User talk:JeffKo427
Welcome
[edit]Welcome!
Hello, JeffKo427, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:
- The five pillars of Wikipedia
- How to edit a page
- Help pages
- Tutorial
- How to write a great article
- Manual of Style
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}}
on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome! --ais523 13:37, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Helpme request
[edit]{{helpme}} As I mentioned above, I'm working on an article about He2-104, or the Southern Crab Nebula. Which name should I create the page as, and which should I redirect from?
- Generally speaking, use the name that would be most familiar to the majority of readers (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions). In this case, I'd recomment Southern Crab Nebula (for instance, Omega Nebula is the main title and NGC 6618 is the redirect). Hope that helps; if you have any further questions, feel free to put {{helpme}} back up. --ais523 13:37, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Help
[edit]{{helpme}} I've finished a draft of the article referenced above, and used my other account's userpage to look at it. And, well... I'm not very fond of the way it came out. I have some ideas about what needs to be changed, but can you give me any pointers about general article writing and what I did wrong? I've read how to write a great article, but can you tell me specifically what I did wrong here? I also need some help referencing--I read the referencing article, but I can't find the information I need in there.
Don't worry about the stuff in the box--almost all of it's wrong, as well. I'm still working on a. finding it and b. figuring out how the box works.JeffKo427 16:25, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
- (edit conflict; I wrote this before I saw the second paragraph of your help request) Your article draft doesn't look all that bad to me; it's a lot better than many of the new articles that people submit to Wikipedia. As the article is only short at the moment, you may be interested in Wikipedia:Stub#Ideal_stub_article, which explains how to write an article that will serve as a good basis for expansion. As for referencing, you can get as fancy as you like (see Wikipedia's page about citing markup for information on how to create the fancy footnote references that many featured articles use) or as simple (placing an external link inside square brackets is a simple way to reference something[1]). By the way, you can use a user subpage, for instance User:JeffKo427/Sandbox, as a personal sandbox if you wish; this will let you maintain many sandboxes if you have the need. I hope that helps; place {{helpme}} back up if you have any further questions. --ais523 16:35, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
- Now I'll answer the second part of your question; the box is an infobox, a sort of template. The code you've (presumably) copied actually contains nested templates, so it's quite hard to read. All the text between {{ and }} forms a template; it's written using the name of the template, followed by a vertical bar, and then lots of parameters to the template (information it needs) which are written as the parameter's name (use the parameters that are there at the moment), an = sign, and the parameter's value (which can be very complicated, or just a few phrases). Hope that helps! --ais523 16:40, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
tone?
[edit]I left a reply to your concern about "tone".
Cheers! -- Geo Swan 22:14, 9 February 2007 (UTC)