User talk:Michelle.K.Rico

Test

Hi Michelle. I'm testing the talk function too. Let me know if you get this message. I keep thinking I have the hang of this and then I start to question whether I do!Marlenefine (talk) 18:21, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Professor Fine. Trying to write back to you on my page. Does this work? Did you receive a message? Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 21:27, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Getting started

I hope your first week on Wikipedia has been fun and not too intimidating. Again, don't hesitate to ask me questions if you have any. You can either reply here or on my talk page. To respond like a pro, begin typing beneath my post, and indent by typing ":" before your paragraph of text. When you're done, you then sign your post by typing ~~~~, which will add your signature to the end. Each time we reply under the same topic, we keep indenting more and more by adding extra colons before our replies, such as "::" on the second reply and ":::" on the third. For example:

Hello! ~~~~
:Hello, back! ~~~~
::Thanks for responding!  I love talking to myself! ~~~~
:::I completely agree! ~~~~

The result will look like this:

Hello! – VisionHolder « talk » 01:32, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Hello, back! – VisionHolder « talk » 01:32, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for responding! I love talking to myself! – VisionHolder « talk » 01:32, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I completely agree! – VisionHolder « talk » 01:32, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

In case you would like to start looking at some of the code behind an article, you may look at a recent article I wrote entitled William Charles Osman Hill, which is about one of the leading primate taxonomists of the 20th century. First, before entering edit mode, look over the structure of the article. Ignoring some of the complex things, like the big infobox that contains his photo, look for simple thing that you want to learn how to do. Next, select the option to edit and see if you can find the code that you wanted to learn. You can always highlight and copy it, and then paste it on your user page so that you can play with it safely without changing the actual article on accident. (Be sure to not submit and save your changes to articles until you feel comfortable about how to do so. And if if you do accidentally mess something up, someone will probably come around and fix it rather quickly, so don't worry too much.) I'll tell you now that referencing is both the most important and most challenging part of editing. Don't worry about that this week, though. When it comes time to talk about referencing, I'll be there to walk you through it. For now, let's just make sure that you can add bold, italics, and wikilinks. Again, if you have questions, just ask. And remember, asking questions will give you experience by requiring you to format an answer on a talk page. – VisionHolder « talk » 01:32, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your guidance! We are meeting with campus ambassadors tomorrow to discuss more so I am currently trying to just figure it all out! Thank you for showing me how to respond on my own talk page. I'll definitely look at your recent article. I think that comparing the published pages to the edited has been the most help.Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 21:32, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Hello! I have been assigned to choose a few articles that need edits under the US Public Policy page. I was wondering if you wouldn't mind critiquing and telling me if these are good choices...whether or not they do not need help or need too much help. The pages are Intermediate Care Facilities for Mental Retardation and Absentee ballot. For the first one, I know it will be a lot of research, but it is something very close to me that I would not mind researching. I was even wondering if it would be possible to do a whole page on the non-profit organization that advocates for the disabled in my state? There is not already a page for it and I would love to do that. The second, Absentee ballot, I find to be very useful if it were properly functioning but I would only have much interest in doing research on my own state's requirements. Basically, I prefer to create the page for the organization in my state that advocates for the disabled, but I wanted your feedback. Thank you! Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 20:52, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

You have certainly made some good choices for your options. In order to create a new article about a non-profit in your state, the organization would have to count as "notable". The guidelines are pretty strict, and if insufficient secondary sources were found to support the article, not only would the article be short, but it could be deleted by Wiki admins. I strongly suggest carefully reading Wikipedia:Notability, as well as Wikipedia:Original research, and consider the sources you have access to before selecting this option. Intermediate Care Facilities for Mental Retardation, on the other hand, would be an excellent choice! The article is in terrible condition, and any work on your part is likely to be a vast improvement. Absentee ballot would be tricky because of the international nature of the article. You would probably need to create a new article entitled Absentee voting in the United States, research the general topic, and then create sections for each state or group states if the requirements are similar. However, such a broad article on that subject doesn't sound like something you're interested in. In short, I don't think you can go wrong with Intermediate Care Facilities for Mental Retardation. Your primary choice will depend on whether or not the non-profit is notable and whether you can find sufficient sources. I have strong doubts about the voting article, primarily because of your narrow interest in the subject. I hope that helps. If you have any other questions, please ask. – VisionHolder « talk » 22:52, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Update

I'm just checking in to see how things are going. I noticed you have started a sandbox. Do you have any questions so far? Do you need help with referencing? Just let me know. – VisionHolder « talk » 21:02, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

References

I noticed that you are starting to list references in your sandbox. Would you like help on formatting them? I can show you some helpful templates that will make the process a lot easier and the make the code a lot easier to read. – VisionHolder « talk » 03:22, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

