User talk:A legend

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Welcome to my talk page!


Contents

[edit] Your userspace

I see you have been creating quite an extensive userspace. Note however that Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia. The mainspace (articles) come first. You have only 3 edits to articles this month and over 25 edits to pages in your userspace. You may want to see WP:USERPAGE#What may I not have on my user page?. Wikipedia is not a social networking site or free webhosting for things like this. If it appears a user is abusing the freedom we generally allow in userspace, their userpages may be nominated for deletion and in extreme cases where the user does not stop, they may be blocked. While editors who make many article contributions are generally allowed more leeway in terms of usage of userspace, editors who edit their userspace almost exclusively will come under scrutiny. While your userspace is (to a certain extent) your space, its main purpose should somehow be building the encyclopedia. Mr.Z-man 02:25, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

And please fix your signature so User:A legend\Humor can be deleted, since you used a backslash instead of a normal slash, it was not created as a subpage in your userspace but rather as a userpage of nonexistent User:A legend\Humor. Mr.Z-man 17:26, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Hold on.--The source of the cosmos... 21:02, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Misuse of TWINKLE

Hi, I've removed TWINKLE and some of the other anti vandalism tools from your monobook as some of your recent edits using these tools have been unhelpful, although they were made in good faith, they required attention from more experienced users, which takes them away from writing content. You may revert the changes I made to your monobook after the protection expires after 48 hours from about now, in the intermin, please try and read over the various policies related to the usage of these tools so you can use them correctly and to their full potential. Thanks. Nick 02:08, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

A Legend, I think the administrators above are bringing up important points. Do you have any article contribution ideas that we can work on together?--Chaser - T 02:12, 29 September 2007 (UTC)


@Chaser: Not sure about ideas... @Nick: Oh... Sorry. Just wanted to help.--The source of the cosmos... 21:04, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A helping hand!

Hi,

I got asked to give an independent look at your edit history by some folks who feel you'd probably benefit from some guidance and a bit more information. Since it looks like you're relatively new to editing Wikipedia, and to what's needed, I might write a bit more, to try and be helpful.

First, good marks to you, you have done most things right. You've edited politely, tried to find sensible articles, and tried to be a careful editor. That's good, and much respected. Thanks!

Unfortunately some of your edits haven't been helpful, as you have probably figured out. So since you're trying to help I thought I'd drop you a note to give a hand and explain some stuff for you, so you can learn. First I'll write a bit on Wikipedia, so you have a better understanding how it works on this sort of thing, then how your edits have actually been, and then how to edit more successfully.

With what I have seen so far, I'm sure you'll be glad to have a go. Good luck!


Wikipedia

Wikipedia is unusual, it's a reference encyclopedia. That means we have criteria and rules, which help us decide what belongs and what doesn't, and how to write it. We have policies everyone has to follow, to say how we decide these things, and to guide people in their editing. You might enjoy finding out about some of the main ones - the knowledge will help you edit better and avoid "beginners mistakes".

Most editing is done by hand. Bots are useful for catching vandals and spelling errors, but they can't fix the big things that need addressing in Wikipedia. So a lot of editors and even administrators work by hand, fixing articles manually and deciding what other people need to do.


Your edits

As you can see, there has been some discussion what advice to give you. The feeling is that you will be a good editor in a while, but you badly need to slow down and get the basics, or "learn how". What's happening is you want to help, but you are guessing how, and so you're not really helping yet. We'd like to see you succeed at it - a lot of our best Wikipedia editors started like that, not knowing anything much a few years ago.

The kind of problems are things like, requesting a bot but not having any experience what bots can and can't do, or what needs doing, or good Wikipedia experience. So you just don't have that ability yet. Also, you are trying to write a bit like a newspaper, and you need to learn to write like other editors, otherwise they all have to spend time correcting your work. Last, a lot of your work has gone onto your user page, which is fine if you do work on articles, but not really intended to be a "social space" for yourself.

So there is a problem which is that you want to help, but you don't know how, and instead what's happening is you are making other editors have to go round after you fixing your guesses what you should be doing.

Usually when that happens we ask people not to edit, because its just a problem and a worry. But you seem to really want to help, so we have talked and instead come up with a set of ideas that we hope will let you explore and have fun on Wikipedia, do some real encyclopedia work, and learn stuff thats actually helpful and interesting. If you are as bright as you sound, you'll pick it up really quickly and then be ready to try more things.


What Wikipedia needs!

This is a basic introduction to Wikipedia, taken from the ABOUT page. You might like to read that page some time to learn about the project.


Contributing to Wikipedia
Main articles: Contributing to Wikipedia, First steps in editing articles, Bootcamp

Before beginning to contribute you should check out some handy helping tools such as the tutorial and the policies and guidelines, as well as our welcome page. It is important to realize that in contributing to Wikipedia, users are expected to be civil and neutral, respecting all points of view, and only add verifiable and factual information rather than personal views and opinions.

