User:Yopienso/Sandbox2

Mrs. Warren's Profession

If you haven't seen the the changes and comments I made at Sandbox#Mrs. Warren's Profession: please start there! And do have some tea. What follows is lengthy, but it's simple little steps, and if you just read slow and carefully, without panicing, you should do fine. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:43, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Here's the link. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/gbshaw/Warren-Profession.pdf

I think it's free use even though it's copyrighted. ?? Maybe not.

First of all: what do you mean by "use"? To point to something, as when you cite it, is not "using" it, and copyright doesn't matter. Now if you were to copy part of that source, or the picture, that would be a problem. Even if it says "free for educational or non-commercial use", sorry, no, Wikipedia doesn't allow that. But to point to it, or even to use a short quote (but be sure to point to where you got it!), is okay.

Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw, the Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202 is a Portable Document File produced as part of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English, to free and easy access of those wishing to make use of them. Cover Design: Jim Manis; Henri Matisse Two figures Reclining in a Landscape (1921) Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University

Okay, now let's look at what you are trying to do.

This is what it looks like on the page; I want to replace the dead link on footnote #1.

1. ^ Shaw, George Bernard (1902). "Mrs. Warren's Profession". http://authorsdirectory.com/c/wrpro10.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-14 [dead link]

2. ^ "Mrs. Warren's Profession Study Guide". Guthrie Theater. 2003. pp. 25–26. http://www.guthrietheater.org/sites/default/files/mrswarren.pdf. Retrieved 2008-08-14.

3. ^ Lawrence, Dan H. “Victorians Unveiled: Some Thoughts on Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24 (2004): 40. Retrieved 2010-03-21.

4. ^ "Mrs. Warren's Profession", The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Century and Beyond (eds. Joseph Black, et al.) Canada: Broadview, 2008

5. ^ Dierkes-Thrun, Petra. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 49, Number 3, 2006, pp. 293-310 (Article)

What you have above is what you got from the displayed page. Recall what I said at Sandbox#Mrs. Warren's Profession: that is the result after the wiki software processes your editing and any of those magical incantations.

This is what it looks like when I'm on the edit page:

Not exactly. What you copied over from the edit page was still "magical". When you put it into this page, and clicked on "Save page", the wiki software processed all of that. In order to see here, on the displayed page, what you saw on the edit page you have to turn off the magic. For that we have a different kind of magic: "<nowiki>" and "</nowiki>". Now don't worry about that, the point is that now you can see that gobbledy-gook as gobbledy-gook, just as it appears when you edit it.


{{Reflist}}

{{George Bernard Shaw}}

[[Category:1893 plays]]
[[Category:Plays by George Bernard Shaw]]

[[cs:Živnost paní Warrenové]]
[[it:La professione della signora Warren]]
[[hu:Warrenné mestersége]]
[[ja:ウォレン夫人の職業]]
[[ro:Profesiunea doamnei Warren]]

I can make neither heads nor tails of that gobbledy-gook. Yopienso (talk) 05:36, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Give it another look. And don't let the strange characters throw you off, just consider: what do doubled square brackets mean? Wikilinks! I am sure you have seen them before. When you click on one of them (when the magic is turned on!) you go to some other part of Wikipedia. Actually, the last five are to articles in other Wikipedias. The initial pair of letters indicates which one: it = Italian, hu = Hungarian (Magyar), ja = japanese, ro = Romanian. I think cs is Czech. Go back to Mrs. Warren's Profession, click on "Languages", and you'll see these links. (Be adventuresome, and visit one of those.) The Japanese characters will probably look like little dominos unless your browser has a special extension.

The "Category:" links are just another place on Wikipedia, but these come with a little magic. First, they get placed at the bottom of the article. Second, they also cause the article in which they appear to be automatically included in the that category. Yeah, for about a day your sandbox was included in the category "Plays by George Bernard Shaw". Good reason for not bandying these about unless the magic is turned off.

About all that you really need to know about all of that stuff is 1) it goes at the bottom of the article, and 2) ignore it. At some point you may be creating articles where you add that stuff, but for now just leave it alone, don't worry about it.

Off the remaining gobbledy-gook I have already explained {{George Bernard Shaw}}: that's a template (magical incantation) that says "replace me with this fancy box"; you've seen that. And our old friend {{Reflist}} is just another template that collects whatever references it finds to make a list of footnotes.

And at this point I need to run off, so I'll have to explain about repairing the link later. The main thing for now is: understand that 1) "all that gobbledy-gook" is just the incantations for making magic happen, and that 2) there is a big difference between seeing all that before the magic happens, or if the magic is turned off, and after it's done its work. Understanding that should greatly relieve the frustration.

Totally lost and frustrated. Yopienso (talk) 05:36, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Hopefully that is old news. Don't let it get you down, and I'll check with you later. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:43, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Reflist is no friend of mine. I get so upset looking at this I haven't been able to even thank you for trying to help. Unfortunately, with all the time you've spent trying to help me, you've never given me just a simple 1, 2, 3 to follow. Reminds me of an old series of camera ads: "I don't want to ____________. (Fill in the blank with arcane photgraphical jargon.) I just want to take a picture. All I want to do is link to a copy of Mrs. Warren. There is nothing in the gobbled-gook for me to read and modify. With all your prior explanations you've never told me how to make a proper citation. I'm quitting. I hate this. I have too much to do in real life. Yopienso (talk) 17:39, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

You're right about one thing: "There is nothing in the gobbled-gook for me to read and modify." That's why I said (above): ignore it! Don't let it get to you. You're letting all that stuff intimidate you, and I am rather at a loss to understand why. It all looks forbiddingly complicated to you because you're looking at it slant-wise. That, I think, is the basic problem. (And letting yourself be intimidated.)

