User talk:Timothyda

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Hello, Timothyda! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking Image:Wikisigbutton.png or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already loving Wikipedia you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Happy editing! Just Heditor review 23:11, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
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[edit] September 2007

Welcome to Wikipedia. It might not have been your intention, but your recent contribution removed content from Pampas Republic. Please be careful when editing pages and do not remove content from Wikipedia without a good reason, which should be specified in the edit summary. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you would like to experiment again, please use the sandbox. Thank you. Oxymoron83 07:37, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Adoption program

Hi!

I'm Steve Baker - I'm a part of the Adopt-A-User program and I see you are looking for some help. I'm an experienced editor (8000+ edits, 2 featured articles) and I've had several successful adoptions in the past. If you'd like to accept my offer, let me know on my talk page. SteveBaker 13:43, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

OK! Welcome to the adoption program!
There is no formality to the process - I added an {{adoptee|SteveBaker}} template to your user page so you get added to the list of people who are adopted - and I add a similar one to my user page to flag that I'm helping you out.
Whenever you have a problem of any kind whatever, you can drop me a message on my talk page - or if it's something VERY difficult where you don't want other Wikipedians to be able to see the conversation, you can email me at steve@sjbaker.org
I generally take a look at the 'contributions' list of my Adoptees once in a while to make sure things are going OK - but aside from that, just use me as a sounding board for ideas - or a place to come for advice - someone to have on your side in times of trouble...whatever you need.
If (after a month or two) I feel you're doing just fine without me - I'll hand out some sort of hokey graduation certificate and we're done. If at any time you can't stand me anymore - just drop me a rude note and I'll stay out of your way!
I can generally help with the mundane aspects of editing - also navigating the maze of Wikipedia guidelines and procedures - but generally, my interests probably won't overlap yours - so the actual content that you add won't be something I can help much with...but we'll see.
I see you've been doing a lot of work in football articles - I'll try to find some time later today to review your edits and see if there is any advice I can offer. Meanwhile, what are the issues that made you seek adoption? Is there some specific set of things you have trouble with? I'm here for you!
SteveBaker 11:37, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm just looking to learn the ropes. I've been editing things for ages but never really looked at things seriously.

User:Timothyda 09:56, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
From what I can tell from recent edits, you seem to be doing some great work at general cleanup. This is a valuable service to Wikipedia (and it's what I spend a lot of my time doing). I guess my biggest gripe is that the articles you are working on are really badly under-referenced. It's crucially important for Wikipedia that the facts we put into articles are referenced by adding citations of books, web pages, magazines, newspapers. So when you said "Spirit FM broadcasts to West Sussex from studios in Chichester." - I'd like to see a link to someplace I can go to verify that. Perhaps their web site says this? Maybe you read it in a local newspaper? Perhaps it's in their annual shareholder report? We need a citation. Take a look at my article Mini - notice that after every major claim about the car, there is a little blue link like this: [12]. If you look at the wiki markup where one of those is, you'll see something like:
<ref name="reed1">{{cite book | author=Reed, Chris | title= Complete Classic Mini 1959-2000 | id=ISBN 1-899870-60-1 }}</ref>
(which displays as a little blue number in square brackets - and adds the citation information to the reference list at the bottom of the article.)
It can be tough to find references for every single fact in an article - but the biggest discriminator between a minor stub article and something that'll one day appear on the Wikipedia front page is the quality and extent of the citations.
Anyway - as I said, it looks like you're doing pretty good. Is there anything specific I can help you with?
SteveBaker 01:47, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Not really, oversight and advice is useful. I'm an information junkie. So I wonder, find and correct. But I should also take a step back and go in search of verification. Spirit FM was a cleanup. But I'm sure I can find a source for that. Thanks for your advice.

