Yblumberg

A very overdue:

Welcome

Template-style welcome-message follows. Please forgive the one-tone-fits-all phrasing!

Hello, Yblumberg, welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay.

Here are a few pages that you might find interesting and helpful:

• Editing: The concise cheatsheet, or the short introduction guide
• Overview: The Wikipedia:Five pillars, condensed philosophy and policies
• Wikipedia:Featured articles, the standard that all articles are trying to achieve (theoretically, eventually)
• Our Wikipedia:Manual of Style
• Help:Contents, the main help menu

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages (the discussion tab) using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date.

Don't be afraid of making mistakes, as all changes are kept, and problems can be easily reverted with the "history" tab of each page.

If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! -- Quiddity (talk) 06:48, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Templates

Thanks for the welcome. If I want to try and go about editing a biography about someone, how do I decide which template, if any, I should use? Then how do I actually use it? I assume this information is available already somewhere so I don't mind if you just direct me to it (I just don't know where to find). yblumberg (talk) 05:29, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure which particular type of template you mean. The main biography varieties are probably Infobox templates (the summary boxes in the top-right of many articles). Info about those can be found via this (incomplete) index of some of them: Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Infoboxes.

The other types of templates are listed at length, at Wikipedia:Template messages. Source templates (citations), and Cleanup templates (maintenance tags) are two of the most common types.

If instead, you mean an "empty page skeleton" type template - a page structure with blank elements to fill in - we don't have anything like that (as far as I know). Each article is written from scratch! Any existing articles can be used as a guide though. See Wikipedia:Your first article for an extensive help page. (Feel free to ask as many questions as you like. I'm happy to help. Our help pages are almost endless, but the main Help:Contents menu is not too bad as a starting point, if you like browsing ;) -- Quiddity (talk) 08:36, 12 March 2010 (UTC)