User talk:Lawolters

Welcome!

Hello, Lawolters, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created, such as Arbella Insurance Group, may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines, and may soon be deleted.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Questions or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! —Tom Morris (talk) 07:45, 20 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed deletion of Arbella Insurance Group

The article Arbella Insurance Group has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Non-notable regional insurance company in the USA; fails WP:GNG and WP:ORG. Only passing mentions in sources.

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. —Tom Morris (talk) 07:45, 20 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Some tips to help you out!

Hi Lawolters, I thought I'd drop a few notes on your talk page with some help on writing articles :o)

First of all, it may be best for you to do a bit of reading, starting with the Wikipedia manual of style, which will give you a lot of information about how Wikipedia prefers its articles to be written. It's not as hard to follow as it might look; quite a bit of the information there probably won't be vital for you at first.

Second, I recommend you make a user sandbox - which is just an area you can use to practise in, and to make notes in, and to get things ready in. If you click this red link: user:Lawolters/Sandbox, that will let you create that page (it gives you an edit window to start work in). Anything, anywhere, on the help and information pages which gives you an example, try it out in your sandbox until you're familiar with it.

For your article, the next thing you want to do is start collecting as much information as you can about it. Google searches (particularly in Books and Scholar) will be your best friend for this! Once you've found the information, the next most important thing is to start writing up each fact in your own words (very important, this), and make a note at the same time of exactly where that information came from. Build in the references as you go along; I'm going to copy in, down below this, a whole heap of help on doing references, which was produced by one of our best teachers (Chzz).

Here's another place that you'll find incredibly useful - citation templates which you can copy and paste into your sandbox, between <ref></ref> tags; you just fill in the blanks from your sources into the template, and you'll end up with nicely formatted inline citations :o) It all helps. Remember to add a references section to your sandbox (make a new line, and put ==References== on it, and type {{reflist}} on the next line, so that you can see how your citations look as you do them. Remember to save your page often! You don't want to lose your work.

Hopefully this will give you a good start and make life easier for you.

One last thing to keep as a motto: "It's better to write one good, well-referenced, nicely-presented article than it is to create fifty unreferenced one-line stubs!" Pesky (talk …stalk!) 08:39, 20 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How references work

Simple references

These require two parts;

a)

Chzz is 98 years old.<ref> "The book of Chzz", Aardvark Books, 2009. </ref>

He likes tea. <ref> [http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com Tea website] </ref>

b) A section called "References" with the special code "{{reflist}}";

== References ==
{{reflist}}

(an existing article is likely to already have one of these sections)

To see the result of that, please look at user:chzz/demo/simpleref. Edit it, and check the code; perhaps make a test page of your own, such as user:Lawolters/reftest and try it out.

Named references

Chzz was born in 1837. <ref name=MyBook>
"The book of Chzz", Aardvark Books, 2009. 
</ref> 

Chzz lives in Footown.<ref name=MyBook/>

Note that the second usage has a / (and no closing ref tag). This needs a reference section as above; please see user:chzz/demo/namedref to see the result.

Citation templates

You can put anything you like between <ref> and </ref>, but using citation templates makes for a neat, consistent look;

Chzz has 37 Olympic medals. <ref> {{Citation
 | last = Smith
 | first = John
 | title = Olympic medal winners of the 20th century
 | publication-date = 2001
 | publisher = [[Cambridge University Press]]
 | page = 125
 | isbn = 0-521-37169-4
}}
</ref>

Please see user:chzz/demo/citeref to see the result.

For more help and tips on that subject, see user:chzz/help/refs.

Something to make your life easier!

Hi there Lawolters! I've just come across one of your articles, and noticed that you had to create titles for your url links manually, or were using bare urls as references.

You might want to consider using this tool - it makes your life a whole heap easier, by filling in complete citation templates for your links. All you do is install the script on Special:MyPage/common.js, or or Special:MyPage/vector.js, then paste the bare url (without [...] brackets) between your <ref></ref> tabs, and you'll find a clickable link called Reflinks in your toolbox section of the page (probably in the left hand column). Then click that tool. It does all the rest of the work (provided that you remember to save the page! It doesn't work for everything (particularly often not for pdf documents), but for pretty much anything ending in "htm" or "html" (and with a title) it will do really, really well. Happy editing! Pesky (talk …stalk!) 08:39, 20 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Your submission at Articles for creation

Arbella Insurance Group, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.

The article has been assessed as C-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.
You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. Note that because you are a logged-in user, you can create articles yourself, and don't have to post a request. However, you are more than welcome to continue submitting work to Articles for Creation.
If you have any questions, you are welcome to ask at the Help desk or on the reviewer's talk page
If you would like to help us improve this process, please consider leaving us some feedback.

Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia!

Kevin Rutherford (talk) 03:04, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]