User:Timothyda 13:09, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Hmmmm - well, let's see if I can give you some pointers to places of interest here:
  • One place a lot of us information junkies hang out is on the Wikipedia Reference Desks - these are places where people come to ask questions about things that they couldn't find in the encyclopedia - and a bunch of Wikipedians go there to see if they can track down the answers. There are a number of categories (Science, Language, Humanities, Entertainment, Math, Computers and Miscellaneous). I treat it as a daily mental workout - it's interesting to see whether you can track down the information people want - and you can't help but learn a lot along the way. Your evident interest in radio might suggest the Entertainment desk would be an interesting place to hang out.
  • If you are interested in the workings of Wikipedia in general ("office politics", administration, policy-making) then you should certainly visit the main discussion board for the project over at The Village Pump - and perhaps read Wikipedia's weekly community newspaper: The SignPost (complete with our own comic strip: WikiWorld). There is also a weekly podcast called Wikipedia Weekly.
  • Some people here (I'm not one of them) feel that the encyclopedia is cluttered with far too many articles on non-noteworthy subjects. These people often hang out on Articles for Deletion where people propose articles that are not worthy of being here and they are discussed (often at great length and acrimony) and eventually either kept or deleted.
  • The inverse of that is Articles for Creation where people who feel that an article needs to be created come (typically with a little stub of an article) and Wikipedians discuss whether the article is worthy (99% of them aren't!) - creating the articles that pass muster and helping people to put an initial version together.
  • There are VAST numbers of so-called 'WikiProjects' where a group of people with similar interests hang out and try to push a particular section of the encyclopedia forwards. I'm a car nut - so I hang out at WikiProject Automobiles. You can find 'adverts' for these projects at the top of the talk pages for articles they are working on. Most Wikiprojects attempt to rate the articles in their subject area by quality and importance - and they often maintain useful lists of articles that are in need of help. So if you were interested in radio stations, there is a Wikipedia:WikiProject Radio Stations just for you. (I notice that the SpiritFM article is not currently 'owned' by them - you ought to add it to their list.) There are typically "To Do" lists for each project - so if you have a boring evening with nothing better to do, head over to the Wikiproject ToDo list and try to knock off some of the items. Wikiprojects often attempt to standardize the articles that they 'own' - with uniform info-boxes at the top-left, guidelines for photographs, logos, that kind of thing.
  • There are also things called 'Portals' which are specialised 'entrances' to Wikipedia that are unique to a specific topic. So, for example, the Automobile Wikiproject also runs it's own "Front Page" on Portal:Cars - it has lead articles, news, history, etc - just like the Wikipedia main page except that it's ONLY about cars! (I see there is a 'Portal:Radio' too).
  • More generally, there are Wikipedia:Collaborations - where a bunch of people will get together to achieve some general goal that's not focussed on a specific topic. There are places where people nominate an 'Article of the Week' that is an article on an important topic - yet which is in poor shape. (Wikipedia:Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive) Whichever article wins the weekly poll gets attacked by experts in writing as well as subject matter experts - and a concerted effort is made to pull that article into shape within one week.
  • There are the Good article and Featured article review boards where people may nominate articles for the honor of being called 'Good' or for the HUGE honor of being on the main Wikipedia front page for a day. Anyone can go there and voice their opinion of the articles - or attempt to fix up the complaints of other reviewers. These are often difficult debates on the quality of an article.
  • In parallel with those review panels for articles, there are other review panels for photographs, animations, audio and so forth.
  • Then, of course there are our sister projects - you can dive into Wiktionary and write or fix up dictionary entries - or head over to Wikiversity and write lectures for their courses - or collaborate on writing a book over at Wikibooks. None of those are at quite the level of support that Wikipedia is - but they all have their own sets of reviewers, creation and deletion pages, newspapers, podcasts, projects and whatever.
Well, that should be enough to get you going. The Wikipedia community is huge and complicated - there is enough stuff to do here to completely immerse you for a lifetime!
SteveBaker 12:52, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Moving pages

Thank you for moving the article on BCR FM to Quay West 107.4. For your future reference, you may wish to read WP:MOVE, which explains the preferred method of changing article names. There are, apparently, some licensing implications that make a straightforward copy-and-paste difficult. CJPargeter 08:07, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] RSAB

Hi, thanks for your edits on the RSAB page - makes a real difference it looks more like a wiki article! are you involved in the project or just edited it? 91.84.17.41 09:57, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Not involved in RSAB, I was just doing some tidying. :)


[edit] Adoption status.

Hi! I was just doing my routine checking-up-on-adoptees-whom-I-havn't-heard-from. It looks like you are doing some great editing work...but you havn't asked for any help on anything. Is there anything I can do to help out? Anything that needs explaining?

SteveBaker (talk) 02:28, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Steve, thanks for the compliment. The big gap is being able to efficiently merge updated pages rather than cut and paste. Do I need an extra level of access to merge things easily?

Oh, and I'll stop updating logos, just too much hassle.

Thanks.

--Timothyda (talk) 20:12, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm - I'm not 100% sure what you are asking. Do you mean that you are trying to merge two articles together? Can you give me an example of what leads you up to the point of trying to merge something? I don't think there is any extra merging tools available to admins - but perhaps you are simply doing something awkwardly when there is an easier way. I guess I just don't "get" what you are trying to do.

Images (especially 'fair use' ones) are a bit of a pain - but once you know the routine, it's not too bad. For images you made yourself - totally non-copyrighted stuff - you just stick it into the system as GFDL - but for copyrighted stuff like Logos, (even if you redraw them yourself) you need to do it like this:

  • Make sure your image file is no bigger than maybe 300 pixels across - try to make it be about the resolution it'll need to be in your article. (ie "Low resolution")
  • Use the "Upload file" link in the menu on the left - but click on "Go directly to the upload form" at the bottom of the page instead of using the stupid shortcuts.
  • Drop down the "Licensing" menu, scroll down a bit and select "Logo" (meaning a non-free, copyrighted logo that you're going to use under "fair-use" provisions).
  • In the "Summary" area, copy/paste this exact text:
{{Non-free use rationale
|Article=
|Description=
|Source=
|Portion=No
|Low_resolution=Yes
|Purpose=To accurately describe the club logo in an article about the club
|Replaceability=No
}}
  • Now fill in ALL of the fields after the '=' signs. The Article field should be the name of the article that's going to use this image. Description is "Logo of (whatever team it is)", Source is the URL of whichever web site you took it from - or if you redrew it yourself or scanned it in from a magazine or something, just say so. I filled in the others for you.
  • Upload the image then go to the article about the club and make a link to the image in the usual way. (It's important that you do this within 48 hours of uploading the picture because the system automatically deletes unused fair-use images).

Done!

SteveBaker (talk) 01:10, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

(I went in and fixed up the two fair-use rationale complaints you had above - so I thought I might as well clean out the complaints too. I hope that's OK.) SteveBaker (talk) 01:19, 4 January 2008 (UTC)