Hello, DDB9000, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.
Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! I dream of horses If you reply here, please ping me by adding {{U|I dream of horses}} to your message ( talk to me) ( My edits) @ 00:23, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. This is a message letting you know that one or more of your recent edits to The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys has been undone by an automated computer program called ClueBot NG.
Thank you. ClueBot NG ( talk) 02:09, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. Your edits continue to appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Repeated vandalism may result in the loss of editing privileges. Thank you. 122.108.183.105 ( talk) 02:13, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Please stop your
disruptive editing. If you continue to
vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at
Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory, you may be
blocked from editing.
Butter72 (
talk)
02:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
You may be
blocked from editing without further warning the next time you
vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at
When the Eagle Flies.
Butter72 (
talk)
02:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, DDB9000. I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:
Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that should automatically produce your username and the date after your post.
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page, consult Wikipedia:Questions, or place {{ help me}} on your talk page and ask your question there.
Again, welcome! Orville1974 talk 04:36, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
The following response was copied from the Teahouse. This editor has failed to cite sources, but is not vandalizing Wikipedia:
I read very carefully the page on vandalism and I have done nothing of the sort whatsoever.
- All I've ever done here, whether signed in or not has always had to do with improving pages and providing good and helpful info .Now, suddenly that I'm I'm being accused of vandalism(!) for just not knowing exactly the way to do it right. I just want people to have the best facts at hand and use my knowledge to help. Isn't that the idea of Wikipedia?
- Is there a human who can understand what is going on and help me?
- David DDB9000 — Preceding unsigned comment added by DDB9000 (talk|C|TB| • contribs) 12:02 am, Today (UTC−4)
- Hi @DDB9000: Welcome to the teahouse! There are a lot of humans here (of which I am one). Give me a minute to see what's happened. Orville1974talk|C|TB| 12:23 am, Today (UTC−4)
- Hi again @DDB9000: We're all human (well, there are a couple bots, too), and we all make mistakes (in this case thinking your edits constituted vandalism). We really appreciate your contributions to Wikipedia, but the reason your edits keep getting reverted (and sometimes tagged as vandalism) is because you have not cited reliable sources to support the changes you've made. Everything on Wikipedia should be verifiable to third-party sources. This guide will help explain how to include sources with your changes: Help:Referencing for beginners. Thank you! Orville1974talk|C|TB|12:34 am, Today (UTC−4)
From the Teahouse, copied by: Orville1974 talk 04:41, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
DDB9000, I saw your request for help on another user's Talk page, and was curious what the problem was so I took a look. Your edits were not vandalism, but there are several reasons people may have thought they were. First, you are putting complex text in infoboxes. Infoboxes are not intended to convey long explanations, we rely on the text of the article for that. Infoboxes are not intended to have information not in the body of the article. One thing some vandals do is they dink with infoboxes, because people reading the pages often ignore the infobox, so vandalism there can pass unnoticed for longer. What you want to do is first make sure the information is in the body of the article, then add a succinct explanation to the infobox. In this cse, rather than trying to put a detailed explanation of who released an album in what parts of the world in the info box, it is sufficient there to just list the publishers, while in the text you give more precise information about who did what in which countries.
Second, and more importantly, you are misusing the 'minor' edit checkbox. What you are doing may seem 'minor' to you, but the way Wikipedia uses the term, it is not - minor edits are those that do not change the substantive content of an article - such things as fixing a typo, removing a triple space or a double carriage return, adding a missing quotation mark, that kind of thing is a minor edit. Any rewriting of the text, changing the phrasing or adding new information is not minor as Wikipedia defines it. Why this is important is because a lot of people who edit pages use watchlists to alert them when a change is made so they can confirm that the edits improve the page (or at least don't make it worse), and so they can rapidly detect vandalism. Most editors don't want to see typo corrections, so they activate the setting whereby their watchlist ignores edits marked as 'minor'. Because of this vandals will mark their substantive edits as minor edits to slip them in under the radar. As a consequence, someone who marks substantive edits as minor edits is sometimes assumed to be a vandal.
