User:Neuromath/New user history
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] Date of registration: 2006-12-10
The calendar date 2006-12-10 is in a format specified by ISO 8601, which is an international standard.
The links below, detailing the work I have done on Wikipedia, include only work done since my registration as "Neuromath" on 2006-12-10. (I contributed some very minor edits, as an unregistered user, before that; I can't even remember which articles were involved.) I have never worked on Wikipedia as a registered user under any username other than "Neuromath". (For an exposition of the problems that can arise from editing under more than one username, see Wikipedia:Sock puppetry.)
[edit] Newbie mistakes
This section is intended to help new users to avoid certain traps for the unwary by offering illustrations of cases where I myself made such mistakes. There is a huge amount of information on Wikipedia about preferred style, but not all of these rules are equally likely to be violated (by a well-intentioned user) in practice. I hope my experiences will give any other new users who might read this page a sense of which things to watch out for in particular.
[edit] Editing talk page entries after first creating them
When I added the section Only High importance, not Top? to the talk page for Osmium, I omitted the words "naturally occurring" before "chemical element". I realized later that my statement could be taken to imply that a print encyclopedia would be gravely deficient if it did not mention, for example, Ununhexium. For this reason, I edited my remarks to add the two missing words. To my surprise, I discovered still later that editing one's own remarks on a talk page after first entering them, except when leaving the original struck out (mistake like this), and with a few other exceptions, is considered behavior that is unacceptable according to the talk page guidelines. A talk page is considered to be a historical record of a conversation, not a work subject to continual improvement after the fact (as Wikipedia articles are).
[edit] Using HTML instead of wikitext
[ more detail to be added later ]
[edit] Failing to add edit summaries to all edits
This is one of the commonest newbie mistakes, and I was no exception. To avoid it, and to appreciate the importance of avoiding it, read Help:Edit summary.
[edit] Adding a category link without knowing about its special properties
[ more detail to be added later ]
[edit] Using non-breaking spaces on talk pages
[ more detail to be added later ]
