User talk:Light Code

Welcome!

Hello, Light Code! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! Marteau (talk) 15:30, 18 January 2018 (UTC) Getting Started Contributing to Wikipedia The five pillars of Wikipedia • Tutorial • Your first article How to: edit a page • upload an image Getting Help Frequently Asked Questions New contributors' help page Where to: ask questions • make requests Tip of the day Request administrator attention Policies and Guidelines Neutral point of view • Reliable sources Verifiability • Citing sources • No original research What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons Simplified Manual of Style • Three-revert rule Copyrights • Non-free content • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism • Sock puppetry Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The Community Community Portal • Adopt-a-user program Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • Resolving disputes Build consensus • Village pump IRC channels • Mailing lists Discover what's going on in the Wikimedia community (The Signpost) Things to do Be bold in editing • Help develop an article Maintenance • Peer review • Requested articles Join a WikiProject • Translating articles Cleaning up: General • Spam • Vandalism Miscellaneous Categories • Disambiguity • Stubs User pages • Talk pages Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

<chem>...</chem> vs {{chem2|...}}

Hi,
Thanks for your work on iron(III) chloride. However, please do not change {{chem2|...}} templates into <chem>...</chem>.
For one thing, the latter typesets the formulas as images, ignoring the reader's font settings. Thus, if the reader is not using a Roman font, those formulas actually look worse than those produced by {{chem2|...}}.
Note that Wikipedia readers do not gain anything by having a slightly fancier typesetting in display formulas than in text formulas.
Also, typesetting textual information as images is against the spirit of HTML.
Finally, note that doing "horizontal" edits on a large number of articles, just to "improve" their looks, is a waste of your time; and, by hogging the watclist of thousands of other editors, a huge waste of their time too. Consider editing article contents instead.
All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 07:09, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi,

Thanks for the info. I was not aware of the typesetting problems with the <chem>...</chem>. I will keep that in mind with my later edits.

As for horizontal edits and my time. My main objective is improving the citations of other articles. Many articles have outdated links and / or are not accurately cited (e.g. Title + Link, cited as website, when actually it is a book or a book chapter). Many times the citation style is uneven as many people may edit an article without minding the citation style of the already existing citations. You may say that doing that is a waste of time and I respect your opinnion, but because many others also see this in the same way, the citations look how they look. Someone has to do it and I do not mind. I kind of like this kind of editing.

The only thing that bothers me is you saying about me "hogging the watclist of thousands of other editors". Could you explain further what you mean by this? As much as I am happy to clean some article's citations, I do not want to mess some other person's work or steal their credits for the article. None of that please. Up till now I was always checking the "minor edit" option thinking that it does not change the article's "author" whilst submitting a slightly better version, but I may be mistaken. I wold be thankfull for some info on this, please.

Best regards, --Light Code (talk) 17:48, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi, Thanks for the reply.
Improving the contents of references (such as getting proper links, replacing websites by journal articles with DOIs, fixing author names, etc.) is definitely a good thing, and it is great that you are doing it. What I consider a waste of time is merely changing the appearance of citations. If the citation is readable, and presents all the necessary information in a non-ambiguous way, it does not matter at all whether it does not conform to some "official" style, or even if it is not consistent with other references in the same article.
Neatness and consistency were extremely important for the old paper encyclopedias, because the potential buyers used (consciously or unconsciously) those features as a thermometer to estimate the quality and completeness of the contents. The reasoning was that neat layout and consistent typesetting implied that the publisher had very tight management and planning, and a staff large enough to carefully check every line of every page; and hopefully that same big and well-oiled machine would also be used to produce and check the contents.
Well, that is one worry that Wikipedia does not have. Everybody knows that Wikipedia is written by a random bunch of literate wild monkeys, without any real management, supervision, vetting, guidance, etc. Therefore, Wikipedia is, almost by definition, extremely incomplete and inconsistent -- and will always be.
And, moreover, Wikipedia does not care much about sales volume. 😄
In fact, if the layout and looks of an article are too polished, the reader may be lead to think that the contents too has been polished to the same degree. That is, sloppy formatting can be an effective way to tell the reader "do not trust anything you read here without checking the sources". 😄
As for hogging the watchlist, indeed, the problem does not exist if you click "minor edit". So, please ignore that part of my comment. (If only all horizontal editors did the same...)
All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 18:45, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi,
Thanks for your last message. Do not worry, I am not just doing every article as they are. I just change those that have some problems with citations (as mentioned), and the rest of citations gets changed alongside just by momentum.
As for the monkeys :], I am also trying to change "old style" citations that do not work under visual editor, so that new people who prefer the visual editor are not drawn away by the necessity of switching to the "scary coding" :D. This way we can get even more monkeys.In the future I will try to make an automated system for this.
Best regards, --Light Code (talk) 15:10, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

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