The third thing you are doing is the one that led to a significant escalation - there is a policy WP:BRD, which beats around the bush a little bit, but what is is usually interpreted as meaning is that if you make a change, and another editor reverts that change, you should not attempt to do the same thing again. Instead, you should go to the article's Talk page and explain why you think your edit needs to be done, and discuss it to come to a consensus that is acceptable to everyone who cares to participate. Only then should you again try to make the edit (or whatever you have agreed to). This not only gives others a fuller context for your edits, it demonstrates your good faith. Once you have been accused of vandalism, it becomes all the more important to demonstrate your good faith by taking it to the Talk page rather than repeating the same edits.
And last, you are adding information without a source. Yes I know, the pages you are editing already have a lot of information that is unsourced, but theoretically everything on Wikipedia should be sourced. Another thing that vandals do is add made-up content to pages. Any unsourced content could be made up, so anyone adding unsourced content could be a vandal.
This all snowballs. While editors are supposed to assume good faith, once an accusation of vandalism has been made, all of the things you have been doing wrong start to look more sinister, and it becomes more likely each will also be interpreted as vandalism. That seems to be what has happened here.
What do you do about it? First, stop using the 'minor edit' checkbox altogether. Nobody complains when a minor edit is not marked as one, but when a major edit is marked as minor, that looks like you are trying to hide something. Second, explain the edits you want to make on the Talk page: either do so before you make the edit, or at the same time - this is usually not necessary unless you expect it to be controversial, but once the 'potential vandal' tag gets dropped on you, you need go the extra step to demonstrate your good faith. Third, try to find some sources for what you are adding, and include that in your edit. Finally, it wouldn't hurt to drop a quick note on the Talk pages of the editors who have accused you of vandalism and explain that you didn't realize your edits were a problem, and that you would appreciate help on how best to incorporate the information you want to add to the pages. They may point out something else you did that raised a red flag for them. This will probably not get your information back on the pages, at least not without discussion on the article Talk pages, but it may convince them to again assume good faith. Agricolae ( talk) 04:54, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Let me give you two more hints, this time about Talk pages. First, do not preface lines of text with spaces (this applies to articles as well). This causes them to format incorrectly in off-set boxes, which a lot of people find really annoying. Just start typing. If you want to indent, use a colon - : - at the start of the line, or if you want a bullet point, begin with an asterix - * - but not just a space.
This is what it looks like with a space at the start. Don't do this.
The second thing is that you need to be sure and sign your Talk page contributions with four tildes ~ in a row. You can type them individually, or just underneath the edit window there is a button that will automatically add four at once. This will add the formal 'signature' and timestamp that is used for Talk pages on Wikipedia, and should be added to every Talk page contribution.
Now, regarding what you said on my Talk page . . . .by this way, this is atypical as well, it is usually more straghtforward to carry out a conversation in one place. If someone starts a discussion on your Talk page, respond on Your page. If you start it on their page, then you should watch for a response there rather than pingponging back and forth between the two Talk pages. If several days have passed before you type a response on your page, then use the ping command to send them a notification - @ DDB9000: (look at the code I typed to see how to do this), but don't overdo pinging - if they are obviously monitoring your Talk page, there is no need to ping them every time you respond.
That all being said . . . re the infobox, on The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, you added "Island (worldwide except as noted)/Polydor (Canada)". That is the kind of thing that a) needs to be in the body of the article if it is going to be in the infobox, and b) is just too many words for an infobox. I would suggest just putting "Island/Polydor" in the infobox, and explain in the body that Island did it worldwide while it was Polydor in Canada. It may even be decided (once it gets hashed out on Talk) that since the infoboxes are intended to give the 'big picture', one country being different is not noteworthy there. Adding it just to the infobox is a red flag - I am not saying it is vandalism, but adding material just to the infobox is the kind of thing vandals do. Same with the minor edit tag - what you did, making a substantive edit to an infobox that was tagged as minor, wasn't vandalism but it was flagged as potential vandalism by the ClueBot, which as the name implies is a bot not a human, and once it identified your text as the kind of thing that is often vandalism, that started the process of human editors who might otherwise give you the benefit of the doubt deciding that you were probably a vandal. Again, the same thing with the restoring of reverted content - you may have done it because you thought you had made some mistake the first time, but it was perceived as belligerent flouting of WP:BRD and this fed into the growing erroneous narrative that you were a vandal.
