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User:JzG/help

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Wikipedia is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Wikipedia...

You have come here because you need help, probably because I left you a comment that you find puzzling. Please note that this is not the place for messages to me, for that you need my talk page.

First: Don't panic! Wikipedia is not on a deadline. There are few things that can't be fixed by a dose of calmness and reasoned debate. If something looks wrong to you, instead of demanding it be fixed, try asking nicely why it was done. You'd be amazed how much more effective that is.

Here are some useful places to go:

An admin done me wrong!

If you feel an admin has done you wrong, try talking to them. Nicely. We are only human, we are janitors not policemen, and we are not paid for what we do. Almost all admins are reachable by email. Visit their user page and click the "email this user" link. Leave a message on their user Talk page. And above all, never assume malice when it could be a simple misunderstanding. It's almost certainly not personal - we tend not to give adminship to people who are likely to make random personal attacks and harbour grudges, some of us are really quite nice people and good to our mothers. Remember, too, that admins often have many, many articles on their watchlist, while you may have rather fewer, so it's easy for us to miss an edit in a watched article or Talk page, and we might see patterns of editing which you do not - or indeed you might be right, and pointing it out politely could be very welcome. Above all if an admin says there is a policy or guideline reason for including or excluding something, they are quite likely right, or at least offering a valid interpretation of policy. We are supposed to know that stuff -we are not omniscient, but we have been around a bit.