User talk:Tollens/Archive 5

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Question from Mckenziehill11 (17:10, 24 January 2024)

Hi,

I tried to create an article last week and have heard no update on the publication status of that. Do you have any updates for me there? --Mckenziehill11 (talk) 17:10, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi Mckenziehill11! It looks like Draft:Dave Rose was declined on the 18th – the reason given is that the draft doesn't demonstrate that significant coverage of Rose exists in reliable sources, and that much of the article is not supported by sources at all. In terms of the first reason: your reference 6 is excellent, and is exactly what reviewers are looking for, but on its own it does not demonstrate what we call notability on Wikipedia (though that term is misleading – it has nothing to do with the typical sense of the word and everything to do with what has been published about a topic already). The rest of the references in the draft either don't mention Rose at all, or only mention him in passing, neither of which advance a claim of notability.

In terms of the second reason for the decline: nearly everything in a Wikipedia article should be supported by citations to reliable sources, and unfortunately your own personal knowledge or original research can't be used because readers have no way to verify that the content is true (though I don't doubt that it is).

Like many newcomers, it seems you may have written your draft backwards – this is when you write from what you know personally before looking for sources. It is always far easier to find the sources you will use first, then write the article using only the material found in the sources – not only does this ensure that all of what you write is well-sourced, but it proves that reliable sources do talk about the subject (because if they didn't you couldn't have written the article).

You're more than welcome to continue working on the article and submit it for review again when you think it's ready – if you need help with anything in particular please let me know and I'd be happy to try and assist. Tollens (talk) 22:41, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Question from PlaneCrashKing1264 on 2024 Korochansky Ilyushin Il-76 crash (14:55, 25 January 2024)

How do I add stuff to the Infobox? --PlaneCrashKing1264 (talk) 14:55, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

@PlaneCrashKing1264: The infobox used on that page is Template:Infobox aircraft occurrence – each template page (nearly) always has documentation about what parameters it accepts. You can change existing text simply by rewriting the value for that parameter, and new parameters can be added by placing | parametername = The content that should be placed there as a new line within the template. Unfortunately, there's no way to customize the actual text of each header in the infobox (like changing "Aircraft type" to "Type of aircraft", for instance) without editing the template directly. Tollens (talk) 23:06, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Question from Akash Ahmed50 on Expo 2010 pavilions (20:19, 26 January 2024)

Bank of America Md Akash Ahmed --Akash Ahmed50 (talk) 20:19, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Hello Akash Ahmed50! I'm not sure what you mean, do you have a question about using or editing Wikipedia? Tollens (talk) 20:28, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks and further question

Thank for your assistance on the Help desk! I have a followup question. For Wikipedia:Community feature requests/preload I want to put ~~~~ after "Proposer" and also a comment like <!-- Generally looks like *'''Support'''--~~~~ --> in the Voting section. How do I do this? I have tried to read the documentation but I am none the wiser.--Commander Keane (talk) 00:04, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi Commander Keane! Assuming the page is being used like described at mw:Manual:Creating pages with preloaded text, breaking up certain elements using <noinclude></noinclude> should keep them from working earlier than they should. Each time you want ~~~~, for instance, you can put ~~<noinclude></noinclude>~~ instead, and the noinclude tags will be removed after the preload is used. You'll also have to do this with the HTML comment to keep the inner noinclude tags from being treated as a comment, so to produce the comment you have above, you should be able to use <!<noinclude></noinclude>-- Generally looks like *'''Support'''--~~<noinclude></noinclude>~~ --<noinclude></noinclude>> or anything else that breaks both the comment tags and the signature. Tollens (talk) 22:58, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Worked like a charm :-) --Commander Keane (talk) 19:51, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Mentor?

