User:Authorknitter/Tips and Tricks

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A Helping Hand or More

I generated this in early April 2006 for another newbie, so if something isn't quite edited now into context, forgive me, as there is other complications for him.

While this is dense, magnifying your browser font should give some relief. (Try CTRL-'+' or on IE6 View-->Text Size, which can be added to the IE6 toolbar).

Getting back to hard to read... I was deliberately trying to incorporate a few 'behind the scenes' tricks as a way of getting some useful how-to knowledge into the hands of the various beginner-editors I've made this accessible to since it's first inception.

Take it one section at a time and examin it in edit and 'preview mode' with another browser window open to the original document.

Chains of Edit Windows

'Running before you walk', or 'just so you know' the possibilities! <G>

Note when you click a link in 'Preview mode', even though you may have edited the page (without yet saving), you can still navigate down the chain of links to look around, or pop back to your user page to save a note, or answer a message on your talk page— provided you are prepared to 'return' back to the edit window and save eventually.
- This allows you to simultaneously be editing or looking at a whole lot of 'Pages' (such as 'checking a link'— so it's NOT going to a redirect or disambig page—a good practice!, or for a Category or some other such related information (e.g. an external link) to the article except that no 'hanging' changes are applied to the Wikipedia database until you backspace or back click to your last edit window for a given URL (page) and (then, or eventually <G>) click the save button to put it into the data base. (Iterim changes are stored on YOUR harddisk, not on Wikipedia, so failing to save means a waste of your time— any edit changes are gone/vaporware). This is called a string of edits, or an 'edit stack', but such does allow for making related edits and checking of links before finalizing an given large edit.
- Caveat: When going down a link chain in preview mode and adding links or such information to the current edit window when there is a need to grab several things in your cut buffer, don't preview again, but tab forward until you get all the several things you want to add. This saves time as you won't have to re-update all the intermediate pages. When everything you want is tucked in nice a tighty, then preview again. At that point you fork, and cannot 'tab forward' down the chain you just grabbed references from, unless you reload the pages and re-do the chain of links like you never navigated down it in the first case.
- I don't recommend going more than three deep or so, as it's easy to get confused, and every subsequent 'Preview' adds another layer of now irrelavant 'looks' (intermediate pages generated by edit-preview actions) that must be backed through to close your original edit page.
- Lastly, you might wonder what happens if you back too far. Well, if you go to save a 'prior edit window' instead of the 'last edit window', you'll see the same notice as if you and someone else are editing the article at the same time. It says Edit Conflict. In this case, if it's you alone causing the problem, you should be able to again (still) 'Tab Forward' (SHIFT+BACKSPACE or Clicks) to the correct edit window, and save there. Take anything you may have saved in the wrong edit window with you in your cut buffer, and put in the right place before saving!
- Recovering from an edit conflict with another user can be much more complicated, so we can deal with that another time. It won't happen often.

On WikiCulture

There's a few good things in here about WikiCulture, as we are a online community, and so have various practices that seem 'different' and even 'alien' at first blush.

For example: 'Snooping' is pretty much 'expected' by most wikipedians as a method of keeping informed (or learning) as to what is going on.

So don't be surprised if someday someone answers a question you asked off some third editors talk page ahead of whenever who owns the talk page might get around to you. For example, 'they' may be off wikiP for a while, and the other editor knows it. Many talks are 'Watch listed' (look at your user tabs— 'customers' and 'anoms' don't have them), so new posts are noted, and the 'stranger' party is obviously trying to help and is probably doing so.
Such help aids two — you needing the answer, and 'they' who no longer needs to answer you in what may be a busy schedule.
It also aids you in giving you a new and friendly 'contact' in the wikiCommunity.

So all around, it's a good thing.

