User talk:Lindalevi

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[edit] Harris Newmark

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[edit] Re: Harris Newmark

Hello – thanks for the message. Thanks also for the kind words. I love finding articles like this one that need expansion and referencing. I found a few conflicting sources for the Newmark/Montebello land division details; I live in Oklahoma and there are several towns/areas that likewise have differing accounts of the process by which they were named. I tried to sort it out, but if I didn't get it right you should change it. Be sure to cite the appropriate sources; the standard here is verifiability, not truth. I hope you agree that more work needs to be done. I'm spread pretty thin right now, but I promise I'll get back to the Newmark article soon. In the meantime, take what I've done and build on it, or change it if you like, and add more sources.

That handily leads me into answering your questions. WP:FOOTNOTES, which also has a simpler explanation at Help:Footnotes, is the key. Basically, you surround the book name (or magazine article or URL) with <ref> </ref> tags, then create a 'Notes' or 'References' section at the bottom of the page that holds only {{Reflist}}, which is a template (you can click on these links to see more). The software will take the book name (or whatever is contained between the two tags), give it a sequential number or letter, and place it in the 'References' section. The guideline for citing sources gives a more in-depth explanation of what kind of material to cite as a source and where to use citations, which is pretty much everywhere.

If you use a particular reference twice, you can give it a nickname so you don't have to type the entire reference content more than once. The Rochlin book, for example, has the nickname "pioneer" in Harris Newmark. I gave it that nickname when I added the reference so I don't have to paste in the author/title/publisher/other stuff more than once. The software doesn't care where the full citation is located in the article, so you'll find the first "pioneer" up in the lead section and the full citation way down in the text.

The lovely formats come from the citation templates. They are user-friendly templates that give a standardized format for citing journals ({{cite journal}}), web pages ({{cite web}}), books ({{cite book}}), and even videos or DVDs ({{cite video}}). You don't have to use these templates, and you'll find many, many articles that do not, but they make citing _so_ much easier.

Take a look at these pages while examining the Harris Newmark article. It may take a bit, so don't rush. Make some test edits in the Sandbox or by using the preview button, to see how it works. Look at other articles using this format; I wrote most of Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, which is a Good Article, and the same style of referencing is used in it. Featured articles are also well-referenced: Anne Frank, Joel Brand, and Max Weber are good examples. Max Weber uses a kind of hybrid style of referencing, the system I've described above melded with a style called Harvard referencing, but the same technology is used to create it. Either style is acceptable – Harvard refs are good when there are lots of cites from a single source, and many biographies of well-known people use it. We may yet decide to change to Harvard referencing in the Newmark article. We'll see how it plays out.

If you have questions after you've read through these pages, don't hesitate to ask. One more thing – be sure to sign your user talk page posts with four tildes (~~~~) so others will know who you are and what you said. Have a nice weekend! - KrakatoaKatie 09:52, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Montebello/Newmark

Hello again! Nice to see you back.

I don't really understand your question; I've pondered it for a while now, and it's still fuzzy. To help me understand the problem you're having, would you go ahead and make your changes? Don't worry about how the numbering ends up or what happens to the article – you can't 'break' anything, so just go ahead and do it. Be sure to put something in the edit summary like "attempt to repair incorrect references, see my talk page" or something like that to indicate you're trying a suggestion. I have the article on my watchlist so I'll take a look once you're done.

As far as the numbering of references is concerned, don't get too wrapped up in keeping the #8 there. The references are numbered by the software, in order of their first appearance in the article text, not by any numbering scheme we editors give them. That's sometimes hard for new editors to grasp, because they're used to saying "#1 means this, and #2 means that, and #3 means the other thing". The MediaWiki software does all that numbering for us if we tell it which references are to the same cited work. All #8 means is that's the 8th unique reference in the article. The two paragraphs in the article's lead section are good examples of how the software numbers the references; examine it closely and I think you'll see what I mean. You can also look at the article's history – click on 'last' to see the differences between two edits.

I hope you and yours are all okay in SoCal. We had terrible fires here last year and the year before from drought, high wind, and the assistance of a couple of bored 16-year-old boys who liked fire. Our water supply nearly dried up two years ago. So it's only natural that this year we're 13 inches over our annual rainfall average and we had a flood with terrible environmental consequences. I just wanted you to know that I'm thinking about you. Stay safe. :-) - KrakatoaKatie 07:15, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh, good – it's nice to know all seems well. We heard one of the fires was started by a 10-year-old boy who was playing with matches – some of the grass fires here last summer were started by bored teenagers. We're something like 13 inches ahead of annual normal rainfall this year, but two years ago the lake that supplies our water was nearly dry. It seems to go all the way wet or all the way dry, with nothing "normal" in between.

I live close to the Kansas border in Oklahoma, and we're about 20 miles as the crow flies from the city in Kansas where the refinery flooded, which seemed to be the thing that made all the national news. That storm dumped almost 15 inches of rain overnight, and the Army Corps of Engineers screwed around and waited until the last minute to open the floodgates on the dammed lakes upstream from us. That's what caused the Kansas floods too, only on different Corps-managed lakes. None of us were surprised about the New Orleans levee problems, because every lake in Oklahoma is manmade and (mis)managed by the Corps. They don't seem to know anything about managing water flow or dams, because they cause most of our flooding themselves by waiting until the lakes are about to overflow the dams before opening the gates.

About two months after our flooding, the remnants of a hurricane parked over Oklahoma City, where my parents still live, and dropped 13 inches of rain in 6 hours on _them_. One of the Highway Patrol helicopters had to rescue one couple out of their pickup truck when a flash flood nearly drowned them, and you may have seen that on national news too – that took place less than 10 miles from my parents' farm. At least the weather's not boring here.

You're doing great with the Newmark article. I'll follow the progress, and let me know if you need help. We've got a ton of admin backlogs, and anonymous page creation is going to be enabled on November 9 for a trial run, so we have a lot of work to do before Stephen Colbert decides to tell his minions about it. The first time he told people to change a Wikipedia article on The Colbert Report, I think it was in July 2006, the servers crashed. I love Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but every few weeks they cause a lot of trouble here. ;-) So off to work I must go. *hugs* - KrakatoaKatie 09:21, 4 November 2007 (UTC)