Apparently you're assigned as my mentor. What does that even mean? vghfr 05:13, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi vghfr! It just means that you can ask me any questions you have about using or editing Wikipedia, similar to places like the Teahouse or help desk. If you don't need any help, you don't have to ask me anything at all – I'm just here as an extra resource if you need it! Tollens (talk) 21:06, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Ah, ok. That's pretty cool! Thanks! vghfr 21:14, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Wondering if i could get some script help

Hi! I'm trying to write a script that grabs data from an array and displays it in an UI box. I've got most of it working, but I can't figure out how to append a HTML break (<br/>). Not sure whether this is within the scope of your skills, but thought I'd ask anyways. (and if you have any any idea how to do this with json that would be awesome)

	while(step < citLength){
		caveat.appendChild(document.createTextNode(citPlainText[step]));
		step++;
	}

(if you need further context the script is here) vghfr 04:01, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

@vghfr: You should be able to add caveat.appendChild(document.createElement("br")); right under the second line you have there, I believe. I'm not entirely certain what you mean by doing it with JSON? If you mean you want to append a string with HTML in it, you can do that using insertAdjacentHTML with "beforeend". You could then do something like caveat.insertAdjacentHTML("beforeend", "Some text<br>More text");, passing it a string you've loaded from your JSON file. If you're just trying to figure out how to read the string from JSON, it looks like you'll want this documentation page. Tollens (talk) 04:38, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

In retrospect that seems super obvious, don't know why I didn't think of that lol. Thanks for the help, and I'll take a look at that documentation. vghfr 04:55, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

Question from BreeFitz80 on David Germano (12:48, 31 January 2024)

Just wanting to say hello 👋🏼 😘 --BreeFitz80 (talk) 12:48, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Hello BreeFitz80! Tollens (talk) 19:14, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for having me, think this is pretty darn cool. 172.59.81.124 (talk) 23:39, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2024).

Administrator changes

• Red-tailed hawk
• Robertsky

• Ameliorate!
• Ancheta Wis
• Anthony Bradbury (deceased)
• Cobi
• Ev
• Moondyne
• Worm That Turned

Bureaucrat changes

Worm That Turned

CheckUser changes

Wugapodes

Interface administrator changes

• Enterprisey
• Izno

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.

Technical news

• Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (T326065)

Arbitration

• Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
• Community feedback is requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at WP:AE.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2024 Steward elections will begin on 06 February 2024, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 27 February 2024, 14:00 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• A vote to ratify the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found here.
• Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes. Read more
• The Unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in February 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:01, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Lmk

Can you please tell me how I “copyright violations”??? Zacharythoden (talk) 09:06, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

I guess I get what you mean but I would wish next time you would just edit that part/those parts instead of changing my edit back to a redirect, and maybe be more specific??? Zacharythoden (talk) 09:10, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

@Zacharythoden: Apologies for not explaining at all – that's entirely my bad. All the prose in the article was directly copied from the sources that were provided after the text – citing a source does not allow you to use the text of that source verbatim. Removing the copyrighted text would have left no prose in the article, and rewriting all the copyrighted text would amount to writing the article, which at this particular moment I don't have the time or interest to do. However, it does have to be removed somehow – Wikipedia has to take copyright seriously because republishing copyrighted material creates legal issues. I see you've restored the content – it does still appear to contain copyright violations of [1] and [2] (the latter primarily because it is the entirety of the section; if expanded with original text the quote would be fine). These do need to be removed as soon as possible. I would highly recommend working on the article as a draft, then submitting it for review when you think it's ready, to avoid issues like this. Tollens (talk) 09:31, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from Jsamson2001 (17:26, 2 February 2024)

Is it ok to delete a source and replace it with a better one that provides similar information in greater depth? --Jsamson2001 (talk) 17:26, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

@Jsamson2001: Absolutely! If the existing source is of reasonable quality, you might want to leave the existing one and simply add the other one as well – if the existing source isn't very good at all, though, you can absolutely just remove it when you add the new one. Tollens (talk) 01:29, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks. The current source is quite poor so I think I will just can it. Jsamson2001 (talk) 01:59, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Also, I'm attempting a pretty drastic improvement to a particular article. Is the sandbox feature what people use to write out large additions in advance and then just paste them in? Jsamson2001 (talk) 02:01, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

@Jsamson2001: Generally if the article exists already it's better to work on it directly, saving every once in a while (when you finish a section works, or whatever other 'milestone' you prefer, it doesn't matter, really). While it isn't a huge deal, people will sometimes be upset by single edits that drastically change an article because they're harder to review. If it's a fairly long or popular article, or about a more controversial topic (though based on your contribution history it doesn't seem like any of that is the case), I would recommend discussing on the talk page before making sweeping changes. Tollens (talk) 02:22, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Awesome thanks. I was wondering about citing a book multiple times in an article. How would I cite which page each reference from the book comes from? I'm pulling heavily from a pretty comprehensive book on the subject of the article so I figured it would best to cite which page or page ranges each separate fact is pulled from. Thanks Jsamson2001 (talk) 03:32, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

