User talk:Pspicerwensley
Welcome
[edit]Hello, welcome to Wikipedia.
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Again, welcome! - UtherSRG 13:55, 18 May 2004 (UTC)
Hello Peter,
There's really very little hard and fast rules about what sections should and shouldn't be present in an article. Generally in longer articles you normally see a "History", "References", and "External links" sections, but the rest are dependant upon content. Generally when I'm trying to determine what should be present in an article and what should be omitted, I find it usually helps to remember that articles here should resemble what you would find in a normal encyclopedia; in other words, the article should have enough information to give a non-knowledgeable reader a good overview of the topic, but not too much to bog it down. The article should serve as a "launching point" for the reader - to sum up the highlights and provide links/pointers to more extensive resources for the reader to follow should he/she be interested.
What tends to happen with a lot of articles is "information creep" - too much information is added, and the article begins to resemble not an encyclopedia entry, but an instruction manual. This is of course not done intentionally - editors with the best of intentions often are merely trying to be more informative. Again, while WP is not limited in size and can be more thorough than a traditional encyclopedia, it still isn't meant to be an exhaustive resource for each topic.
Both the Joomla! and TikiWiki articles aren't bad articles to reference. They both, for the most part, seem to be fairly neutral and concise. They are not perfect though - the Documentation section of TikiWiki could probably just be condensed to a single external link for readers to follow, and the entire Major components section really ought to be condensed. Joomla!, on the other hand, is much better - it doesn't go into extensive detail, and leads the reader to other resources for further info. The Release History section should probably go though. I'd say if you use Joomla! as a reference, PhpWebSite would come out looking pretty good.
As far as writing from a NPOV goes, there's a pretty good (if not long) guideline here. There's plenty of other guides available too in the Help category that can help you write a great article.
As a side note, I recommend you remove your full name and e-mail addresses from the PhpWebSite article's Talk page for your own privacy sake. The information is available to everyone, so you may get unwanted contact if you post personal info here. You can always enable the "E-mail this user" feature in "my preferences" to allow users to e-mail you without them knowing your e-mail address. I'll remove your personal info from my own talk page.
I hope this info is of use to you. Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance! --AbsolutDan (talk) 13:29, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
P.S. it's a good idea to always sign your posts by adding 1 or 2 dashes followe by 4 tildas at the end like this: --~~~~
--AbsolutDan (talk) 13:41, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
- Those proposed edits sounds like a good start to me. Another good resource you may wish to check out is the featured articles (see Wikipedia:Featured articles. Featured articles are those deemed best by the Wikipedia community, so are great examples of tone, style, POV, etc. Enjoy! --AbsolutDan (talk) 15:05, 24 April 2006 (UTC)