Renathras

September 2018

Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Oregon. Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Repeated vandalism may result in the loss of editing privileges. Thank you. General Ization ^Talk 18:52, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at Oklahoma, you may be blocked from editing. General Ization ^Talk 18:53, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

(Admin: See recent editing history of 2600:8805:1000:8300:A576:4677:4996:D4C0 (talk · contribs · WHOIS). General Ization ^Talk 18:56, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

@General Ization: If further templates are needed for this user, due to extenuating circumstances about previous activity, please consider a reset to uw-vandalism1 for the next unrelated occurrence, in light of the long message this user left at my talk page, now moved below. Mathglot (talk) 20:01, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

I have removed the Lv4 warning since the editor is now discussing their edits. General Ization ^Talk 21:24, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Welcome

Hello Renathras and welcome to Wikipedia! We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your contributions do not conform to our policies. For more information on this, see Wikipedia's policies on vandalism and limits on acceptable additions. If you'd like to experiment with the wiki's syntax, please do so in the sandbox (but beware that the contents of the sandbox are deleted frequently) rather than in articles.

If you still have questions, there is a new contributors' help page, or you can to ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia.

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
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I hope you enjoy editing and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! Mathglot (talk) 19:43, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Re: Demographic Tables

Moved from User talk:Mathglot § Re: Demographic Tables

The following message authored by Renathras (talk · contribs) is addressed to User:Mathglot and originally appeared on their talk page at the link above.

Good afternoon!

I wanted to reply to your message and...can't really figure out how to send messages on Wikipedia, so sorry if this is the wrong place, please remove at your leisure.  :) But anyway, I was using the Wikipedia pages to build a data table on demographics because I'm curious about data for majority-minority/minority-majority status across the US States, and long-term trends are interesting to me in general. MOST of the pages had such data tables, but the data table listed the White demographic in total (without respect to the Hispanic ethnicity of the population) while the paragraphs immediately above generally listed the Non-Hispanic White population, but not the Hispanic White population (which can be found either on the quick data pages of the 2010 US Census or by simple subtraction). So, needless to say, I was doing this on each page/table myself to get the data to put into my spreadsheet that I'm generating. The reason the division is valuable for the dataset is that Non-Hispanic Whites are the demographic that determines if a state is majority-minority or not, not the overall White population (for example, in California where the overall White population is ~60% but the Non-Hispanic White population is around 36%, making the state majority-minority with an expansively diverse overall demographic makeup).

And I stopped and thought "Wikipedia is supposed to be edited by the body of Humanity to enhance our overall knowledge, right? I'm doing all this work, but it's not being shared with anyone, even though the data is right there. So why don't I make these changes as I go through all the pages to provide that data/ease of reading for other people in the future?" That is to say: I was always taught to share.  :)

That, and some pages (like New Mexico's) didn't have a data table AT ALL, so I had to generate one from scratch. Granted, this pointed me to the US 2010 Census page which I can use to get all of my data from (though it's slightly less user friendly than Wikipedia's pages), but it supplies the data and is the source proper for the data anyway.

I apologize for any offense and won't make any more edits. I just was trying to help out since I'm already doing this work anyway, and in the case of the pages that had no table, was trying to bring them in line with the other pages. My base assumption was that since the other US State pages had such data tables, it would make sense for all of them to and it seems the community would accept the presence of the tables (since the majority of the states already have them). But I will cease making any further edits, and sorry for the inconvenience.  :( Although I'll note there are probably a few more pages without data tables at all. Should they be left without data tables..? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Renathras (talk • contribs) 19:23, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi, Renathras, first of all, there are lots of rules around here and it takes a while to get on board. You maybe had an excess of enthusiasm about sharing your data, but it's clear to me that you are editing in good faith, and are here to improve the encyclopedia. And sharing your data is great, and I encourage you to continue doing that, but maybe when you have an idea for an improvement that could affect multiple articles, try it out on one article first, then give it a rest for a while, and see how other editors react to your change. If there is no objection, you could start to edit other articles in the same way. Even better: for any systematic change like that, raise a discussion on the article Talk page first, or on an appropriate WikiProject, and get consensus from other editors, before attempting your systematic change.

