User talk:Grammarmonger

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Welcome!

Hello, Grammarmonger, 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:

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:Questions, 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! 

—RuakhTALK 20:01, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Grammarmonger!
In response to your question about automation: the above message was not automated; I sent it because I saw your contribution to Adjective and saw that no one had welcomed you yet. The content of the message, however, was standardized; I produced it by typing this:
{{subst:Welcome|Ruakh}}

~~~~
in the edit box.
I hope its being a stock message doesn't make you feel any less welcomed; the thought was genuine, at least. I do hope you decide to stay. :-)
—RuakhTALK 16:56, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pent-up desires

Hi, Grammarmonger!

I'm glad to hear of your pent-up desire. Please don't keep it to yourself. Let it flow. Wikipedia can certainly use more help than any one of us can offer.

Happy New Year!  ;^> DavidCBryant 22:26, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Hello again!

It's not really my Caltech flag ... somebody else created it in a common area of Wikipedia. Anyway, I took the liberty of posting a small userbox on your user page, with nothing in it except the Caltech banner. I hope you like it.

So you're a Darb? I'm a Lloydie myself (1973). I have run into a couple of other Darbs on Wikipedia already – Joe Decker and (I'm pretty sure) N6. You and Joe must have been there at the same time. Oh. I read your second message, saying that you need to go to sleep. I really ought to get offline myself right now, to go feed the parrots. But I do want to mention one more thing. Today an automaton called "Orphanbot" deleted the Dabney Hovse crest from this article. I'd like to put the image back in there, but I'm also thinking that a Darb might have an easier time getting that job done correctly. DavidCBryant 17:41, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Good morning! (It's about 4:00 am here. I get up early.)

I don't think there will be any "trouble" about the Dabney crest. But I do feel sorry that I wasn't more explicit. I did allude to "getting that job done correctly". By that I intended to convey the idea that we need to get permission from someone to use a particular image, or verify that it's not copyrighted. I personally can't imagine why anyone would think he could copyright something like the Dabney crest. But if somebody's going to grant "permission", or create an entirely new image somehow, I suppose it's more likely to be a Darb (maybe even a current house officer) and not anyone else. Please forgive me for not explaining all this more clearly the first time.

So you have a macaw? That's a big bird. Ours are smaller. Kathryn and I belong to Boom-Boom (a lesser sulfur-crested cockatoo), Tweetheart ("Maximilian's Parrot"), and Spanky (Senegalese, and truly a "Little Rascal"). Boom-Boom loves me, because I fed her out of a bottle when she was just two months old. Tweetheart tolerates me, and Spanky can hardly stand the sight of me. I think Spanky's still in love with Kathryn, and perceives me as a rival. But maybe I just smell bad – it's hard to understand why parrots do what they do. DavidCBryant 11:25, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hiding link contents

Hi, GrammerMonger!

You can make a link appear as anything you want, for example Grammar Monger's user page, by using a vertical bar inside the wiki reference.... LouScheffer 18:16, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

In particular, you can use this to hide the # from a page heading reference, as in Academics at Caltech. I hope this is what you were asking for, LouScheffer 18:51, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lukanka

Hi Grammarmonger, thank you for the information about my picture on the BBC site. I've updated the Lukanka article and I've answered you on my page. I'll be grateful if you can check the article for errors. Thank you. --Ikonact 09:44, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Caltech flag

I borrowed the personalized version of the Caltech flag from Trovatore, a Flem. I'm not real crazy about it either, but I figured it was a good place to start learning more about customizing my own page.

I'm not real sure how to locate the code behind the templates (the {{xxx}} constructs). They have to be stored in a library somewhere. I'll do a little hacking around to try to figure it out. I'm sure they're all just set up using cascading style sheets and HTML, but so far I don't quite understand where the contents of "templates" generally reside in Wikipedia. Probably in "WikiCommons", or somewhere like that. Maybe it's all explained in an article with a name like "Wikipedia:Templates". DavidCBryant 15:38, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Here ... I found an example (for chemistry) that's stored in a library I could easily identify.

<div style="float:left;border:1px solid #969;margin:1px"> {| cellspacing="0" style="width:238px;background:#fcf" | style="background:#969;vertical-align:middle;text-align:center" | '''[[Image:Nuvola apps edu science.png|44px]]''' | style="font-size:8pt;padding:6pt;color:#000;line-height:1.25em" |<center>This user is interested in '''[[Chemistry]]'''. |}</div> [[Category:Wikipedians interested in chemistry|{{PAGENAME}}]]

I put a copy of this up in my sandbox, and it works OK by embedding the in-line code inside the {{Userbox}} wrappers. All the stuff between the <div> and </div> tags define what the flag looks like ... the other bit generates a "category" tag at the bottom of the page in which it's embedded. If I find that other library I'll let you know. DavidCBryant 16:03, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Grammarmonger! It's just me again. ;^>

I found the libraries. There's a "Template" namespace. If you're interested you can read about it at Wikipedia:Template messages. I don't suppose you really are all that interested, so I've taken the liberty (once again) of editing your user page. If there's still something you don't like about this Caltech flag, just let me know and I'll tweak it some more. Have a great day! DavidCBryant 21:04, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Stellar Work!

Image:CopyeditorStar7.PNG The Copyeditor's Barnstar
Awarded for diligent effort fixing even the smallest æerrors. Jouster  (whisper) 13:01, 29 May 2007 (UTC)


[edit]  

I have a question concerning sequential placement of footnotes. I found a page where the tags are out of sequence, but do not see how to organize them. From the help pages, it would seem the ordering is automated, in which case this might be a bug. Could someone please help me to understand how to sequentially organize footnote referent numbers?

Mmmm weird at best... can you provide us a link to this article? What is possible is that the same footnote is referenced more than once. They are ordered by their first occurence, which mean that you can have 1 2 3 1 1 4 3 2... I hope that helps! Please put the helpme tag back with the article if you need further help! -- lucasbfr talk 13:52, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit]  

{{helpme}}

I stumbled upon two nearly-identical pages, which is a waste and is already leading to problems regarding differences in the information presented.

One page is: "The Very Best of the Bee Gees"; the other is: "Very Best of the Bee Gees" (no initial "The")

My inclination would be delete the latter page, as it is less complete (no album cover image, etc.), and then add a redirection page from "Very Best of the Bee Gees" to "The Very Best of the Bee Gees"; however, I am not sure this is the best way to go about it or if more might be involved. Please let me know, thanks!

The best thing to do, generally speaking, is to merge any information from the worse-named page to the better-named page, stating that's what you're doing in the edit summary (so that people can find the copyright information for the information you merged), then replace the worse-named page with a redirect to the better-named one, which is pretty much what you wrote above.
(By the way, the software didn't take kindly to the markup ====; I've put a non-breaking space in the middle of that for the time being to try to get it to work correctly, but you can change the headings to anything you like if you don't like that fix.) --ais523 16:42, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll look at the pages tomorrow. It's late here now. As for the markup, what happened was that originally there was a "helpme" above this one, which had been "neutralized," but that "helpme" made this current one ambiguous, so I tried to delete the old one, and what was left was the mess that you see. If you are inetrested, you can look at the edit history to see exactly how it went. Thank for your help!