Spaces

Wikipedia Spaces are segments of the database dedicated to specific tasks. There is a Category space, a template space, a user space, and image space, and a wikipedia (administration) space, plus the ice-berg they all service: The Main or article space. All the above have an associated Talk 'co-space'. You don't have to be much brighter than a burned out bulb to see that Talk pages must be fairly important. It's how we communicate and interact as a community. Decisions are 'joint' by consensus, and contention, while not uncommon, is expected to be dealt with professionally, dispassionately, and above all, courteously.

On top of the above there are Special pages, which are constantly being updated, and are in fact merely a 'one-of-a-kind' report (Though you can build a url for one— the 'URL' calls for the report on the fly, as it were). These are a user's contribution's page, an article or talk or all the above 'spaces' history pages.

Conventions

For similar reasons, 'You' will be expected to snoop yourself— it's a great way to learn good techniques as many user pages are 'fancied up', it also holds down some on repetative questions if you skim past a post on 'your issue'— which may be shared by some other, after all. So read and browse a lot, and don't feel like you are invading anyone's 'privacy'.

Perhaps more to the point, some 'old-wiki-hands' generally expect you to look on their talk pages for any answers you might ask. The easiest way to do this is to open a seperate browser page (or tab), and set it to viewing your 'watch page'— and every so often, refreshing it to see what changed. If 'JoeBlow' answers your question left in a section Can you tell me about Blah, his talk page reflected on your 'watch list' will show an edit to that section, and if he's not making other edits there, then you can see it soon after. The alternative is you must manually check for your answer over and over. That's one reason I don't use such a system. I may answer on my talk to a long query, but I will also always post a short "see my answer to your question on user talk:fabartus#Section title" on YOUR talk page. (Trust me! <G>) I see this as an elementry courtesy.
Other talk conventions will usually be posted by the editor on the top of their user talk page. Try to read and comply with their wishes.
Note: There is no such thing as 'privacy' on Wikipedia— everything we do or say is expected to be civil (WP:CIV), professional (WP:NPOV and WP:V), and open.
The one exception is that 'User' pages, including sub-pages are generally only modified by their owner or by permission of same (Say co-building a new article page not yet ready for article space), and are still not private. They are however outside the search engine, and private from the greater world on the Web.