Regarding the fact that you were adding unreferenced material to pages that were almost entirely unreferenced, yeah, I know. Stinks, doesn't it. Life isn't fair, but any contribution can theoretically be reverted if it isn't referenced, even if the entire remainder of the page also isn't referenced. Most editors take a different approach, allowing unreferenced material, with the expectation that the referencing will be added at some point in the future, but this technically violates policy and can result in pages drowning in unreferenced content.
I am not sure what is happening with the reCaptchas you mention. I opened up a few of the relevant User Talk pages, and none of them were requiring reCaptchas to edit - I only see this when I have accidentally logged out. Maybe it is something newly registered users see, but I won't be able to comment on that. The overall takehome here is that nothing you did was particularly bad, it is just that the cumulative effect of the different things you were doing led to a false conclusion that you might be a vandal, and once you got called a vandal the first time, it caused other editors to treat you like a vandal as well. New editors can sometimes have a Sisyphean experience trying to climb Wikipedia's steep learning curve. Agricolae ( talk) 11:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
But short of my rummaging through all the physical papers from the UK music media in 1974, how do I prove this? As such, I would not add this info to the Wikipedia page.Right, unfortunately. Unless it can be verified by someone else, it cannot be included. Believe it or not, every day, people attempt to add things that are wrong to Wikipedia, sometimes even intentionally. This necessitates the policy of verifiability, and bots like ClueBot (the shear volume of edits requires some automated assistance to review). Otherwise, this just becomes another useless collection of gibberish. If you can find the physical newspaper article, great – add the fact and cite it – citations to offline sources are necessary when no online source can be found. Otherwise, the article will just have to be without this particular bit of information. "Quality, not quantity".
![]() |
Hi DDB9000! You created a thread called Archival by
Lowercase sigmabot III, notification delivery by
Muninnbot, both
automated accounts. You can opt out of future notifications by placing
|
Hello, DDB9000, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.
Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! I dream of horses If you reply here, please ping me by adding {{U|I dream of horses}} to your message ( talk to me) ( My edits) @ 00:23, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. This is a message letting you know that one or more of your recent edits to The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys has been undone by an automated computer program called ClueBot NG.
Thank you. ClueBot NG ( talk) 02:09, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. Your edits continue to appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Repeated vandalism may result in the loss of editing privileges. Thank you. 122.108.183.105 ( talk) 02:13, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Please stop your
disruptive editing. If you continue to
vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at
Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory, you may be
blocked from editing.
Butter72 (
talk)
02:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
You may be
blocked from editing without further warning the next time you
vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at
When the Eagle Flies.
Butter72 (
talk)
02:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, DDB9000. I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:
Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that should automatically produce your username and the date after your post.
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page, consult Wikipedia:Questions, or place {{ help me}} on your talk page and ask your question there.
Again, welcome! Orville1974 talk 04:36, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
The following response was copied from the Teahouse. This editor has failed to cite sources, but is not vandalizing Wikipedia:
I read very carefully the page on vandalism and I have done nothing of the sort whatsoever.
- All I've ever done here, whether signed in or not has always had to do with improving pages and providing good and helpful info .Now, suddenly that I'm I'm being accused of vandalism(!) for just not knowing exactly the way to do it right. I just want people to have the best facts at hand and use my knowledge to help. Isn't that the idea of Wikipedia?
- Is there a human who can understand what is going on and help me?