But just to break the ice, let's try "a simple 1, 2, 3".

Go to the article. In the References section (as displayed, not in the Edit box) go to the footnote you want to update, click on the "^". This should put you back into the text at the footnote link (the superscripted number in square brackets). Note the sentence where the footnote occurs.
Go up to the top of that section, click on "edit". That should put you into the edit window.
Find the sentence you noted above. At the location of the footnote you should find the text of the footnote, and likely a {{Cite ...}} or {{Citation}} template with the bibliogrpahic details. Complication: if, instead, you find something like "<ref=xxx />", cancel this edit, go back to the first step, click on a different "^" (this kind of reference undoubtably has more than one), and proceed as before.
In the footnote text, find the old link; replace it.
If the new link points to the same source as the old link, fine, go to the next step. But if the new link is to a different source, then you must also change the other bibliographic details, such as title, first and last name of the author(s), etc.
To check the footnote you will probably have to temporarily add "{{reflist}}" at the bottom of the section you are editing. Do that, then click on "Show preview". The footnote numbers will be different, ignore that. Check that the footnote looks good.
Remove the {{reflist}} that you added. Check "Show preview again", then save the page.
Check the foootnote link, the reference, and whether the new url goes where you expect it to.

And that should be it. Questions? - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:08, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

You're a sweetheart. You almost persuade me to come back and try again.

Meanwhile, look what happened at the Apache HTTP Server page. Info box got splayed out across the top. Yopienso (talk) 09:40, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

What in particular should I look for? The infobox is in the upper-right corner, just as any well-behaved infobox will do. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:12, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Just so you don't think I'm totally crazy :) here's the diff. Somebody (not I) accidentally removed a bracket and somebody else replaced it.

Yes, crazy stuff happens.

So, all the info is right there in the text, not below in the reflist. It's sinking in! Yopienso (talk) 08:44, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes again, provided you're talking about the contents of <ref> tags. {{reflist}} does not contain the info, it only causes the data to be displayed at that point. Add {{reflist}} multiple times, and you'll get multiple copies of the footnotes. Similarly if you do {{George Bernard Shaw}} multiple times, etc. They are just incantations, not to be confused with the actual result. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:54, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes!! Ha! Got it!! Just had to wave my magic wand. BUT! I still don't know how to create or maybe it's just insert a template. I just checked and it's been 2 mos. doing this little job, so we'll wait for Spring break for another. xoxo Yopienso (talk) 02:06, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

It's like the fable about the stone cutter. He hits the stone, nothing happens, hits it again, again nothing, etc., then on the 79th blow his hammer breaks. Whoops, I'd better check the revision history on that.

The two months spinning your wheels was because you were cross-wise to the rails. Now you should see progress. (Yes, it is, in part, "just insert a template".) But first tell me (my payback): what do you see was the key problem to understanding this? And is there any way this could have been explained better? - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:40, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Review

[Broke into a new section.]

what do you see was the key problem to understanding this? 1. A treacherous button on the edit page that made me think I was doing it right. That thing needs to be fixed. 2. Too much information from you.

And is there any way this could have been explained better? Once you gave "a simple 1, 2, 3," I immediately understood it.

Imho, a how-to manual should cut to the chase and explain "how to." This is all a technician needs or wants. A technologist needs and wants all the underlying philosophy/technology/what-have-you; save the "how come" for her. Like I said before, "I don't want to know all about F-stops. I just want to take a picture." :) Yopienso (talk) 18:36, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

This "treacherous button" — would that be the one labeled "Reference" (the open book)? In what way do you deem it treacherous?

I deem it treacherous in that I thought using it produced acceptable footnotes, but have been informed it produces unacceptable footnotes.

I think that gets back to the general confusion between "footnotes" and "citations". That button produces perfectly good footnotes, but whether the content of the footnote amounts to a citation (let alone a proper citation) is quite another matter. This is a general issue, and I am still trying to work out a strategy for grappling with it.

As to the rest, well, that's a deep matter. The first problem with such "simple" 1,2,3 guides is they are rigidly specific: any variation in situation, or the reader's understanding of the instruction, and they fail (equals more frustration); they won't work for a multitude of similar but slightly different situations.

A key question is: were all the prior whacks of the hammer (so to speak) really without effect? I suspect the essential problem you had was not understanding the difference between where the content of the references actually resides (in the text, between the <ref> tags) and where it appears in the displayed page (where the reflist template calls it out). (Right?) I doubt that you would have picked that up from a "simple 1,2,3"; I suspect the key clue for you was understanding that the whole nine yards of the George Bernard Shaw box all results from the simple incantation of {{George Bernard Shaw}}. Maybe? - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:45, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I can't say the hammering had 0 effect. Yes, the stumbling block was my failure to understand where the content resides. I think I might try to explain it to someone like this: "Now, here's something important: the content of the references does not 'reside' in the reflist, but right there in brackets in the text. It 'magically' appears in the reflist thanks to Wiki mark-up language that we're not exploring today. You will have noticed and likely been irked by 'all that stuff' in the text that can make editing difficult when there are many references. Well, 'all that stuff' is the information that then shows up below in the reflist! That's where you type in your information." Yopienso (talk) 19:08, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that helps me fine-tune my focus. Now to lie in wait for another test subject — I mean, innocent in distress! While I'm waiting, you want to attempt use of {{citation}}? - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:44, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but not yet. Making myself scarce around here except for necessary look-ups. Yes, I use (refer to) WP! Regularly. Which leads to fixing typos....which leads to....etc. Yopienso (talk) 22:34, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Just sticking this here for safekeeping. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pain#Cite_ref Yopienso (talk) 03:27, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

—EGO— ^think

—SW— ^confess