User talk:KateSpan

Welcome!

Hello, KateSpan, 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:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using 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 {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! :) -- phoebe / (talk to me) 21:25, 2 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Reverting pages[edit]

Please stop reverting my edits at University of San Francisco. I am trying to help improve the article and ensure that it complies with Wikipedia policies. Please see WP:3RR and WP:REVERT to understand when it is appropriate to revert. Cheers! Madcoverboy (talk) 23:35, 8 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(copied from User talk:Madcoverboy)I received your message on my user page. Obviously I am not the Wikipedia expert that you are, but I am a USF student currently, and I am engaged in a Final Project for a class to update and renovate OUR page. I don't know what your history with the University is, but if you actually read through the newly updated page, you will see that the information being added comes directly from the USF website, more specifically the Residence Life portion (http://www.usfca.edu/residence_life/). Indeed, if in your opinion, the information on the University's own website is incorrect, then maybe you should be in communication with those responsible for the content on the website. I would appreciate if you did not delete the hard, honest, and unbiased work our class is contributing for our final project. Above, it was mentioned that we could learn a lot about Wikipedia from interacting with you, but how can we learn if our page is being deleted every time we edit? Hope we can come to an agreement. Thanks, --KateSpan (talk) 23:54, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Let's just keep the conversation on your talk page so we don't have to keep checking back and forth. First off, one of the rules of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit any page. A necessary implication of this is that no one owns any page and can keep others from editing and improving it - so it's not really your page ;). Secondly, I don't have any history with the university. However, I do have substantial experience writing and editing University articles as I have been editing them for several years now. I rewrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology over a year ago and UC Santa Barbara, continue to work on Northwestern University and History of Northwestern University, as well as having made major edits to the University of Southern California, Rice University, UC San Diego, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins University in the past year. Obviously, I haven't gone to all ~~or any~~ of them, but that doesn't mean that there aren't things that could be done to ensure that they're improved. I would encourage you to look at WP:UNIGUIDE as this is a document that describes the consensus for what should and should not be included in college and university articles. Please also look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Universities/Accomplishments and see how the best-rated articles actually have similar structure, style, tone, formatting, and other features. The edits I am making are attempting to make USF more similar to those!

Finally, I don't think that the information on the USF residence life page is necessarily wrong. However, it should not be duplicated en masse on Wikipedia as that is copyright infringement. Nor does everything need to be included either; people could just go visit that site instead of Wikipedia. Remember, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia - it should be a summary of facts presented in a standard style with neutral tone. I also did not delete the information, I just moved it off of the maing article to the Residence halls at the University of San Francisco. As is the case with the history, campus, and academic sections, make sure to summarize the information and present the important themes - don't try to include everything! Madcoverboy (talk) 00:27, 9 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

wrap-up of USF project[edit]

Hello students working on the University of San Francisco article,

You're probably just about done with your project. If you are still working on the article here are a couple of ideas:

one editor posted a great to-do list on the talk page which could be used to improve the sources and some sections
you can continue to use the project page Wikipedia:WikiProject University of San Francisco to coordinate
Don't forget that Wikipedia is not a guide for students. It's an encyclopedia. And the better the sources are the better the article will be.

General notes:

You've probably noticed that other editors are now working on the USF article, in some cases removing some of the material that some of you posted. This is the way Wikipedia is supposed to work. Don't get upset about this: even though the other editors are not students, they are helping bring the article up to Wikipedia's standards. I tried to give you all a sense of how complex these standards are in class, but now you are seeing them in action.
If you want to see a list of your own contributions (whether or not the text you added is still in the article) you can just go to special:contributions. Enter your username in the box and hit "search", and you'll get a list of your contributions; click the link that says "diff" to see exactly what you changed in that edit.
You all did a great job without a lot of time or help -- the article has really grown! You should all be proud of yourselves. I hope that it was fun and that you will continue to contribute to Wikipedia. If you have questions about editing, you can always contact me on my talk page. And...
thanks for editing Wikipedia :) -- phoebe / (talk to me) 18:41, 11 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]