User talk:SkyllaLaFey

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Hello! This is SkyllaLaFey, and I just wanted to kick off my 'User talk' page. I'm a bit of a book addict and I believe in the importance of knowledge being accessable to everybody. My hobbies and interests are rather eclectic, but include reading(of course!), cooking/baking(eating!), and a bit of bellydancing. If anyone wants to assist this newbie I would be grateful, as I am slightly apprehensive about getting started. I consider myself a reasonably literate individual, but sadly I am not yet at home in the realm of technology. SincerelySkyllaLaFey (talk) 02:28, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Welcome! (We can't say that loudly enough!)

Hello, SkyllaLaFey, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

Please sign your name on talk pages and votes by typing ~~~~; our software automatically converts it to your username and the date.

If you have any questions or problems, no matter what they are, leave me a message on my talk page. Or, please come to the new contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions.

We're so glad you're here! Rockpocket 03:13, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hi, and consider our project

Hi, SkyllaLaFey! Glad to see you've received a proper Wikipedia welcome already. I saw your name while visiting the page of Happy-melon, who has been doing tremendous work on reorganizing the structure and technology of the League of Copy-Editors, of which I am a member. If you are looking for worthwhile Wikiprojects to join, please consider the League, since your self-description as "literate" appears accurate :) The joining page is here. The page on which article authors request copy-edits is here. It will give you some idea of what type of requests we receive and what we do. You will find that a thorough copy-edit is often a requirement for an article to receive the status of Featured Article (our very best) and Good Article (our, well, good). In fact, the review panels for those title awards often recommend that the article's editors request a copy-edit from the League before continuing the review. Unfortunately, we are horribly understaffed in relation to the demand. If you care to assist, I think you will find it very worthwhile. Either way, enjoy your time on Wikipedia! Unimaginative Username (talk) 05:10, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Adoption