- David DDB9000 — Preceding unsigned comment added by DDB9000 (talk|C|TB| • contribs) 12:02 am, Today (UTC−4)
- Hi @DDB9000: Welcome to the teahouse! There are a lot of humans here (of which I am one). Give me a minute to see what's happened. Orville1974talk|C|TB| 12:23 am, Today (UTC−4)
- Hi again @DDB9000: We're all human (well, there are a couple bots, too), and we all make mistakes (in this case thinking your edits constituted vandalism). We really appreciate your contributions to Wikipedia, but the reason your edits keep getting reverted (and sometimes tagged as vandalism) is because you have not cited reliable sources to support the changes you've made. Everything on Wikipedia should be verifiable to third-party sources. This guide will help explain how to include sources with your changes: Help:Referencing for beginners. Thank you! Orville1974talk|C|TB|12:34 am, Today (UTC−4)
From the Teahouse, copied by: Orville1974 talk 04:41, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
DDB9000, I saw your request for help on another user's Talk page, and was curious what the problem was so I took a look. Your edits were not vandalism, but there are several reasons people may have thought they were. First, you are putting complex text in infoboxes. Infoboxes are not intended to convey long explanations, we rely on the text of the article for that. Infoboxes are not intended to have information not in the body of the article. One thing some vandals do is they dink with infoboxes, because people reading the pages often ignore the infobox, so vandalism there can pass unnoticed for longer. What you want to do is first make sure the information is in the body of the article, then add a succinct explanation to the infobox. In this cse, rather than trying to put a detailed explanation of who released an album in what parts of the world in the info box, it is sufficient there to just list the publishers, while in the text you give more precise information about who did what in which countries.
Second, and more importantly, you are misusing the 'minor' edit checkbox. What you are doing may seem 'minor' to you, but the way Wikipedia uses the term, it is not - minor edits are those that do not change the substantive content of an article - such things as fixing a typo, removing a triple space or a double carriage return, adding a missing quotation mark, that kind of thing is a minor edit. Any rewriting of the text, changing the phrasing or adding new information is not minor as Wikipedia defines it. Why this is important is because a lot of people who edit pages use watchlists to alert them when a change is made so they can confirm that the edits improve the page (or at least don't make it worse), and so they can rapidly detect vandalism. Most editors don't want to see typo corrections, so they activate the setting whereby their watchlist ignores edits marked as 'minor'. Because of this vandals will mark their substantive edits as minor edits to slip them in under the radar. As a consequence, someone who marks substantive edits as minor edits is sometimes assumed to be a vandal.
The third thing you are doing is the one that led to a significant escalation - there is a policy WP:BRD, which beats around the bush a little bit, but what is is usually interpreted as meaning is that if you make a change, and another editor reverts that change, you should not attempt to do the same thing again. Instead, you should go to the article's Talk page and explain why you think your edit needs to be done, and discuss it to come to a consensus that is acceptable to everyone who cares to participate. Only then should you again try to make the edit (or whatever you have agreed to). This not only gives others a fuller context for your edits, it demonstrates your good faith. Once you have been accused of vandalism, it becomes all the more important to demonstrate your good faith by taking it to the Talk page rather than repeating the same edits.
And last, you are adding information without a source. Yes I know, the pages you are editing already have a lot of information that is unsourced, but theoretically everything on Wikipedia should be sourced. Another thing that vandals do is add made-up content to pages. Any unsourced content could be made up, so anyone adding unsourced content could be a vandal.
This all snowballs. While editors are supposed to assume good faith, once an accusation of vandalism has been made, all of the things you have been doing wrong start to look more sinister, and it becomes more likely each will also be interpreted as vandalism. That seems to be what has happened here.
What do you do about it? First, stop using the 'minor edit' checkbox altogether. Nobody complains when a minor edit is not marked as one, but when a major edit is marked as minor, that looks like you are trying to hide something. Second, explain the edits you want to make on the Talk page: either do so before you make the edit, or at the same time - this is usually not necessary unless you expect it to be controversial, but once the 'potential vandal' tag gets dropped on you, you need go the extra step to demonstrate your good faith. Third, try to find some sources for what you are adding, and include that in your edit. Finally, it wouldn't hurt to drop a quick note on the Talk pages of the editors who have accused you of vandalism and explain that you didn't realize your edits were a problem, and that you would appreciate help on how best to incorporate the information you want to add to the pages. They may point out something else you did that raised a red flag for them. This will probably not get your information back on the pages, at least not without discussion on the article Talk pages, but it may convince them to again assume good faith. Agricolae ( talk) 04:54, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Let me give you two more hints, this time about Talk pages. First, do not preface lines of text with spaces (this applies to articles as well). This causes them to format incorrectly in off-set boxes, which a lot of people find really annoying. Just start typing. If you want to indent, use a colon - : - at the start of the line, or if you want a bullet point, begin with an asterix - * - but not just a space.