@Jsamson2001: There are some instructions at Help:References and page numbers – any option on that page, except the first, works. Feel free to go with whichever you personally like best (unless one of those options is already being used in the article, in which case you should use the existing style). Tollens (talk) 04:50, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from Jsamson2001 (09:58, 5 February 2024)

Hi, thanks for all the help so far. I have a bit of a dumb question if you have time. I want to add a notes section separate to the main reference section and use it to cite specific page numbers of book sources. However I am having some trouble figuring out how to get it to work. Do you know if there's a tutorial somewhere that could walk me through doing this? --Jsamson2001 (talk) 09:58, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the somewhat delayed response Jsamson2001! The documentation page of Template:Sfn is perhaps such a tutorial, but it has a lot of information you probably won't need. Essentially, what you need to know is that if you're going with this method, you can move all the references to the end of the article (out of the actual text), and remove the <ref> tags around each one. Then, in place of where each reference should be, you can put {{sfn|FirstAuthor'sLastName|PublicationYear|p=PageNumber}}. A good example is at Template:Sfn#Usage. If you need to cite multiple pages, you can use pp=Start–End (two p's instead of one). Then, wherever you put {{reflist}}, all the citations will be rendered automatically. If you'd like an example, I'm happy to convert a reference in an article to this format so you can see what it should look like – I would just need the title of an article you're working on. Tollens (talk) 08:37, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from Ko Won & Ko Young-Ah (20:12, 7 February 2024)

Hello? Do I work on Homepage or the user page to get it started? --Ko Won & Ko Young-Ah (talk) 20:12, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi Ko Won & Ko Young-Ah! You're probably looking for a draft page – user pages are generally for communication with other editors (though if you'd prefer to make your draft there, that's fine). You can use the article wizard to create the page for you.

I notice that your username is the same as the people you are writing about – if you are looking to write an article about yourself, please be aware that autobiographies are strongly discouraged – if you meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria, other editors will create an article about you eventually.

Even if you aren't writing about yourself, there are still some important guidelines about what references have to exist before an article can be published. On Wikipedia we call this notability (though that wording is a bit misleading, it has nothing to do with the usual sense of the word). Typically, editors who are reviewing submitted drafts check that the article has at least three sources which are reliable, independent of the subject (so in an article about a CEO, not the company's website, for example), and contain significant coverage of the topic (not just a passing mention).

In terms of actually writing the article, one thing to remember is that all information should be verifiable – that means that a reader can easily check to make sure that the information comes from reliable sources like I talked about above. Typically, this means that most sentences should have a citation to another source, even if you already know a lot about the topic. Original research isn't permitted on Wikipedia, unfortunately.

I know this is a lot – writing a new article can be challenging. While you're more than welcome to jump right in, you might be interested in gaining some experience beforehand by editing some existing articles; the Task Center has some ideas on how to do so if you'd like. If you have any questions about any of this, or need help with anything in particular as you edit, please do feel free to ask me – I'm more than happy to help! Tollens (talk) 08:43, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from Hasibzafar456 (08:23, 8 February 2024)

How to edit articles with updated content? --Hasibzafar456 (talk) 08:23, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Hello Hasibzafar456! You should be able to edit most articles – there should be an "Edit" button near the top right of each page. Please keep in mind that all content on Wikipedia should be supported by citations to reliable sources – you can read more about how to do this at Help:Referencing for beginners.

If instead of "Edit", you see "View source", with a padlock icon nearby, this means the article is protected from being edited by new accounts to prevent disruption (though this shouldn't be an issue for more than 99% of articles). In those cases, you can instead submit an edit request – you can use the edit request wizard to help you do this. Tollens (talk) 08:53, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from JFrederique (20:28, 12 February 2024)

Hi, My account wasn't recently blocked because of a COI. I've been unblocked and would like to know how to go about writing an article? --JFrederique (talk) 20:28, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi JFrederique – you might find Help:Your first article a useful read. There are a couple rules that you should be aware of before you start writing, those being WP:Notability, WP:Neutral point of view, and WP:Verifiability.