Hi there! I'm back a little early, but happy birthday for the day after tomorrow!! Of course I'd be delighted to adopt you. I see you've already learnt the three most fundamental tenets of Wikipedian philosophy: being bold, explaining yourself and asking for help when you need it. I'd be glad to teach you anything you'd like to know - just drop a note on my talk page any time and I'll get back to you. In the meantime, I'd echo what's said above - joining a WikiProject is definitely the easiest way to get into editing Wikipedia in a focused and organised way. I'd recomend one of the smaller projects - WP:BIO or WP:MILHIST will easily lose you in their bureaucracy - but the most important thing it to pick something you're interested in and that you know you can write accurately about. Check out WP:PROJDIR - there really is a WikiProject for just about any topic under the sun! Good luck, and happy birthday again for the 13th. Happy‑melon 21:22, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Well thankyou for the thankyou, and I am truly glad to have met an American who can actually spell properly :D! In answer to your (implicit) questions:
Userboxes are a bit of a pig in many respects - because they only take up a portion of the width of the screen, they don't tie in very well with other stuff that's floating around on the page. If, as usually happens, the parser which constructs Wikipedia pages thinks it can get two or even three in across a page, it does so, resulting in what you see now on your page. There are two ways to force the parser to instead line them up vertically:
  1. Use <br> tags, which are raw HTML. Any raw HTML you put on a Wiki page will override anything the parser can do and forces the page to do what you want. The <br> tag translates to "insert a line break here". You'll notice, however, that that wasnt' quite enough - it just makes them form a diagonal line when I tried it here. To actually make them line up vertically you have to use <br clear=all> tags, which are the nuclear-powered version which mean "stop the press, insert an invisible bar under this line which nothing is allowed to cross". That works, but it's definitely the brute force solution, and if you try and put anything else on the page you'll see you can't fill the white space to the right of the boxes - any new text will go below. Not ideal.
  2. The much more elegant solution is to use a Wikitable. This is a piece of Wikimarkup which enables you to put just about anything just about anywhere if you know what you're doing. The syntax is fairly sensible, although it can get a bit confusing if you've got a large or complicated table. I encased your three objects in table markup:
 {|
 |-
 |{{adoptee|Happy-melon}}
 |-
 |{{User oops}}
 |-
 |My Sandbox [[User:SkyllaLaFey/Sandbox]]
 |}
Incidentally, I hope this example answers your second question: the blue box appears when you enter code. When you need to add code in the middle of a line, you have to use <code>...</code> HTML tags, but if you need to enter a whole line or more of code, you just put a leading space on each line - that is, each line of code starts with a space. That's nothing to do with HTML - it's pure Wikimarkup, and always one that trips up the uninitiated! Don't worry, everyone's done it at some point, usually when trying to indent comments on talk pages. If you want to do that, use colons (::) instead, as you can see I'm doing here. One colon = 1 tab, 2 colons = 2 tabs, etc. Once you get over about 5 or 6 colons, it starts to look ridiculous, so people will "outdent" by going back to using one or no colons, often adding an arrow (←) which is in the top row of the massive box of special characters underneath the edit window. Have a look at the talk pages of any of the major policies to see this sort of stuff in action (WT:N is always a good one, there's always a good argument going on over there!).
Anyway, as you can see in the code above, the more elegant solution is to put the userboxes into a table. No one recommends raw HTML tables - they're messy, hugely complicated and usually don't do what you want anyway. Wikitables are much neater and usually do what you tell them. The syntax (at this level) is pretty straightforward: {| marks the start of the table and |} the end. |- marks a new row and the single pipe | a new cell within that row. This style produces nice clean code, and can be extended indefinitely with new lines if and when you decide to include more userboxes. If you want, you can arrange them in two columns by adding a second cell in each row:
 {|
 |-
 |{{adoptee|Happy-melon}}
 |{{User:UBX/tea}}
 |-
 |{{User oops}}
 |{{User_USAFo5}}
 |-
 |My Sandbox [[User:SkyllaLaFey/Sandbox]]
 |[[WP:SANDBOX|Some Other Link]]
 |}
This user has been adopted by Happy-melon.
This user drinks tea.
This user tries to do the right thing. If they make a mistake, please let them know.
USage decline This user uses American English, but is appalled at its rapid and continuing deterioration.
My Sandbox User:SkyllaLaFey/Sandbox Some Other Link
Hope that answers those questions. Wikimarkup is much more important than HTML here - you can easily get away with only knowing how to use three sets of HTML tags: <code></code>, <nowiki></nowiki> and <ref></ref>. I'd suggest you save on the HTML guide and read the free Help:Wikitext examples which covers most of the basic wikimarkup. Have a play in a sandbox - your own or the official one - and remember, you're not an admin, you can't actually break anything. So be bold, find something to work on, and do your best. Have fun! Happy‑melon 21:55, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Heehee, I changed the fourth userbox to the "language decline" box that I've added to my user page.SkyllaLaFey (talk) 01:00, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Coding for dummies, by the world's leading dummy

Yes, I have no trouble spelling "through", or "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis", but as I've admitted to Happy-melon several times, I'm completely code-ignorant. Some day, I must learn what he told you above, about tables and such. In the meantime, I recently found (by snooping through other userpages) how to line stuff up without the table codes etc. HM will sneer at the primitiveness, but check my userpage, click "edit", and see the use of "userboxtop||left" or "right" or "center". First, the boxes on the left were listed under the "userboxtop||left", then those on the far right, under "userboxtop||right"; then, the "userboxtop||right" was repeated, which makes the third group line up inside the far right group. Finally, the "userboxtop||center" list adds the group that is seen second from left. This got a messy page into something sort of orderly, and I'd been on WP barely over a year! Now HM can tell you how backwards this is :) Unimaginative Username (talk) 03:56, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Not at all - in the same way I didn't complain when someone replaced a table with {{col-begin}} and {{col-break}} on Wicked (musical). I just sit back and have a little chuckle when I remember the content of those templates: purely and simply, they just hide the table markup in a template and give it a more user-friendly name! So of course I'm not going to poke fun at you for taking the backward, luddite, ignorant fool's way out :D. Hehe. Seriously though, use whatever is easiest for you. Happy‑melon 10:11, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
I live in a cave in Afghanistan without electricity or running water, so of course I'm a luddite. If it weren't for this satellite internet service and a really long-lasting battery, I'd have no contact with the modern world at all. So, no offense taken :) Unimaginative Username (talk) 04:49, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Editor-in-Training

