User talk:Missswiss

Your edit to Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and why I reverted it

Thank you for your well-written note on my talk page. I am happy to explain why I reverted your edit to the page and why it was reverted again by another editor. For starters it was completely unsourced. There is a certain tolerance level for unsourced edits if they are obviously true or at least believable. Yours, however, sounds more like rumor. Worse, it was highly inflammatory. This is an encyclopedia, and if you are going to be adding highly inflammatory, derogatory writing to an article it absolutely must be sourced and there needs to be a clear reason for its existence.

However, by -far- the most important reason for the revert to your edit is that the article is not about Billy Joel. The article is about the town of Cold Spring Harbor. There is clearly no reason to include a massive trivia item about Billy Joel in an article about the town of Cold Spring Harbor -- even bearing in mind the name of Joel's first album. The bar you reference -- Finnegan's -- isn't even IN Cold Spring Harbor! It is in the nearby town of Huntington. I know this because I grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, of course :).

Regardless, I hope this clears things up. I appreciate and believe that you really were trying to improve the article, so I'm going to assume good faith and remove the warning from your talk page. For future reference, the "your test worked" language is a standard level 1 warning. As part of the editorial policy of assuming good faith in all matters on Wikipedia, any potentially malicious edit is assumed to have been a "test" at first. It is clear that you weren't attempting to test your Wikipedia editing skills so unfortunately in this case the template wasn't entirely appropriate.

Anyway, I hope this hasn't dissuaded you from attempting to contribute in the future! You're well-spoken and a good writer. You could certainly contribute in meaningful ways here. Thanks! Ginsengbomb 04:48, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Hello again! Your latest edit to the Cold Spring Harbor page is another example of the problem. While it is certainly trivia that is relevant to Cold Spring Harbor that Billy Joel's first album was named after the town, it is clearly -not- relevant that Billy Joel grew up in Hicksville. Like your previous edits which I discuss above, that would be a more appropriate thing to indicate in the Billy Joel article, assuming it is not already there. I do, however, appreciate your effort to correct the erroneous mention that Billy Joel grew up in Levittown. Feel free to contact me again if this isn't clear. Thanks! Ginsengbomb 04:52, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

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