User talk:Comsign

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!

The best way to contribute is to write about what you know. Read articles about topics that interest you, and you'll find places where you can contribute. This is far more valuable than links to external websites. We try to keep links to external sites to a minimum, and linked sites generally need to have valuable content that cannot be incorporated into the Wikipedia article, and little or no advertising or commercial activity.--Srleffler 00:27, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OADM

Hi, Srleffler. I have some concepts or terminology explaintations for some terms like OADM and OXC on my own site. For example for OADM, I have copied and pasted those explainations from my site to wiki OADM page, which was a "stub" page before. However, I just wonder how I can refer to my original sources and there would be any copyright issues if I copy my own materials to Wiki.(Comsign 15:42, 5 August 2006 (UTC))

I moved the article to Optical add-drop multiplexer, because wikipedia article titles are not supposed to be abbreviations. OADM now automatically redirects readers to the new title. I don't have time to go over the article in detail right now, so I added the {{wikify}} tag. This puts a notice at the top to ask that someone go through the article and make links, etc. Someone (maybe me) will come along and do this later, or you can start doing it yourself. It's OK to copy and paste from your own website, as long as you wrote the material yourself and own all the copyrights to it, and you don't mind releasing the material to the public under the GFDL license, so that anyone can use it. There might be some procedure to inform other editors that the copy/pasted text is not a copyright violation because you have the rights to it; I'm not sure.

Keep in mind when copying material, that we're writing an encyclopedia here. Material on your website might not have the correct style or be written for the same audience as an encyclopedia's. For example, the article should not assume that the reader knows what WDM is, or that it is used for telecommunications. We have to provide links to articles like wavelength-division multiplexing, and spell out in the OADM article that this is a telecommunications technology.

You might want to take a look at add-drop multiplexer. Are these similar technologies, or two names for the same thing? Perhaps the articles could be merged into one, or perhaps they need to refer more directly to each other.--Srleffler 17:41, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For providing references to original sources, see WP:CITE for instructions. There are a set of templates listed at Wikipedia:Citation templates for automatically formatting references to books, journal articles, websites, etc. Wikipedia can produce automatically-numbered footnotes. The instructions for that are at Help:Footnotes. If you copy text you wrote from your website to here, you probably should not cite that as a reference, since technically you are not referring to an external source—the source is you. Generally wikipedia articles need references to sources other than the author who contributes the material (see WP:NOR for an explanation of this).--Srleffler 17:52, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Another thought: Your account allows you to create a user page, which is a place where you can tell other Wikipedians a bit about yourself. You could mention your website there, and provide a link. That would also serve to let other editors know that you have the right to copy material from there.--Srleffler 20:14, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, as you may have noticed Wikipedia's coverage of telecommunications is pretty poor, and this is especially true of optical communications. There are major holes where new articles are needed, and many articles are poorly written and do not coordinate well with each other. Many also use way too much jargon. An additional issue is that several years ago a public-domain telecomm glossary was imported, so there are many, many poorly-organized and oddly-formatted stub articles that do little more than define a single telecomm term. There is a lot of work to be done in the telecomm area. This will be a long-term project, requiring attention from many editors to fix.--Srleffler 05:06, 7 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I assume that by "fiber grating" you mean a fiber Bragg grating? I made the redirect. I also redirected optical circulator to circulator for now. The final form might have separate articles for each, but for now perhaps one article that explains both and distinguishes between them will do.--Srleffler 00:35, 8 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

References

I changed the format of the reference to your website at Optical add-drop multiplexer, and removed the one at Optical cross-connect. My reasoning is that in the former case you contributed a significant amount of text that you have previously published there, and it is appropriate to acknowledge the source. I added a hidden comment and a note on the talk page to warn other editors that this is not a copyright violation, because you are the author and copyright owner. In the case of Optical cross-connect, though, the article does not appear to contain any text taken from your site, nor does your site seem to have been used as a reference in writing the article. Additionally, your site generally does not meet Wikipedia's requirements for external linking. There is a difficult balance here. Generally, you should not cite yourself as a reference, because of the policy on original research. There is a difference between a reference notice to acknowledge the source of directly-copied material, and a citation, which attempts to use your site as an authority to back up a claim. Let me know if this isn't clear. This is a subtle and difficult issue.--Srleffler 05:06, 7 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]