SLM463
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Hello, SLM463, 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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About NPOV
edit
Welcome to Wikipedia, and thank you for your contributions. One of the core policies of Wikipedia is that articles should always be written from a neutral point of view. A contribution you made to Salem, Oregon appears to carry a non-neutral point of view, and your edit may have been changed or reverted to correct the problem. Please remember to observe our core policies. Thank you. Katr67 (talk) 17:23, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
Honestly, I didn't read most of what you left on my talk page. To be perfectly clear, neither I nor Katr67 care about Salem and golf or your involvement in golf in Salem. It really has nothing to do with our views on golf, or Salem. What we both and all the regular editors on Wikipedia strive for is writing a neutral, balanced encyclopedia. And when people start adding opinions and fact manipulations, that gets our POV sensors up. And when I mean fact manipulations, I mean, "only capitol West of the Rockies" type info. That isn't the most helpful to readers. One, what is west of the Rockies? Does that mean Idaho does not count because part of the Rockies run through it, and ditto with Colorado? Or as I implied, are you just picking facts here and there to make a point? If you are going to compare state capitols, compare them all. If you want to pick comparable cities, pick all cities in the US that have populations of say 125,000 to 150,000 at the 2000 census. But don't try to pick the specific enough facts to try and show how horrible Salem is to golfers. The fact that this addition comes not long after a closure of a golf course made the TV news and residents being unhappy about that fact, makes this come across as a soapbox, the same when someone in Orenco, Oregon started talking about the unique heritage of that community around the same time that local residents lost a battle to stop the development of the old golf course into a new subdivision. Keep up the fight, make your views known, just not on Wikipedia. But most of all, WP:CITE your sources from Wikipedia defined reliable sources. Anything unsourced will often get deleted.
Now: "these are facts about the city Parks and Recreation services" & "Does this mean only certain facts and sports are eligible? (thus my question about hiking.)" Let me be clear about what I said: "The points about hiking and walking are not expressing an opinion of whether either is a good or bad thing, those sentences inform the reader that those things exist at those places." Which means exactly that, those things exist, the reader is not told whether it is a good or a bad thing. There is no opinion involved about whether or not hiking trails exist. It becomes POV if one then were to add "but there are no city owned hiking trails along Lancaster Drive." So what if Salem does not own a golf course? How many cities in Oregon do? Further, the city of Salem I believe also does not itself own: a basketball/sports arena (Salem Armory being state owned), a rocket lunching pad, a brewery, a trolley, a skyscraper, a canal system, a container ship port, a helicopter, a RV park, an Olympic stadium, and thousands of other items a city can own and operate. Cities own many things, but mentioning a city doesn't have a municipal golf course is an opinion, not because it actually doesn't, but because that is the fact you choose to include. Many people in Salem are likely happy that the city does not own a golf course, and many people want a municipal golf course. Many would like to add some other service, and many will be against that same service. But we try not to let the battle play out on Wikipedia, because it is an encyclopedia. Feel free to make additions where ever, but always cite the info and keep it neutral. Otherwise any other editor will likely remove it for the same reasons that the golf course edit you added was removed. Take your time to read through all the blue linked items myself and others have listed here, and you will get what Wikipedia is about, and how to contribute in ways that will not lead to your edits being deleted or modified. It's really nothing personal, it has to do with how Wikipedia works. Just imagine if everyone with a gripe about the city were to add those gripes to the article. First, it would remove any shade of the article being encyclopedic, but it would also be 40 pages printed. I personally hate the roads and lack of east-west running main connectors for fast and easy travel between downtown and I-5. But Wikipedia is not the place for that debate, nor is it a place for the debate about a new state hospital. Aboutmovies (talk) 07:13, 24 March 2008 (UTC)