to quickly get the basics of editing here, and you may find it useful. The subject of this article is notable, and its article should hold the reader's attention instead of prompting a hit on his/her browser's 'back' button. Thanks. - KrakatoaKatie 13:38, 3 September 2007 (UTC)