Talk:Synchrotron Radiation Source

Edit request

I think I have a conflict of interest as an ex-employee at the Synchrotron Radiation Source and author of an article in one the new references I propose, and therefore should not edit this page directly. However I am a newcomer to editing the wikipedia and may have misunderstood. Please let me know if I should make the edits myself.

Several of the links referenced by this article are no longer available and I suggest replacements. The text needs updating a little to reflect the passage of time (the facility is no longer in decommissioning) and there is a website and document providing historical information that should be of interest to readers wishing to know more that did not exist when the article was first constructed.

Please change the references to be as follows:

1.

2.

3. , Chapter 4

4. , Chapter 13

5. Qureshi, Yakub (4 September 2008), Switched off...lens that gave us iPod, Manchester Evening News, retrieved 2008-08-04

6.

7. Performance of the Daresbury SRS With An Increased Brilliance Optic (PDF), CERN, retrieved 2009-08-11

Text changes:

First paragraph Line 2: change existing ref 1 to new ref 1, ref 2 and ref 3. Line 3: delete existing ref 2, which doesn't work now. I don't know a suitable replacement. Line 3: replace ref 3 with new ref 4. Line 4: "..in August 2008.." -> "..on 4 August 2008..." Line 5: stop sentence after "...operation." and put new refs 4 and 5 after "operation"

History section Line 2: replace old ref 6 with new ref 4. Add second paragraph "There is a website [6] containing reminiscences of the early days of synchrotron radiation research at Daresbury Laboratory [], as well as accounts of the scientific work on the SRS by those who came to Daresbury to carry out their research programmes. The complete and comprehensive document of refs [4] and [5] gives many examples of the economic impact of the science performed and the technology developed at the SRS."

Thanks Idleparty (talk) 16:45, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello @Idleparty:! I've gone through and incorporated most of your suggestions. Let me know if I missed any. I rescued some of the old dead links with archived links of the way the pages looked in 2010. Also I've not added the text you suggested in the history paragraph. In general we don't use links to external websites in the text of our articles. Instead we use them to reference the article prose (if you look around at other articles, you'll see the same pattern). You seem to be knowledgeable about SRS so if you are interested it would be great if you could use some of those history documents to write up a more complete history of the facility. If you'd like help formatting that for Wikipedia, feel free to let me know by pinging me in a post (with [{ping|Ajpolino}}), posting on my talk page, or requesting an edit as you did here (and someone will respond eventually...). If you're comfortable formatting it yourself, feel free to post it here on your own. If you continue to be open about your connection to the SRS, I'm sure no one will have a problem with it. Thanks for your interest and for taking the time to find those sources! Happy editing! Ajpolino (talk) 00:14, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Hi @Ajpolino, thanks very much for making these edits and encouraging me to add some history material directly to the page. I'll give some thought to this and consult colleagues involved in our history project. Best wishes and thanks again. Idleparty (talk) 19:39, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Hello @Ajpolino: After a long delay, I have now taken up your suggestion of making some direct edits to the page, adding some specific comments on the scientific output and achievements of the SRS. I have placed references in the text, both to Wikipedia articles and to external source. However I think I should add the external links to the References section. I haven't been able to do that and looking at the help material on the subject is just making me more confused. I would be very grateful if you would point me in the right direction, please. Idleparty (talk) 17:26, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

@Idleparty: Hi there, it looks like you're using the visual editor which I'm not very well accustomed to, but I think when you edit there should be a toolbar at the top of your editing window that looks like the image here:

If you click the "cite" button on that toolbar and paste in your URL that should give the simplest version of a properly formatted citation. Like I said, my editing interface looks a bit different, so could you give that a try and let me know if it works or goes terribly wrong? Also could you point me to whatever help documentation you found confusing? The help documentation here at Wikipedia is currently a mess, and I'd like to improve it where possible. The full user guide for the visual editor is currently well-hidden here. Anyway, let me know how all that goes! Happy editing! Ajpolino (talk) 17:30, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

@Ajpolino: Hi Ajpolino, thanks very much for your helpful reply. It turned out to be very easy using the Cite button. My confusion arose from attempts to edit the Reference List. This elicited the message "References list/List of general references/This reference list is generated by a template, and for now can only be edited in source mode.". So I attempted to use Edit Sourcee on this section and this displayed "==References==/

", with no actual list to which I could add entries, and at the bottom of the page "This page is a member of 1 hidden category (help) : ". The help link here goes to a long document about Hidden Categories, within which there is the suggestion of using the "What links here" tool. This seemed to offer the possiblity of finding the reference list, but I could not see them in the list displayed. At this point I concluded that I didn't have sufficient understanding of the system to make progress. Thanks again for your help. Now that I have more confidence in being able to edit the article successfully, I may add more information. Idleparty (talk) 19:11, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

@Ajpolino: Oh but my message above magically produces the 'invisible' list (NOT visible during editing)! Idleparty (talk) 19:15, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

@Idleparty: Great! Yes, things here definitely take some getting used to. I'll think about that References editing problem -- it must be a common source of confusion (Briefly, things surrounded by squiggly brackets are "templates" which do various technologically advanced things. So the template {{Reflist}} takes all the references in the page text and automagically displays them as the pretty list at the bottom)... Anyway, I hope you decide to stick around and add more information here (and maybe even at other articles?). When you inevitably encounter other bizarre aspects of the editing interface, feel free to let me know here or at my talk page. If I'm not around, you'll typically get a quick response at WP:TEAHOUSE where you can ask about any aspect of getting started here and folks will try to help. I hope all is well! Ajpolino (talk) 20:43, 18 February 2020 (UTC)