Some tricks and more info

You'll be watched closely for a couple of months as a newbie, (or Anom., but not as much as the Anoms are watched.) If (Whenever) you forget to log in and then make an edit, your edit will show up in the page 'history' as an IP address. To see what other unattributed unlogged edits you may have made as well, you can go to the coresponding user pages matching your IP simply by entering your IP in the search window preceded by 'user:', or 'user talk:', then clicking the 'user contributions' link there. Thus you can navigate to my page, and see what I've been up to, or to check and see if I'm on WikiP working so you can get a quick answer. Similarly, you can cut and paste (CnP) 'user:Mel_Etitis' or 'user_talk:Mel_Etitis' from this page as you first read it and put it there in the same search window , which will take you to his user pages.
When 'wikified' as links the equivelent imbedded navigation hyperlinks are: user:Mel_Etitis / user talk:Mel_Etitis, as mine are user:fabartus / user talk:fabartus. (He's a good admin to know for all that he's 'a bloody Brit'! <G> I'm not an admin, but just a heavy contributing editor.)
1. I should note: editing someone's user page is a big no-no (clarification: You can edit to LOOK and STUDY or steal (copy stuff), but not to save), but you ARE encouraged to read user pages before perhaps asking a question better asked elsewhere (e.g. I know of two High School high achievers that do little article adding, but do a whole lot of editorial copy editting. Asking them a technical question on something is the wrong person.)
2. Conversely, Talk Pages, including User Talk pages are considered part of wikiDocumentation, and are held in common for all. In other words, they are proprietary company documents, not personal documents.
3. So to keep something to you alone, put it on your user:page or in a user sub page like this document. But not in User Talk. For example, I cut this out from my original 'post' to a newbie and created a user subpage called Welcome message by generating this link User:fabartus/Welcome_message (the very first time). When I previewed it, the link was red, indicating an invalid reference inside the database (empty article title) and as far as the wiki search engine in concerned. Once I preview and have a redlink, I then click the redlink and paste in some contents, or edit in from the keyboard. When I save, the new page exists. So you now see a bluelink to this former new page. (That's how to create a new page from within an older page edit.)
or a similar link— Unwikfied: Gets to my talk page. These are the three of the four ways of getting around in Wiki and/or in using links, so edit this section and study the differences. (And now you know how to create a new page from scratch as well.)
The fourth is by direct URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:24.61.229.179&redirect=no an explicit cite here, and a link to my IP (note the &redirect=no, a form should you want to edit it and delete the redirect (Don't!, now you know one way to edit such); the point is the IP and User:BlahBlahBlah are entirely interchangable, assuming the IP isn't an institutional gateway like a library firewall—then it could mean hundreds of users.
User_talk:24.61.229.179 gets you to the other more indirectly... you're on my talk, but with a bluelink indicating you went through the redirect up near the article title. By clicking on the blue link, you will go to the page redirecting you here. So you can edit that away too (Don't!).
My user page has a lot of good stuff on it. It's part of the wikiCulture that people expect you to steal things from user and Talk pages, so open up one edit window where you want to put it, and the edit window where the source is, and copy away using CnP from window to window... back out or jump to a new URL in the source window edit, and no harm done. It's also pretty much invisible and untraceable. I've a group of interesting user pages (now dated, I suspect some have changed) that use various WikiMetaLanguage effects and lists. Poke around, and browse 90%:10% editing, the ten will be much more productive that way all the sooner and can become 99%+ soon enough. If you're into sci-fi I'm working virtually alone on a ten plus article series of articles (sadly neglected) talk: 1632 series will get you to most current planned links about a section or two down.
I'm around often right now, and glad to help. If I'm not actively on Wiki, the best and fastest way to get me is generally by an email... I tend to long careful edits. A whole chain of short edits just messes up the history pages, which are a very useful tool. By that link, you can see that you can preview an edit, then follow links in the generated copy downstream to check them. That's how I get into such chains of edits. It does require a lot of using of BACKSPACE to get back to the most recently previewed changes... especially if you get five or six articles downstream with nested edits and (usually multiple) preview looks along the way! I don't recommend it, but don't often take my own advice either! <G>
You can see from this whole page, how to place numbered points in a document. I could undensify it, but would loose the numbers unless manually inserted.
1. Here's the next level of numbered indents. Wiki works with browser text size scaling, so when making an edit that moves around images and such (tables), check the wrapping and new placement of such changes by zooming in an out while viewing the effects on the whole. Sometimes you can fill up a lot of otherwise whitespace by correctly placing the image within the text, and/or by changing its thumbnail size (px).
  1. Caveat#1: Check your image placement using several other skins with similar zooming back and forth. The various skins make a fairly significant display difference as you will quickly see examining the same article.
