User talk:Dr.Bastedo

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[edit] Welcome


-- Shen

[edit] Foraminifera

Kris

[edit] Dinosaur

Thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. You are welcome to work on the dinosaur articles. However, I have reverted your latest changes to Dinosaur. For one thing, you edited the article to say "winged pterosaur Pterodactyl". As pterodactyl is another name for pterosaur, not a type of pterosaur, the edit is misleading. You also are repeatedly bolding words, which, per the Maual of Style don't need to be bolded. We usually bold the word in an article where it first appears in print, but we do not keep bolding it thereafter. Best wishes, Firsfron of Ronchester 01:02, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Dr. Bastedo,
Thanks for your note. I want to again welcome you to Wikipedia and at the same time respond to the comments you left on my talk page.
"Pteradactyl" is indeed a SUBCATEGORY of pterosaur. Just check the Wik. Furthermore, if you had examined my full entry, you would have noted that I had further changed this to "Pteradactylus" (the genus).
Actually, your edit is here (your changes are shown in red in the green column). You can clearly see you did not write "Pteradactylus"; you wrote "Pterodactyl" ("the winged pterosaur Pterodactyl"), and you have no futher edits on that page. The suborder Pterodactyloidea and the family Pterodactylidae are divisions within Order Pterosauria, but, as our article states, "Pterosaurs (/ˈtɛ.rəˌsɔː(r)/, from the Greek "πτερόσαυρος", meaning winged lizards [are] often referred to as pterodactyls". In any case, "the winged pterosaur Pterodactyl" is clearly misleading, as it indicates there was a specific Pterosaur called Pterodactyl, and this is not the case.
As to your second comment, you should read the MANUAL OF STYLE, section 3, entitled "Article titles." It states that all SYNONYMS are to be boldfaced. And it gives just ONE example, in which MULTIPLE boldfaces are used ...
WP:MOS does indeed state synonyms should be boldfaced. However, your edit bolded the word dinosaur after the word dinosaur had already been bolded in the previous paragraph. There is simply no reason to bold the same word multiple times. The reader will quickly tire of having the word dinosaur in bolface, which is why it only needs to be bolded one time. You also bolded the word archosaur; as "Archosaur" is not a synonym for dinosaur (many archosaurs are not dinosaurs, but all dinosaurs are archosaurs, as are living birds), I don't know what that was about.
You also removed the wikilink on the word "aquatic", and then added it later in the article, and added a second wikilink to Cretaceous, as shown by the edits in red. While there were some parts of your edit that I think were fine, overall, they confused the issue and introduced some errors, both in terms of style and accuracy. I hope you will continue to edit Wikipedia, and wish you the best of luck being (forgive the pun) bold and improving our content. For the record, you can type four tildes (~~~~) in order to sign your messages. Best wishes, Firsfron of Ronchester 22:56, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BPD

Thoughtful and graceful edits. Thank you for your excellent valuable help with this article. Please feel free to join in on the talk page as we work together to improve this article. Particularly liked how you handled the EMDR header! --Kiwi 01:42, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Agree,
but this kind of sequence can detract some from the 'ease of use' of the page history. May I suggest previewing a bit more before saving... some of these many edits such as word choices, alternative phrases, ink fixes and such refinements could be bypassed by a little more use of that facility.

Also, if you were beginning to edit with an eye on a far ranging series outside of single sections, it is not a bad practice to copy the whole to a user temporary page such as User:Dr.Bastedo/temp where you can evolve at your own pace—Just click the redlink, and you're ready to edit a new page. I usually just tuck one of those in from an open edit window, preview, then copy all to the target page. Backup and close up the original, and then work on the big changes. When done, just copy your new version back to the main space.

The only caveat there is if someone has added or changed things significantly since you copied the page. Our societies norms would be for you to then make a subsequent 'merge' or fixup edit to combine the two efforts. You can, btw, manually do a diff of the current article and your new version by merely editing in the correct page number in the diff URL in your browser. Even easier by diffing after the copy back. To tidy up, you can just wipe the temp page and keep it ready for another day, or tag it with {{db-author}}, whereupon it will disappear fairly soon, as that's a speedy-delete tag.

If on the other hand you are really bent on serious changes, suggest applying the {{inuse}} template or {{underconstruction}} to warn people a big edit is pending to save everyone such fixups. Kiwi is doing just that sort of major change off to the side on my advice (see Talk:Borderline Personality Disorder and A Kiwi), and as a member of the WP:Wc, I'll be glad to lend you a hand should you have a 'how to' or procedural query as well. Feel free to get me about any little thing. Best regards // FrankB 05:39, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
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