User talk:Nerfmaster8

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Hello, Nerfmaster8, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using 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 ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! McGeddon (talk) 09:38, 6 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

NERF acronym

Thanks for the note. Do you know if the "non-expanding recreational foam" has actually been explicitly debunked anywhere? As you're right in saying, encyclopaedic content must be verifiable, so we could only say "there is a popular misconception that NERF stands for non-expanding recreational foam" if we could quote a reliable source that specifically described it as a misconception. If we can't prove anything either way, we should just leave it out of the article. --McGeddon (talk) 09:24, 8 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We can't say "the statement was proved wrong but still a lot of the Nerf community still wrongly believes the acronym" because we don't have a source for the statement being proven wrong (the fact that it was named after off-road foam padding does not prove that off-road foam padding was not originally called "non-expanding recreational foam, nor that Nerf later coined it as an official backronym), nor for the fact that the Nerf community "believes" the acronym to be true (sure there are plenty of Google hits, but we'd need an actual reliable source that remarked on the belief being widely held). --McGeddon (talk) 09:43, 10 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

User:Areaseven

If a user is actively unwilling to discuss a disagreement over edits, you should just raise the issue on the article talk page and get some other editors involved. Skimming the article history I don't really understand the relevance of Toys R Us, so it's probably worth explaining it properly on the talk page rather than trying to fit it into an edit summary. --McGeddon (talk) 08:23, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Users are allowed to delete other people's messages from their own talk page (and it can be a useful confirmation that they've read the message!), but not from article talk pages, unless the comment is obvious vandalism or off-topic. Go ahead and explain the issue on the talk page, and someone will take a look at it. --McGeddon (talk)

Saving content

Just to let you know that you can click the "View history" tab on any article to see it's entire history and previous versions, if there's ever any material you want to retrieve. Help:Page history is worth a read if you've never explored a page history before. --McGeddon (talk) 16:17, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You can view (and edit) an exact copy of any version of the article by clicking its datestamp in the history - this link would have given you everything you needed. --McGeddon (talk) 16:30, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Dart blaster community

Wikipedia is not written for the benefit of the "dart blaster community", it is written for the benefit of the average reader. If Nerf fans know that "water blaster" means water gun, but non-fans don't, we should use the terminology that everyone understands and avoid jargon.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "its probably best to allow the community rather than outsiders to watch over the article", but it seems more constructive to have fans contributing and "outsiders" helping to ensure the article conforms to Wikipedia policy, and that it can be clearly understood by non-fans. --McGeddon (talk) 19:21, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's great that fans have been contributing to the articles, but no group or individual is ever the WP:OWNER of an article, and Wikipedia should always be written for the widest possible WP:AUDIENCE. --McGeddon (talk) 19:38, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Current consensus seems to be that the most common, understandable name for a toy gun that shoots water is a "water gun". Wikipedia articles always take the most common name for a subject, and the article in question is called "water gun", which means that articles that discuss the subject should - if writing for the average non-expert reader - also call the things "water guns".

If it's your experience that most people call water-shooting guns "water blasters" in everyday life, it'd be worth suggesting at Talk:Water gun that the article be renamed to "water blaster". --McGeddon (talk) 14:52, 27 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]