You could make a full-time career just from going through and changing all the misuses of "it's" for "its". Unfortunately, even on Wikipedia :-( The other significant issue is that we have many authors and editors for whom English is a second language. They create a number of articles and make valuable contributions to many more. Some of the requests we get at the League are from such non-native speakers, who openly admit their unfamiliarity and ask the League for help in correcting their English. These articles can be especially challenging, but I try to keep in mind how any article would look that I were to compose in one of the foreign languages vaguely remembered from school :) At least, they have an excuse, unlike the illiterate graduates of American schools. The need for people who care about correct usage is great. However, there's no commitment to work any number of hours per week or whatever. Whenever you have time to edit, you just dig in.

You have lucked onto a fine adopter there. Happy-melon is knowledgeable, active, and creative. I'm sure he (?) can handle any questions you have, but if HM is not available or there is something to which you think I might have some info based on what you've seen, never hesitate to drop me a note. Definitely don't want to step on HM's toes, though. He is online much more than I, vastly more knowledgeable in mark-up etc., two reasons why I don't feel qualified to adopt anyone.

Have you familiarized yourself with the "watchlist" function yet? Among other things, it allows a conversation to stay on one user's page rather than alternating, although many users prefer to alternate anyway, because new message alerts are flashed instantly. For example, I have your page watched for responses to this message, but you may also write on my page. Looking forward to your contributions -- and yes, December is a rough time to start new things. :) Season's greetings, Unimaginative Username (talk) 00:48, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Edit count

Thanks for the kind words, UU, they're much appreciated. I can also recommend familiarising yourself with the Watchlist - try reading Help:Watching pages, once you've finished all the other pages I've already thrown at you!! In response to your question, there are numerous ways of checking your edit count. If you go to "my preferences" at the top of the screen, your total edit count will be displayed, but only you can see that (obviously if someone else clicks on "my preferences", they get their edit count). A detailed list of all your contributions can be found at Special:Contributions/SkyllaLaFey. There are many web tools which will scrape data from this page for you and tell you (or anyone else) exactly how many edits you have there, which is useful if you don't want to count them all! Interiot's tool is probably the most popular. However, if you edit a page which is subsequently deleted, those contributions are removed from your Special:Contributions list and (until recently) were lost altogether, meaning that the result from most web tools will be overly conservative. Recently, Special:Deletedcontributions was created which lists all those previously lost edits, but I don't know of any tools which currently scrape that page as well. In the future, there probably will be. A very useful userbox to have (if you're interested in your edit count - not everybody is) is {{User:Nihiltres/Userboxes/Super contrib meta}}. Aaages ago, there was an enormous collection of userboxes saying "this editor has XXX edits". This one, however, can switch between numbers and hence is much more convenient. If you put it on your userpage:

10+ This user has made over 10 contributions to Wikipedia.

you'll notice that if you click on "over XX contributions" you get a hyperlink to Interiot's tool for instant confirmation. This is an extremely useful userbox! One word of warning, though - I wouldn't make too big a deal of it. Most editors don't give a rat's ass how many edits you have - if you've got 40,000 that probably just means you've been running illegal bot scripts. Editcountitis can be fatal!! I've deliberately put my one way down the bottom of my page so it's not too prominent. Don't let that dissuade you from using it though - it's your userpage, do whatever the hell you want (within reason). Happy‑melon 10:30, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] USage decline and other userboxes

Glad you like the "USage decline" box. It's original (all of mine are, except the left-hand column) and a couple dozen other users have adopted it. You do know that you are free to do so also, should you like? Nothing on WP is copyrighted. Just paste the template {{User:Unimaginative_Username/Userboxes/US_language_deterioration}} on your page, and of course HM will arrange it :). There are a whole lot more grammar-related templates here. Then, like everyone else here, you can use your time to design userboxes of your own instead of doing anything constructive! Regards, Unimaginative Username (talk) 05:05, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Not at all - I'm sure she's perfectly capable of doing it herself now :D. Excellent idea, by the way - you'll be one up on me if you manage it - I haven't written any articles from scratch. Happy‑melon 15:50, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Autosign, edit conflicts and missing links

