User talk:Garygagliardi

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent contributions seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes. Wikipedia does not allow advertising in articles. For more information on this, see

If you still have questions, there is a new contributor's help page, or you can write {{helpme}} below this message along with a question and someone will be along to answer it shortly. You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! -- SiobhanHansa 12:18, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a mere directory of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam policy for further explanations. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you. -- SiobhanHansa 17:38, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding changes

Hi Gary. Thank you for leaving a message on my talk page. I do not mean to discourage you from contributing to the encyclopaedia.

Your expertise would be very welcome and I hope you will stick around and use it to benefit the project. You are correct that other editors can simply reverse your edits, improving an article will sometimes require significant discussion and cooperation on the talk page. It's in the nature of editing here and it would be disingenuous to suggest it wasn't.

You point out that "war" is a controversial subject and seem to imply (and I apologize if I'm reading too much into this, I'm trying to answer what I believe to be your real concern) that this will lead to people deleting your additions regardless of their validity. I can't deny that hot button issues are sometimes a problem on Wikipedia, and it can take time and patience to get past "activist" editing. However there doesn't seem to be much of that sort of activity around the Art of War article so I think, especially if you explain the context on the talk page, you will probably not suffer too much from that specifically. More likely you will have to explain the current state of expert consensus to people who have only read popular but low quality articles or fringe theories. This requires discussion - some of it tedious - on the talk page, laying out who the experts are, where they publish, how they're recognized and what they say.

Most editors, and particularly our administrators are committed to Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy which requires us to attempt to cover with appropriate weight all significant points of view of experts in the field. That's not all points of view, or all published points of view, it's specifically about the views of experts. And with a subject like this what we mainly mean is academic experts - so your expertise and particularly your familiarity with the academic research would be a great asset to ensuring that coverage in the article. And though it might take effort and patience, there is support available to help with articles where some editors are ignoring our standards. I believe that despite the difficulties inherent in a large open editing project, we can get good articles when experts and other editors try to work together and are prepared to adhere to our guidelines on neutral point of view (which means also fairly documenting those opinions you don't share, but know to be significant in the expert community) and verification.

I also believe that experts who do this have a profound impact on the other editors they work with and on the general public who read the articles, which can be very rewarding for everyone involved. So I would really like to encourage you to try your hand at editing.

If you would like to improve the article I suggest getting involved with a WikiProject. WikiProjects are self organizing groups of editors who share a common interest. They can make for a collegial environment on Wikipedia and are a great source of support as well as advice on how to handle things here. There are three that cover The Art of War, WikiProject China, WikiProject Military History and WikiProject Books. You would probably only want to sign up to one - read the project pages to see which feels like the best fit for you or post an introduction to all three and see which one you get the best response from.

If this isn't appealing to you that's fine. Not everyone enjoys editing here. However it's not acceptable to simply point to your own works in lieu of developing content on Wikipedia. We are specifically about building a GFDL encyclopedia, we are not simply a springboard to other resources.

To answer a couple of specific questions you posed -

It was me that reverted the ISBN number change, it was a mistake and I will change it back. Thank you for pointing it out. Such edits are always welcome.

We do not limit our external links to "amateur" sites (though I can see why you might get that impression with the current proliferation of translation links in the Art of War article - we have some work to do there), but we do not allow for fee services, or links to pages that are too focused on selling or that have a high proportion of advertising to content (especially when there are noncommercial alternatives). This does not normally pose significant issues. For most subjects there are a number of resources that easily fall within our guidelines and our difficulty is in choosing between them since our external links section is not intended to be a portal to all things related to a subject. Also the lack of an external links section is not considered to be particularly bad for an article.

We have guidelines for external links that go into detail on what resources are generally appropriate. In this case the links you added were inappropriate for a few reasons: 1) Conflict of interest - you added them yourself, we ask editors to suggest links to their own sites on the talk page and let other editors decide if they are appropriate or not for the article. 2) Registration - the strategy school site requires registration, and this is necessary for both the 1 day trial and the free e-book, our guidelines ask us to avoid sites requiring registration. 3) Commercialism/advertising - the one day free trial for the strategy school is a clear advertisement for a for-fee service, and one of limited use to readers who do not pay to continue. The http://www.suntzus.com link seems to be mainly about providing information to users on the products you sell - there is little information on The Art of War itself that is easily available for free, this is a judgment and other editors might think differently - you could propose the link on the talk page of the Art of War article if you'd like other editors to consider adding it.

Sorry to have gone on at such length. I hope the detail I've provided is helpful and provides better context for why I reverted your edits and for how you can contribute to the project. If you have other questions - about my actions or how to participate - please leave a note here or on my talk page. Thanks. -- SiobhanHansa 13:50, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]