Welcome!
Hello, Millerowski, 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!
Hi there. You asked on the Wikipedia:New contributors' help page for assistance with this article, so I'm going to try to point you in the right direction. The two main issues you need to worry about with an article are content and style. Poor content can get an article deleted and so it's the first thing to deal with, whereas poor style just means the article gets a lot of tags on it telling you to clean it up.
The first thing you need to look at is whether your article will be speedily deleted, and I would say that it's safe from that since there are clear claims of notability. However, taking a quick look through the article there are still some problems:
There are probably other content issues, but these are the main ones I saw from a quick look through the article.
Like I said, style comes second to content, but obviously if you dream of turning this into a good or even featured article, then style becomes a big concern. The main guide for this is the Manual of Style, but that's pretty daunting to begin with. I think to start with these are what you should look at:
I hope that these links, along with the welcome template above, will help you. If there is anything you don't understand, please feel free to ask at my talk page (click on the "Say hi!" link in my signature, then click on the tab up the top that says "new section"). Good luck, Confusing Manifestation( Say hi!) 05:55, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi again. I'll start by saying that the article looks a lot better now - I certainly wouldn't put it up for deletion. I agree that a photo is almost always an essential part of an article, but to actually get it there is one of the hardest things you can do. The reason it's so hard is because of copyright law and the Wikipedia license - the GFDL. The basic problem is that since Wikipedia content is supposed to be freely usable and copyable by anyone, we can't put a photo up unless it can be freely copied as well. I will try to cover the basics of getting an image up here.
For pictures that are in the public domain (e.g. ones made by the US Government, or that are very old) or have been released under a copyleft licence, like the GFDL or Creative Commons, you can upload them to Wikimedia Commons. Since you are not the photographer, you would have to convince him to release the photo under such a license, preferably something like CC-BY-SA. This is actually probably the hardest bit, because this license means that:
And all of this without paying for it - you can see why most photographers are generally unwilling to go with this. However, it may help to point out that the license also means that anyone doing the above must:
If you can get the photographer to agree to this, then you can do the following to get the photo into the article:
The photo will now be on Commons, and will credit the photographer there. You will then be able to use that photo on Wikipedia - or, in fact, on any Wikimedia project. An explanation of how to do that is in the Wikipedia:Picture tutorial, but if you get the picture on Commons and can't follow that tutorial, I'll be happy to help again.
It is possible to upload images directly to Wikipedia, which is what you have to do if they aren't freely licensed. However, you then have to go through the issues of writing a fair use rationale (basically, a statement of why using the picture is believed to comply with the "fair use" clause in the US copyright laws), and you can only do it if the image is "not replaceable" - i.e. it is not possible to obtain a freely-licensed equivalent. In the case of living people, photos are always considered "replaceable" since, in theory, someone could go and take another photo and give it a free license, so you can't do that for Alberto.
I hope you have success in talking with the photographer. Confusing Manifestation( Say hi!) 14:23, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Not to fear - the only error you made is that the text you put in the first part of the image link must be the exact title of the image page - in this case, the image is at commons:Image:Alberto Blanco by DB.jpg, and so the code needed is [[Image:Alberto Blanco by DB.jpg]]. I have made the necessary change for you, and you should now have the photo on the article. If you look at the "diff" [1] of my edit, you can see how it works. I hope this helps! Confusing Manifestation( Say hi!) 06:47, 28 May 2008 (UTC)