Hi there, and congratulations for the mess on my usertalk page :D!! Not to worry, but the reason it all went pear-shaped is that you forgot to close the <nowiki> tag which you (correctly) added around the <br> tag to make it display properly. That of course meant that all subsequent wikisyntax was not expanded, including the tildes you used to sign off at the end. Sinebot noticed that your edit did not contain a link to a userpage or a UTC-formatted date, and consequently tried to sign it. Unfortunately it fell foul of the same problem your tildes did - the template was not substituted or expanded, making even more of a mess :D. When you made your original edit I think you also got an Edit conflict with User:MiszaBot III which was archiving my talk page. Then you made another edit to explain what was going on/wrong, falling foul of the same little mistake; I'm surprised Sinebot didn't try and autosign your comment again. Finally, when I came along and closed the nowiki tag, both your sets of tildes were expanded to my signature, not yours!! All in all, a bit of a trainwreck!! But not to worry, all caused by a tiny little slip that unfortunately had a life of its own. No real harm done (and I've just been watching Diehard 4, so I know what a real computer trainwreck looks like!). I had a look at the history of your userpage, but I can't quite work out what you're saying is wrong - do you mind rephrasing? Something about a missing "my" from a link?? Happy‑melon 00:04, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia pages display very differently on different browsers, screen resolutions and display settings; this image shows how your userpage displays on IE7 at 1280x768. As you can see, there is no problem here from my perspective. What browser do you use? Happy‑melon 19:20, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
My monitor will only go up to 1024x768 pixels, and I believe that is why I was seeing everything laid out differently. It was trying to squeeze everything into my smaller screen width. In the meantime, I'll keep playing on my user page and in my sandbox until I am skilled enough to be unleashed upon the world at large. SkyllaLaFey (talk) 05:49, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Golf monster

Hi there, and welcome back! Good to see you're getting your teeth into something substantial. In answer to your question, the reason the Table of Contents won't display where it normally does is that your set of headings is laid out differently to most articles. If you check the majority of articles on Wikipedia, you'll see that they have an introduction or lead that goes above all the headings, then a series of "level 2" headings (ie headings enclosed in two equals signs), with subheadings as necessary. What you've got is one overarching level 2 heading, then the lead and infobox, then a series of level three headings. The ToC is automatically generated above the first level 2 heading when a page is rendered, hence it appearing at the top of your page. Basically you don't need the level 2 heading "Golf monster", and all the other headings should be level 2, not level 3. Hope this helps, and good luck with the writing! Happy‑melon 12:12, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Copyedit--Slipknot

Wow, thanks alot man. Any help is more than welcome, take your time dude. It seems lie kforever sicne I made that request lol, I've got used to waiting. REZTER TALK ø 20:47, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

From the article:
"With each new album, Slipknot has attained new masks and coveralls. The masks haven't changed dramatically with the release of their second and third albums, as the masks are more of an extension of what they previously were. Jordison addressed the issue in an interview in 2004, stating that the change in masks are to show growth and difference within age."
Basically each time they have released a new album their masks have changed... like they have progressed. Here's an example... this is the drummers mask from 2001: [1] and this is from 2004: [2]. They said that the change is to show growth and difference within age. They said something along the lines of "The change in the masks are to show growth, like say if you see somebody 5 years later they look a little different." Does that make sense? REZTER TALK ø 19:31, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia:Protection policy#Semi-protection it only blocks new accounts and IP addresses from editting the article. You may have submitted your edit while somebody else did and then the edits conflicted. Try copying the whole page to a sandbox (like User:SkyllaLaFey/Sandbox) make your edits there and then copy the whole article back to the original page. REZTER TALK ø 21:17, 19 March 2008 (UTC)