User talk:BPaulLucas

Welcome!

Hello, BPaulLucas, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 {{Help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! --SamanthaPuckettIndo (talk) 21:38, 30 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Olentangy Liberty High School (Powell, Ohio)

Hi. Welcome to Wikipedia. It seems you have not read the info another editor kindly left you above. There are many problems with the edits you made today and pretty much, I have reverted all of it. Nice montage, tho. I formatted that properly for you.

Now on to the specifics of the problems. Firstly, when an editor (in this case me) reverts an edit with a valid reason in the edit summary, you do not just replace it. This is called edit warring and it is highly frowned upon. The proper procedure would have been to go to the article's talk page and start a discussion to try to reach a consensus on the content. See WP:BRD for details of the edit cycle. In this case, that would not go far. High school articles are subject to a guideline found at WP:SCH/AG, which represents a already reached consensus on what content is and isn't allowed on high school articles. General curricular information and grad requirements are not used in US high school articles. An exception might be made if the school had a particularly unique program, but off the top of my head, I cannot think what that might be. Perhaps a course in Cherokee or some other very obscure language? We do allow listings of AP courses, but that brings me to the next issue.

Wikipedia is not really interested in what you know (or me or anyone else). Content has to be verifiable. That means it needs to be referenced. Therefore, I reverted the entirety of the section you created titled "Facility". By the way, "Campus" would have been a much more appropriate title. You cannot use information you know or that you discovered by researching original documents sch as work orders, invoices, plans, etc. That is all called original research and that is not what encyclopedias are for. We cover and summarize what others have written about various subjects, not what a person can dig up about that subject. This brings me to my final point.

I notice your username shows a last name the same as the superintendent of schools for this school district. If you are related to him, that means you have a conflict of interest and you need to be straight up about that. Please post on the article's talk page if that is the case.

I will be happy to discuss any improvements you would like to make to the article with you, but let's please do that on the article's talk page. Happy editing! I am going to leave you a link to a Q&A forum just for new editors where you can go to ask questions about how we do things here at Wikipedia. John from Idegon (talk) 22:25, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dear John,

I am a graduate of Olentangy Liberty. I just wanted to clarify that I am not related to Dr. Lucas. I have just finished my first semester of college and am back home for the summer. I was recently browsing through the wikipedia article for my high school and noticed how much the page was lacking. After hours of searching through web archives, i obtained a header to an article, but the article itself was not archived. The information obtained on the school is from an article published September of 2002 in This Week news papers, a subsidiary of The Columbus Dispatch. After emailing one of the editors, he VPN'd the archives and found the article for me. I have not yet figured out how to cite this article since it was in email format, how would I go about doing that? The information on academics was obtained from an official high school document which I was also going to cite.

Ben — Preceding unsigned comment added by BPaulLucas (talk • contribs) 22:49, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Ben. Glad to make your acquaintance! A few overhead things first. One, when you correspond with other editors via talk page, it is generally a good idea to keep your comments together, so I am taking the liberty of copying my remarks and your remarks over to your talk page. Two, you need to sign communications at talk pages and forums (but not on the articles themselves) by typing four tildes (~~~~) at the end. This automatically adds your username and a timestamp. Last overhead thing---to get an indent in wikiland, you type a colon before the first character in a paragraph, one for each space of indent you want. Spacing forces the markup language to put a box around it, generally rendering it unreadable. We indicate paragraph breaks by inserting a vertical space, in other words, hitting enter.

To cite information from a written source such as books or newspapers, we have specialized templates that we use. I will leave you detailed instructions that are surprisingly easy to follow after this message. Keep in mind that pretty much the only valid content in an academics section is stuff like Newsweek rankings and other notable honors and a brief discussion of AP courses, to consist of just a simple listing of the courses offered. It would be fine to reference that info to the specific page on the school's website where it can be found. Also, please watch your tone when you redo the "Campus" section. Encyclopedias are supposed to be pretty dry, so take care not to use a lot of flowery adjectives and adverbs. Best of luck. Feel free to drop me a note or just answer this on your talk page. I have it on my watchlist. John from Idegon (talk) 23:10, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Ben! Great work on the referencing. I am going to copyedit the campus section. There is really far more detail than needed and there are still some "weasel words". "State of the art" jumped right out at me. Think about it for a second. What information does that phrase actually impart in today's world? What was state of the art when the school was built certainly isn't now. And it will never be a definable quality. We don't use terms like that in encyclopedic writing. Its fine though, cause someone else like me will eventually come along and clean it up. That is the great thing about Wiki. You automatically get on the job training!

Please allow me to make a suggestion. The interior montage you uploaded really cannot be seen in the article unless you take the time to click it and most people won't. Add to that the fact that displaying one picture in that location leads to a whole lot of white space, something that we don't like to have. If you would break the montage back down to individual pictures and upload those, I think the gallery would look much better. I formatted it so it automatically centers and will continue to do so no matter how many pictures you put in the gallery. The other option is to change the picture to a thumbnail and move it to the top of the section. The picture will automatically right justify and the copy will block up against it, removing all that ugly whitespace. Your pictures, so your call. I am going to do some additions to the athletic section today. I think between your additions and my additions it will be enough to raise it up to a start class instead of a stub. Good work! John from Idegon (talk) 18:41, 8 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your help John! The page for my high school is now starting to look so much better! I am very pleased with the tweaked and cleaned up campus section. Although wordy and large, It is important to note how important the design is to how high schools are designed today. I will work on uploading the individual shots of the interior when I have some more time. Thanks again! and good luck in sprucing up the athletics section!

Ben BPaulLucas (talk) 22:00, 8 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to Wikipedia: check out the Teahouse!

Hello! BPaulLucas, you are invited to the Teahouse, a forum on Wikipedia for new editors to ask questions about editing Wikipedia, and get support from peers and experienced editors. Please join us! John from Idegon (talk) 23:11, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Adding references can be easy

Hello! Here's how to add references from reliable sources for the content you add to Wikipedia. This helps maintain the Wikipedia policy of verifiability.

Adding well formatted references is actually quite easy:

While editing any article or a wikipage, on the top of the edit window you will see a toolbar which says "Cite". Click on it.
Then click on "Templates".
Choose the most appropriate template and fill in as many details as you can. This will add a well formatted reference that is helpful in case the web URL (or "website link") becomes inactive in the future.
Click on Preview when you're done filling out the 'Cite (web/news/book/journal)' to make sure that the reference is correct.
Click on Insert to insert the reference into your editing window content.
Click on Show preview to Preview all your editing changes.

Before clicking on Save page, check that a References header ==References== is near the end of the article.
And check that {{Reflist}} is directly underneath that header.

7. Click on Save page. ...and you've just added a complete reference to a Wikipedia article.

You can read more about this on Help:Edit toolbar or see this video File:RefTools.ogv.
Hope this helps, --John from Idegon (talk) 23:11, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To use this message, place {{subst:User:Shearonink/ref}} on User:talk pages when needed.