User talk:LichWizard/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions about User:LichWizard. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Welcome!

Hello, LichWizard, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Nomination of Barony (Video Game) for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Barony (Video Game) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Barony (Video Game) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 13:43, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Request

Hi LichWizard! I saw your yourname among others on the GoCE member list and I would like to ask you for help with prose quality. I've got a generally well-going FAC of mine, and the last remaining thing it needs for a successful conclusion is some copyediting. May I ask you to help me out with that for the article dubnium? I tried to give it my best for now but I'm not sure if that's going to be enough. Your help would be greatly appreciated!--R8R (talk) 10:14, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

R8R I can most certainly try! I'll take a look over it as soon as I can and make sure it looks good! --LichWizard talk 11:09, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much, I'll be eagerly waiting! You can find some comments re prose quality among John's comments at the FAC page.--R8R (talk) 11:16, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Okay, so I looked it over and from what I can tell it's written very well grammatically (however I'm no expert, just a native English speaker). The only two things I would change would be to maybe reword "Dubnium is a synthetic chemical element with symbol Db and atomic number 105." to something like "Dubnium is a synthetic chemical element represented by the symbol Db and atomic number 105." and probably cut this whole paragraph:

"Dubnium, having an atomic number of 105, is a superheavy element; like all elements with such high atomic numbers, it is very unstable. The most stable known isotope of dubnium, 268Db, has a half-life of around a day. Dubnium can only be obtained by artificial production."

As I believe you've stated everything in that paragraph somewhere else in the article.

Hopefully this was of some help to you, --LichWizard talk 13:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you! Could I please ask you to give the article another read to ensure that you, as a native speaker, are okay not only with grammar, but with the flow of the text, specifically of the Naming controversy subsection? This appears to be the part of the article causing the most doubt regarding prose quality. I, alongside other editors, have tried to make it perfectly readable but I'm not sure we're there yet. Now as for your comments:

The introductory sentence is uniform among all element articles, so I think we should keep it that way. Maybe there's even a consensus on it, I don't really remember, but it seems like it's always been this way and there are editors who defend the way it is.
The paragraph is good because it actually helps some not all too attentive (or familiar with the subject) readers extract some basics out of the article. We're not all too room-limited to prohibit that; after all, this is an encyclopedia, not a textbook. We may not only list information but also enhance its accessibility.

But thank you very much for the comments! I really appreciate this as another pair of eyes reading the article comes right in handy now.--R8R (talk) 16:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Sure, I'll give it another read through for awkward sounding parts and such as soon as I can :) --LichWizard talk 16:27, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

I reread the Naming controversy subsection, and it seemed to flow completely fine to me. I know nothing about elements or anything of the sort, but I was able to understand what was going on nonetheless. --LichWizard talk 17:32, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Oh, that is great to know; once again, thank you very much! Your opinion is going to be of much use at the FAC.--R8R (talk) 18:24, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm glad I could be of some use :) --LichWizard talk 18:29, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Copy edit of Shadowmarch

Thanks for your copy edit of Shadowmarch. I checked your work and changed a few things, mostly MOS: minutia. (Feel free to check the diffs at the article's history.) I feel that you did decent work on the article as one of your first copy edits and resolved the tagged issues. I would feel better, though, if you were a little more careful with some of the basic style usage, such as dashes, italics, boldface, and list formatting. I appreciate that you took on a tough article: it seems to be a bit unfocused as to whether it's about the four-novel series or the first novel of that series. Here are a few notes:

Titles for major works of art (e.g.: paintings, statues, books, movies, TV series, albums, etc.) get italics. This can be applied within quotes as the style choice doesn't affect the quotation.
Watch for hyphens and dashes. Hyphens are used for conjunction (joining) and dashes for disjunction (separation). See MOS:DASH for more information.
There was excessive boldface text in the character list. Most articles shouldn't have any bold except for the article's subject at the beginning of the lede and any likely redirects.
List formatting – lists are made up of entries, which are each made up of a term, a separator, and a definition. (These names are a legacy of definition lists from early html code.) The separator can be a comma, a colon or a spaced n-dash, and should be consistent for each list. The character list originally had hyphens and boldfaced terms, but switching to n-dashes gives more visible separation and much the same effect without the bold. There is much more information at MOS:LIST.
- On the same subject, the list definitions don't get special capitalization. If the definitions on a list are a mix of sentences and sentence fragments, then it is permissible to give them all capitals for consistency. The sentence fragments shouldn't get terminal punctuation.
of what online publishing done right might meant. I changed "meant" back to "mean". The problem is that "might" modifies "mean" which becomes unnecessary when using the past participle "meant". So you can have either "might mean" or "meant" but not "might meant". That unsourced line is a bit of a peacock statement and could definitely use a citation.
Job titles, e.g.: king, are not capitalized unless directly attached to a name MOS:JOBTITLE.
As a matter of tone, Wikipedia abbreviates United States as US rather than USA. Exceptions are proper nouns like "Team USA". MOS:NOTUSA
There are issues with the plot, which should be from an in-universe present-tense perspective, but there's not much sense working on it until the article's scope is determined.
I did a little tweaking in the infobox, though that's more cleanup than copy edit.