This is what it looks like with a space at the start. Don't do this.
The second thing is that you need to be sure and sign your Talk page contributions with four tildes ~ in a row. You can type them individually, or just underneath the edit window there is a button that will automatically add four at once. This will add the formal 'signature' and timestamp that is used for Talk pages on Wikipedia, and should be added to every Talk page contribution.
Now, regarding what you said on my Talk page . . . .by this way, this is atypical as well, it is usually more straghtforward to carry out a conversation in one place. If someone starts a discussion on your Talk page, respond on Your page. If you start it on their page, then you should watch for a response there rather than pingponging back and forth between the two Talk pages. If several days have passed before you type a response on your page, then use the ping command to send them a notification - @ DDB9000: (look at the code I typed to see how to do this), but don't overdo pinging - if they are obviously monitoring your Talk page, there is no need to ping them every time you respond.
That all being said . . . re the infobox, on The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, you added "Island (worldwide except as noted)/Polydor (Canada)". That is the kind of thing that a) needs to be in the body of the article if it is going to be in the infobox, and b) is just too many words for an infobox. I would suggest just putting "Island/Polydor" in the infobox, and explain in the body that Island did it worldwide while it was Polydor in Canada. It may even be decided (once it gets hashed out on Talk) that since the infoboxes are intended to give the 'big picture', one country being different is not noteworthy there. Adding it just to the infobox is a red flag - I am not saying it is vandalism, but adding material just to the infobox is the kind of thing vandals do. Same with the minor edit tag - what you did, making a substantive edit to an infobox that was tagged as minor, wasn't vandalism but it was flagged as potential vandalism by the ClueBot, which as the name implies is a bot not a human, and once it identified your text as the kind of thing that is often vandalism, that started the process of human editors who might otherwise give you the benefit of the doubt deciding that you were probably a vandal. Again, the same thing with the restoring of reverted content - you may have done it because you thought you had made some mistake the first time, but it was perceived as belligerent flouting of WP:BRD and this fed into the growing erroneous narrative that you were a vandal.
Regarding the fact that you were adding unreferenced material to pages that were almost entirely unreferenced, yeah, I know. Stinks, doesn't it. Life isn't fair, but any contribution can theoretically be reverted if it isn't referenced, even if the entire remainder of the page also isn't referenced. Most editors take a different approach, allowing unreferenced material, with the expectation that the referencing will be added at some point in the future, but this technically violates policy and can result in pages drowning in unreferenced content.
I am not sure what is happening with the reCaptchas you mention. I opened up a few of the relevant User Talk pages, and none of them were requiring reCaptchas to edit - I only see this when I have accidentally logged out. Maybe it is something newly registered users see, but I won't be able to comment on that. The overall takehome here is that nothing you did was particularly bad, it is just that the cumulative effect of the different things you were doing led to a false conclusion that you might be a vandal, and once you got called a vandal the first time, it caused other editors to treat you like a vandal as well. New editors can sometimes have a Sisyphean experience trying to climb Wikipedia's steep learning curve. Agricolae ( talk) 11:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
But short of my rummaging through all the physical papers from the UK music media in 1974, how do I prove this? As such, I would not add this info to the Wikipedia page.Right, unfortunately. Unless it can be verified by someone else, it cannot be included. Believe it or not, every day, people attempt to add things that are wrong to Wikipedia, sometimes even intentionally. This necessitates the policy of verifiability, and bots like ClueBot (the shear volume of edits requires some automated assistance to review). Otherwise, this just becomes another useless collection of gibberish. If you can find the physical newspaper article, great – add the fact and cite it – citations to offline sources are necessary when no online source can be found. Otherwise, the article will just have to be without this particular bit of information. "Quality, not quantity".
![]() |
Hi DDB9000! You created a thread called Archival by
Lowercase sigmabot III, notification delivery by
Muninnbot, both
automated accounts. You can opt out of future notifications by placing
|