We do want good, new, editors here who are eager to add new content to articles, so please don't be discouraged by this minor snafu. Just go a little slower, read up on some of the links in the Welcome message above, and if in doubt, seek consensus first at Talk. Feel free to contact me anytime you have questions. Also, you can ask a question here on your talk page, and just add {{HelpMe}} to your message, and someone will be around to help. Mathglot (talk) 19:55, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Oh, one final note: Is uniformity bad? Some of the data tables are different than others (4 decades vs 3 decades, for example), and some have the demographic data in a different order vice the Census order (in fact, NONE of them are in the Census order...), with a few also having differently built tables in the source code. I was also trying to tidy all of that up some, but someone probably should at some point. If they're all set up uniform, then that would make edits easier and make it easy to update them with the next set of Census data in ~3 years. Or, at least, that seems rational/logical to me... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Renathras (talk • contribs) 19:23, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Uniformity may be desirable across articles in certain areas. Articles about species, for example, almost always have a standard {{taxobox}} at the top right. To my knowledge, there is no Wikipedia guideline specifically addressing the question of consistency across articles, however (maybe there should be). In any case, the bottom line is that pretty much everything is subject to consensus. In a case like this where the uniformity of demographic data presentation would be in tables across multiple articles, the trick, imho, would be to find the right venue to place your question in order to seek consensus. I think it should probably be in a WikiProject affecting U.S. States, maybe at the Talk page of Wikipedia:WikiProject United States. I would suggest creating a new section at WT:USA, make a brief (to avoid a wall of text that nobody will read), neutrally worded question stating what you would like to do across what articles and why, and wait for feedback from other editors there before actually changing any articles. Feel free to {{ping}} me there so I can watch or contribute to the discussion there. And good luck! Mathglot (talk) 20:25, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

By the way, sometimes it makes sense to advertise a discussion in more than one WP:WikiProject, but in order to avoid fragmenting the discussion, it's desirable to keep all the replies in one place. So, for example: if after raising your discussion at WT:USA you decided you wanted to let the folks at WP:WikiProject Geography to know about your question as well, you'd place an even briefer mention at WT:GEOGRAPHY with a link pointing them to the discussion at WT:USA. So: decide on one Talk page location to have your discussion, and for any other notices you place to advertise it, they should all point to the unique discussion location. Make sense? If you want to do this and are not sure how, just {{ping}} me below (or on my Talk page) and I can help; or use {{HelpMe}} in a new section. Mathglot (talk) 20:48, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Reaching out

Renathras, I noticed you haven't edited in a few days. I just wanted to reach out out to you, and see how you are doing. I wanted to make sure that you are aware that your contributions are welcome at Wikipedia. Sometimes getting on board at the beginning can be a bit rocky, because it might seem like there are a lot of rules out there, and while you're learning the ropes, you might bump into some of them. I know I've done that before; we all have. I'd like to see you continue to edit, because I can tell you are on the right track. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to assist. You can also ask any question you like here on your talk page and get expert help in response; just raise a new section below, and add the token {{HelpMe}} somewhere in your comment, and someone will respond. You can also check out the tea room. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 07:10, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Well, I read Wikipedia a lot, so mostly I've just been reading various articles (as well as news and other things), but I haven't seen anything in particular I have any idea how to improve or suggest improvements to.  :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Renathras (talk • contribs) 23:22, September 6, 2018 (UTC)

One of the cool things about editing here, is that except for certain highly technical articles, anybody can edit anything. You don't really need to know anything about the topic when you start out. I'm no expert on medieval Catalan history, but I got interested in something I read someplace, and now I've edited several articles on that topic. Really, all you have to do, is pick a topic you're interested in, read up on the topic in some reliable sources (see identifying reliable sources), then summarize what you've read in your own words, create a citation for it which identifies the source (see Help:Citations), and add your summary to the article along with the citation. That's all there is to it.

One word of advice: while you're starting out, avoid controversial topics. You can tell if something is controversial, if there's a lot of strife on the Talk page, or a lot of reversions in the History (look for the words "Undid" or "Reverting" in the History tab of the article). Other than that, just go for it!

By the way, please also read up on two things that help keep discussions on Talk pages (like this one) orderly:

1. WP:THREAD, which is about using the colon symbol ( ':' ) to indent replies in an ongoing discussion.
2. WP:SIGNATURE, which is about signing your Talk page comment, by adding four tildes ( '~~~~' ) at the very end, just before you click 'Publish'.

Good luck! Mathglot (talk) 10:10, 7 September 2018 (UTC)