JCNSmith

Welcome to Wikipedia!

Hello, JCNSmith, and welcome to Wikipedia! Wikipedia is one of the world's fastest growing internet sites. We aim to build the biggest and most comprehensive encyclopaedia in the world! To date we have over four million articles in a host of languages. The English language Wikipedia alone has 1,299,480 articles! But we still need more! Please feel free to contribute your knowledge and expertise to our site.

Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial (this is really great for getting used to editing Wikipedia)
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

Also, don't worry too much about being perfect. Very few of us are! It might be a good idea to read this to see how you can avoid making common mistakes, though.

Just to give you a really basic overview so you don't make any mistakes early:

1. Wikipedia keeps a neutral point of view policy, meaning that all contributions must not be biased one way or the other. Even if both biases are presented, it is still not allowed on Wikipedia.
2. Only public domain resources can be copied directly to Wikipedia without permission — this does not include most web pages.
3. Be bold! In my opinion, this may be Wikipedia's most important policy. Go ahead and edit a page! Don't worry about "ruining" other's work, this is a wiki! (Of course, major changes should probably be proposed on talk pages to achieve consensus, but don't be scared!)

We hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please always sign your name on talk pages (but not articles!) using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the time and 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! —Mets501 (talk) 12:18, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

On Time

You have interesting points on the subject. I wonder if you were interested to hear mine. Genezistan (talk) 13:48, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Your query on referencing

Hi, JCNSmith. Wikipedia can be a steep learning curve, and the reams of instructions and policies (although comprehensive and illuminating) can also be intimidating. However, the upside is that there is no expectation on anyone to be miraculously competent from the outset, no stigma attached to getting things inadvertently wrong in good faith, and plenty of people happy to help. For example, I removed the indents you'd put at the start of each line in your reply at Wikipedia:HD#Repairing_a_butchered_entry, because indents make text render incorrectly on the page. Simple, but not intuitive - it took me a good while to work out what was going on when I first hit this problem!

To add the reference manually in the exact form you describe, you would follow these steps. 1) Click on the Edit tab at the top of the page. 2) Place your cursor at the exact point in the text where you wish the reference index number to appear (ie in the text itself, NOT the section headed "References"). 3) Type exactly the following text into the article at that point: <ref>{{Smolin, Lee. ''The Trouble with Physics''. p 256}}</ref>. 4) Save, with an edit summary along the lines of "Added a reference". Note that the sets of doubled apostrophes (not quote marks) surrounding the book's title is how you tell the software to render those words in italic. 5) Provided your article has a References section containing the {{reflist}} template, you will find numbering and position have all been done automatically and your reference is where you want it. However, it isn't perfect, because you haven't given the publisher or publication date/edition of the book you're referencing.

Your Ref Toolbar can help you do this and other jobs more easily and will prompt you to add all the relevant information for a good citation. Go into edit mode, look at the top of the edit window and you should see a row of symbols and characters. Click on "Cite", and then on the drop-down box labelled "Templates". Position your cursor at the point in the article where the reference index number will go, choose WEB(site), NEWS(paper), BOOK or JOURNAL, and fill in the fields as appropriate. When you save, the reference will be made for you.

Hope this helps. Karenjc 17:57, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't want to confuse things, but I don't think the curly brackets should be there. That will look for a Template called "Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics", won't it? I think it should just be <ref>Smolin, Lee. ''The Trouble with Physics'' p 256''</ref> --ColinFine (talk) 21:45, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, ColinFine; I think we've got the problem fixed. Appreciate all the help. JCNSmith (talk) 22:21, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Colin, for the correction. I'd rewritten the post twice in an attempt to show a really clear distinction between using templates and bare references, and managed to leave the curly brackets in for the latter, mea culpa. It was late here, and there was a certain amount of wine involved ... Which just goes to underline my point that it's easy to make mistakes editing Wikipedia, but there are plenty of helpful people around to fix them and the cumulative effect is definitely positive. Karenjc 06:57, 18 June 2012 (UTC)