I hope this is of help and not too overwhelming. I wouldn't expect you to catch all of that. There is a lot of detail work in copy editing, though. Please ping me if you have any questions. – Reidgreg (talk) 21:12, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the message! I'm quite new to copy editing, and style and all of that, so I really apreciate you pointing those things out! I'll try to remember them in the future, and hopefully improve my copyediting skills :) --LichWizard talk 21:47, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Glad to hear that because I've got more notes from Bingo Bango – Reidgreg (talk) 23:12, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Copy edit of Bingo Bango

Some notes:

Be careful of punctuation and spaces at references. It's easy for editors to make mistakes here, but if you train your eye you'll spot them quickly. Like this: samba^[5], calypso^[6], house^[2], techno^[2],. The references should be on the right of the punctuation. Otherwise, on some platforms, a linewrap could separate the reference from the text.
Punctuation at quotations is another area to watch. Wikipedia uses the logical quotation system MOS:LQ where punctuation is only included inside the quotes if it is part of the actual quotation.
Style choices – The MOS: describes the recommended styles for Wikipedia. In some cases there is a choice of styles, like dmy or mdy dates, where you should pick one style and use it consistently throughout an article. In Bingo Bango you saw there was a mix of date styles and changed to mdy dates which was used in the majority of the article. That's the easy fix and is usually the right call. However, the guidelines actually say that rather than using the majority style at any given time – which would encourage edit warring – we should go back to the first style established in the article. If you dig back in the page history to 14 May 2016, dmy date format is used before any mdy dates. Thus, we go with dmy. It's a bit of effort, but that's what we do to avoid style-based edit wars (which are among the lamest of edit wars). If an editor is opposed, they can discuss on the talk page and the style can be changed by editor consensus, but never arbitrarily. I've gone ahead and tagged the top of the page with {{Use dmy dates}} backdated to May 2016 so others can check the history.

I'm glad to hear you're willing to learn. If you haven't spotted them yet, there's a ton of help files at GOCE/How to. Copy editing isn't a bad place to learn as you go, but there is a lot to learn, and the other editors expect copy editors to be experts. But nobody catches every little bit of MOS, and even small improvements to articles are still improvements. Feel free to ask me about stuff, if you don't mind a long-winded response. – Reidgreg (talk) 23:12, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks again @Reidgreg:! When I said I was new to it, I meant mainly on Wikipedia. I've always had an interest in grammar, style, etc. so I thought I'd try and help out by doing something I enjoy. I have made it a point not to touch and GA or FA nominees, as I don't think I'm comforatble enough with copyediting yet to work on those. I'll try to be much more careful with my work in the future so I don't have to have someone come behind me and clean my articles up. --LichWizard talk 23:24, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

It's cool. Every big institution has its own style guide for publications. Wikipedia's is a little peculiar as an online encyclopedia, but you'll pick it up quickly. If you understand the broad points and have an idea of where to look for trickier stuff as it comes up, you should be fine. Congrats on the barnstar! First ones are always special. Keep up the good work! – Reidgreg (talk) 12:51, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

April 2018 blitz bling

		The Modest Barnstar
		This barnstar is awarded to LichWizard for copy edits totaling over 2,000 words (including rollover words) during the GOCE April 2018 Copy Editing Blitz. Congratulations, and thank you for your contributions! Miniapolis 15:49, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Problematic signature

Hi, your dark-grey-on-black signature isn't very readable. Per Wikipedia's policy on accessibility (WP:ACCESSIBILITY) you should have better colour contrast, I'd recommend a much lighter shade of text perhaps? You can read MOS:CONTRAST which also links to tools that help calculate contrast ratings. :) Ben · Salvidrim! ✉ 22:44, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

(And I'm definitely not saying text-on-black-background is not okay, as you can see in my own signature :p) Ben · Salvidrim! ✉ 22:46, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks for letting me know :) --LichWizard talk 23:56, 29 May 2018 (UTC)