The first, notability, deals with whether a given topic warrants its own article. In the case of writing about a company, the rules are more strict than normal (see WP:Notability (organizations and companies), especially this section of that page). An article about an organization needs to contain multiple references to independent, secondary, reliable sources containing significant coverage of the organization. Any source not meeting any one of those four criteria will not count toward establishing notability.

The second, neutral point of view, deals with the tone and content of articles. All Wikipedia articles should be written without bias, representing all significant published views published in reliable sources about the topic. Please pay special attention to this policy when writing with a COI – using promotional language in an article or attempting to simply use Wikipedia as a marketing tool will almost certainly result in your article not being published.

The third, verifiability, deals with referencing requirements: all material in the article needs to already have been published in a reliable source, ideally also being independent of the subject.

In order to create a draft, you can use the Article Wizard, which will set up some technical things for you. When you're done writing, you can click the button that will be at the top of the article saying "Submit the draft for review!", and another editor will review it for you. Just so you know – the "Publish page" button is essentially just a save button; you don't need to be completely done before clicking it. If you have any specific questions along the way, please feel free to ask and I'll do my best to point you in the right direction. Tollens (talk) 07:38, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Valerie Carter

Hi Tollens, can you assist me once again in adding something to the valerie carter page? Let me know. Thanks so much. OohChild (talk) 16:41, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi OohChild! I can absolutely give it a look! I see you've posted at the talk page, I assume that's what you're looking for help with. I might not be able to get to it particularly quickly, so I'll add a template to the top of the section that will notify other editors that you're looking for help. If nobody gets to it before me, I can certainly look over it, probably sometime within the next couple days. Just so you know, you can add this template yourself in the future by putting {{Edit COI}} right before your request. Tollens (talk) 10:22, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! OohChild (talk) 10:31, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from Wikidragonrider (07:49, 16 February 2024)

In the recent article , I have written about an entrepreneur. Wanted to know why it was a speedy deletion. It was their whole journey --Wikidragonrider (talk) 07:49, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

@Wikidragonrider: It appears the draft was deleted for being promotional of the subject. I am not able to view the deleted draft, but please keep in mind that Wikipedia is not a platform for advertising, promotion, or hosting of CVs – it is intended to cover topics neutrally and in an encyclopedic way, simply reporting what has already been said by others. Tollens (talk) 08:38, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from Canilda141414951 (23:32, 18 February 2024)

Hello , how do i create a citation --Canilda141414951 (talk) 23:32, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Hello Canilda141414951! There's a good tutorial available at Help:Introduction to referencing with VisualEditor – if you are still having trouble after reading through it please do ask. Tollens (talk) 00:30, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from Maha1432 on Talk:Bard (03:22, 19 February 2024)

اذكر الأنشطة المستخدمة في برنامج تعزيز السلوك الإيجابي --Maha1432 (talk) 03:22, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Hello Maha1432, I'm here to help answer questions about using or editing Wikipedia. Do you have a related question? Additionally, please use try to use English on this Wikipedia (or provide a machine translation if you cannot) – you may instead be interested in contributing to the Arabic Wikipedia. Tollens (talk) 04:00, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Question from MichellePereira01 (16:12, 21 February 2024)

Hi Tollens, Thanks for being my wiki mentor! I'm looking forward to editing my first wikipedia page. My topic of interest are the environmental governance of outer space. I just realised that after I created by wiki user account I forgot to click the link verifying my email account. That link has now expired. Will this prevent me from editing or adding a page?

Thanks, Michelle --MichellePereira01 (talk) 16:12, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi MichellePereira01, and welcome to Wikipedia! Having a verified email address isn't required for any editing activities (and actually, having an account isn't either for most things!) – all it does is allow you to email other users (using the page Special:EmailUser or the link in the sidebar of someone else's user page), and reset your password if you forget it. You can also still verify your email if you'd like, by getting another verification link: instructions are available at Help:Email confirmation. Tollens (talk) 17:00, 21 February 2024 (UTC)