Most articles start as stubs, but after many contributions, they can become featured articles. The hope of any contributor is to provide useful and accurate information to others, and the projects help coordinate efforts.


Editing Wikipedia pages
Main article, including list of common mark-up shortcuts: Wikipedia:How to edit a page

Wikipedia has robust version and reversion controls. This means that poor quality edits or vandalism can quickly and easily be reversed or brought up to an appropriate standard by any other editors, so inexperienced editors cannot accidentally do permanent harm if they make a mistake in their editing.


Wikipedia content criteria
Main article: Wikipedia:Wikipedia in brief

Wikipedia content is intended to be factual, notable, verifiable with external sources, and neutrally presented, with external sources cited.

The appropriate policies and guidelines for these are found at:

  1. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not summarizes what Wikipedia is, and what it is not.
  2. Wikipedia:Neutral point of view Wikipedia's core approach, neutral unbiased article writing.
  3. Wikipedia:No original research what is, and is not, valid information.
  4. Wikipedia:Verifiability what counts as a verifiable source and how a source can be verified.
  5. Wikipedia:Citing sources sources should be cited, and the manner of doing so.

Each policy or guideline has an abbreviation starting with "WP", so we can discuss it easily, for example: WP:NOT, WP:NPOV, WP:OR, WP:V and WP:CITE.


I have thought lots how to best help. I'd suggest a few things, and feel free to tell me if I'm about right:

You probably need someone experienced you can ask for help (without annoying them). There are schemes for adopting new users. I think that having someone to ask will be helpful in avoiding mistakes. I also get the feeling you want to do something important to help. There are a lot of patrols that are pretty important and where you could probably pick up the ropes really quickly and learn a lot which will help you. I have suggested some of them further down.

Last, start with things you can't get wrong. As you learn, ask for ideas for new more advanced things to do, which is how most people learn here :)


Ideas you might like

A lot of articles have problems that can't be fixed by bots, only by people. Here are some ideas. Let me know which of these appeal, and I'll point you to what you need to know to do it well :)

  • A lot of articles don't have links to other articles. When an article mentions something interesting, it sometimes needs you to edit it and link the word to the other article. It adds all those blue and underlined words you can see to articles. There are ways to know where to add links, that will help you if you're interested. This really helps make Wikipedia useful.
  • A lot of articles don't contain actual sources of information. Someone has to check them out using Google, and decide which web pages are good ones we can use, that have useful information and confirm the facts in the pages. This takes experience, but again its a really good job that can be explained. A lot of editors rate this as important, and get involved but there is a lot to do!
  • A lot of brand new articles are actually bad ones. They are vandalised, or rubbish, or adverts. So a lot of users do what's called "New page patrol" which means checking out the latest pages people add, and if they don't measure up, editing them to say that someone able to do page deletion has to delete them. This is one of the really important jobs again, it keeps rubbish and bad pages off Wikipedia. You would have to learn how to do this, but I think you could manage.


Last

I am sure you will enjoy these and be a productive and skillful member of the community, and gain much recognition for the good work you do, over time. At present though, your edits right now aren't helping, and that can't continue. So my hope is you will enjoy the above, so that you can continue to edit and enjoy it. Do please ask me if you have any questions; my talk page is here if you need it.


All the best!


Let me know what you think!


FT2 (Talk | email) 11:34, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hubert Invents the Wheel

I expanded User:A legend/Hubert a bit, but while I was doing it I also looked up the notability guideline on books. According to that, it's not quite a suitable topic for inclusion. Suck. Any other ideas? Perhaps a book that's gotten an article in a newspaper?--chaser - t 06:51, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

No other ideas, BUT THIS MUSIC PLAYING FOR NO REASON IS DEVOURING MY SPEAKERS! HELP ME!!!--The source of the cosmos... 13:40, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. I'll look for something else we can work on together. Anyway, good work on the Hubert article. I'm sorry it didn't work out.--chaser - t 21:13, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Bummer...--The source of the cosmos... 21:58, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Hey, I got a message from the authors (don't suppose you or your parents had anything to do with that?) and they gave me some info about other reviews. It's enough to convince me that the book is widely read in schools, and I moved it to Hubert Invents the Wheel. Good article idea! I'm glad we could do it.--chaser - t 22:47, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Cool! Oh, and by the way, I've made a plot a movie and video game I call Earth Heroes. Wanna hear the plot?--The source of the cosmos... 00:32, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] VB Calculator

So what do you need help with?

Getting input? Logic? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Deathbob (talk • contribs) 17:01, 29 October 2007 (UTC) Coding. I'm using Visual Basic .NET 2005 Express Edition.--The source of the cosmos... 01:36, 30 October 2007 (UTC)