User talk:Wikid77

Welcome to Pensapedia! I have some questions/suggestions about a few of the contributions you've made so far:

• What is the purpose of the "W:" namespace? Are you trying to link to the Wikipedia article? If so, you can make an interwiki link by placing "wikipedia:" before the name of the article, then stripping the namespace by adding a pipe at the end. For example, [[wikipedia:public domain|]] becomes public domain.
• If you want to make a local (non-Wikipedia) page with helpful information, there are two existing namespaces available — "Pensapedia:" and "Help:" — that should be used for that purpose.
• Pensapedia is not meant to duplicate Wikipedia; we have a smaller and more focused scope. While the area no doubt has a connection to Cuba, it is not a connection that demands such a lengthy and generalized article. In this case, it would be great to have research on historic shipping routes between Pensacola and Cuba, or a list of prominent Pensacolians who are natives of Cuba. In lieu of that, however, I think an interwiki link to Cuba would be sufficient.
• While many articles on the site have been copied from their Wikipedia counterparts, the ultimate goal is to rewrite them eventually to better reflect the focus of Pensapedia. To that end, please include the template {{wikipedia}} at the top of each such page; this will add them to Category:Copied from Wikipedia to let other users know which articles need to be rewritten.

Hopefully these suggestions will help clear up some uncertainty about the nature of this project that I haven't had a chance to address properly in the Help section. Thanks for your participation! --Admin 10:24, 29 March 2007 (CDT)

Suggestions

Welcome back! I'm glad to see your continued participation, but I think your contributions are leaning too heavily on Wikipedia. Specifically, I think the Pensacola overview may be unnecessary: the full Wikipedia text is too verbose and awkward, and I'm not sure what the purpose of an "overview" page would be.

Our main goal is to create articles that have their own unique voice and perspective. While existing Wikipedia articles provide a great starting point for in-depth topics that require copious research, we should try to do more than just copy-paste entire articles. If you want to see a couple examples of pages that have used their Wikipedia counterparts as starting points, see Kent Hovind (Wikipedia version) and Pensacola Beach, Florida (Wikipedia version). As you can see, large chunks of the Wikipedia article have been removed entirely, and many of the links that aren't relevant to our purposes have been converted to text only.

I know that it's hard to anticipate what we're looking for, since we haven't taken the time to write thorough guidelines, but I hope this will help. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Thanks! --Admin 17:46, 29 July 2007 (CDT)

29-July-20007: OK, sorry, I was trying to expand the detailed coverage, as preferred by several Wikipedia users who consider Pensapedia as meager, but I see that's not what's happening here, as I considered "Pensacola overview" as still too limited, not too long. My God, it's the subject of the whole wiki, comprendo? (Hello? Do you see what the whole outside world would expect of Pensapedia?) Anyway, I will focus my efforts on Wikipedia Pensacola articles instead: feel free to delete article "Pensacola overview" and thanks for contacting me before I had expanded/illustrated dozens of articles. Better keep a prepared, canned message to warn others not to formalize/illustrate articles here. Wikipedia has many more people to cover the formalized view of Pensacola. Thanks again for the clarification. Bye. -Wikid77 18:20, 29 July 2007 (CDT)

Sorry about the confusion. I guess what I meant was, if we were ever going to have an article called Pensacola overview, it would likely be very different than a verbatim copy of the Pensacola article at Wikipedia. As far as "what the whole outside world would expect" to read, I think the Wikipedia is much more appropriate for that kind of audience. Our scope here is much more local and probably wouldn't be of much interest to anyone who doesn't live here or have other personal connections. --Admin 18:35, 29 July 2007 (CDT)