  2. Caveat#2: Do the same checks with another browser. Many people only use one browser (IE6), so that should be one. The other ought can be most any other—the heart of this goes to technical matters involving Java Script and HTML implimentations, and the Anti-Trust Lawsuites' by the US Dept. of Justice and various states were rooted in the dispute which is essentially one of Microsoft versus the world on these technical issues. The result: Some webpages work well with both types, most work best with a non-IE6 browser like Firefox, and some work best only with IE6. Hence, the need to check unknown script effects totally invisible to us simple users.
2. Which is useful, depending on the context and subject matter. Some boilerplate templates (e.g. Battle of... articles, say Battle of Tsushima) crowd things aside, and you have to play around to see how well you can make them look.
  1. The article Nagasaki, Nagasaki is illustrative of whitespace voids, or was some months ago before I fixed it up. It had an obnoxious amount of whitespace when I started editing it(1).
  2. Note the string: "Nagasaki&oldid=20698714", in computer science the number is a unique 'keycode', and every page in wikipedia has one, so nothing is ever truly lost once it's saved.).
  3. See if you can find that change back in the article history (hint: search on fabartus in the history tab, change the 'edits displayed' count to something large, then search).
  4. When you do locate it 'Check' the click-circle, and then click on the Compare selected versions button and you should see something like this (ref: "Nagasaki&diff=49188204&oldid=20698714")
  5. Exactly what you'll see depends on all the intervening edits your 'newest version' is likely to be other than '49188204'.
  6. However, This version (ref: "Nagasaki&diff=current&oldid=20698714") should show you what 'diff' you can do 'now' manually exactly... even next if 'now' is next year!
3. You can also use such direct addressing in the URL to compare a file 'off line' (i.e. A 'major' article update generated over several sessions, for example) in one's sandbox (generic term for a private file in user space like this one) to a file in article space, but I'll spare you the somewhat complicated details for now.
And (returning to 'numbered indents' as the topic) one can return to the main flow thusly. (And Note in the above that Para 8.2.1 shows one method, albeit somewhat obsolete, of entering an inline reference 'cite' (footnote) supporting a statement in an article. (we're progressing! There are two other methods now in place as well. See: Wikipedia:Footnotes)
So make yourself at home. It's a really important good habit to puruse a Talk page, and the article history page before editing a matured article. I have some links to catalog type pages where articles are immature. But this is Wiki, one edits where one's interests take them.
Some good places to start getting a feel for the culture (And it is a community with it's own rules and expectations of and on members) are these (mainly talk pages). The one we discussed above is a particularly educational series of pages. Have a couple of spare hours before reading!
1. WP:VP - The village Pump is the community center BB of sorts
2. WP:AfD - The Articles for deletion debate pages. These are also excellent for meeting up and comers and established Admins that you can ask for help. My page has link to all the Admins somewhere under useful links.
3. WP:RFC - Request for Comments
4. WP:JIMBO - Jimmy Wales own talk page. A lot of folks congregate and it serves to give you an idea of hot topics. Follow some of them to their own talks, as they are mostly very senior or very presumptuous. Check their contributions to see which.
One last steer:
1. If you follow the category at the bottom of my user pages, you should get to a list with some poking around entitled 'Wikipedians Welcome Committee' or such like.
2. (You can cheat and start at CAT:CAT and work your way back down if you can't find a way up— it is there, however. These two exercises will give you an excellent peek into the category system and empower you to get around inside wiki all the better)
3. Note that a categorized page has a set of links at the bottom (Depends on your user skin set in your preferences)
4. That link should give you a list of editors and admins that have volunteered to help new editors such as yourself. Another avenue would be to look at the categories at the bottom of the first user who left you the welcome message. These three ways should get you to the same list of admins. I should copy a link to that myself for my user page!
Suggest you set up a Bookmark/Favorites folder (Term depends on which browser you're using) that is alphabetically near the top, to hold only useful wikipedia links. e.g. Mine is called 'aWiki', so it floats (above) alphabetically over top of most all other folder names. Helps when want to put things in fast, or find them fast.
Look at the page history now to see the comparative edits. tab back and forward, and see the changes. Note that my signed edit ends in the status line with my signature but no time. ~~~ is signed in the status window, the four '~' version is used in talk pages which are like delayed time chat rooms.
Tables and tablelike resources:
1. Access some of the measurements and units articles like US customary units for tables examples.
2. Try history of Battles articles for examples of the later like Battle of Trafalgar (See the construct: {{Infobox Military Conflict ... }} in the edit window.

Some Links to Explore

Wikipedia:FAQ -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal#Wikipedia_by_department -- Wikipedia:Community_Portal#Wikipedia_by_department
Help:Contents -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
Wikipedia:Newcomers_help_page -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newcomers_help_page (Ask questions in near real time here- when a wikifriend is not around and need is upon you!)

Lastly, once you've seen this, open a second browser window to it, and puruse the finished version in one, and the edit window version in the other. Some good 'starter' tricks herein if I do say so myself! This should be enough to get you going and fill up lots of WikiTime with educational direct browsing! Good Hunting!
And Enjoy!