That would be very helpful! We are beginning the writing and editing process this coming week so anything you can show me would be great. Thank you! Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 19:24, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Unless someone has told you differently, I am going to introduce you to the citation style I use. It's not too hard to get used to. I am going to suggest using citation templates such as {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite book}}, and {{cite news}}, which will standardize the appearance of your references. Also, I am going to suggest using list defined references (LDR), which will keep the body of the text mostly free of the citation information, and possibly {{Sfn}}, which is a short footnote template you can use if you will be citing various page numbers out of a single book. You may follow the links I have provided just to get an idea, but I would prefer to teach you by showing you. Would it be alright if I started to convert the citation style in your sandbox so that you can see how it works? I will convert a few of your citations to use the citation templates, but I will leave others for you to do as an exercise. Please let me know if this will be okay, and I will make the changes. Also, please let me know if you will need to use short footnotes. For an example of an article that uses short footnotes, see Conservation of slow lorises. For an example of an article that does not use short footnotes, see Primate. – VisionHolder « talk » 21:40, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

It would definitely be okay if you started to convert the citations. I think the best luck I've had is observing the technique after it has already been done. In terms of footnotes, I don't believe there was a preference so if you have any suggestions as to what might be more beneficial for this type of article that would be much appreciated. Thank you! Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 21:58, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I will make the changes shortly—I'm currently in the middle of composing a very long, important email. But after that, expect so see some changes to the sandbox. The issue with footnotes has more to do with the sources. Are you going to be citing mostly web pages and a few short articles, or are you going to be extensively citing books? If you're citing books, you'll probably want to keep track of which pages you pull the information from, and that would make short footnotes necessary. If you're just citing short stuff and web pages, you can probably skip short footnotes. – VisionHolder « talk » 22:49, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! And I will mainly be focusing on shorter articles, no books as of now because information is not that extensive so I don't think short notes will be necessary. Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 23:13, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Alright... I've converted your sandbox to LDR and converted two of your refs to use the cite templates I linked above. As a practice, you can convert the remaining two refs. One will be another {{cite web}} while the other will be another {{cite journal}}. The DOI and PMID values are not mandatory, but helpful for people wishing to find the source you used. They can either be found on the journal article itself or through Google Scholar. If you need help finding them, just ask. Otherwise, if you have any questions, just ask. – VisionHolder « talk » 23:46, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Good job on using the cite templates. I made a few small fixes, and hopefully I didn't cause an edit conflict. The period at the end of the citation was a mistake and not needed. Also, you were missing part of the DOI, so it wasn't valid. Lastly, I found the PMID (from PubMed) and added just to save you some time. It's not critical that you find all of these IDs, since bots will visit the article and add them for you from time to time. Otherwise, is it safe to assume that you now understand how to add references, both to the references section and the text body? If not, feel free to ask questions. – VisionHolder « talk » 19:43, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Congrats!

I can see that you published your Wiki article. Congratulations! You were going to nominate it for Did you know? (DYK), right? If so, be sure to go here and read the instructions carefully. You have 5 days in which to do this, otherwise the article will be ineligible. If you have any questions, please ask. – VisionHolder « talk » 22:47, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I had completely forgotten that you were planning to improve this article, not write a new one. I apologize. Because the article already existed, you will need to merge your work into the article Intermediate Care Facilities for Individuals with Mental Retardation. I don't think it's possible to get DYK credit due to the size of the existing article. I've spoken to your campus ambassador about it, and I get the clear impression that this won't be a problem. However, the articles do need to be merged. Once you've cleaned up Intermediate Care Facilities for Individuals with Mental Retardation, let me know and I will have the extra article flagged for deletion, and then we can move forward with the article clean-up. – VisionHolder « talk » 16:25, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Hello! I decided to edit within the article directly and delete work that was not mine in my sandbox. I'm trying to change the name of my sandbox so it is something other than the name of the article I was editing. How would I go about that? Probably a simple enough question, but I can't figure it out! Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 16:11, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

The best thing to do is start a new sandbox in your user space, copy want you want from the "old sandbox", and then convert the old one (now an article) to a redirect. If you can just copy the information you want to keep out of the "old sandbox", let me know and I'll make the redirect for you. – VisionHolder « talk » 16:45, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Okay great. I started a new sandbox:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Michelle.K.Rico/Sandbox1) and placed my information in it, the contents that were in my other sandbox, however I have already put this information into the actual page so it might be redundant to have it because I plan to edit on the actual page now. Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 17:16, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

In that case, don't use the sandbox and erase it for good measure. I just saw you delete a limited amount of data from the article, so I thought it might still be a work-in progress. Anyway, I'll convert the old sandbox to a redirect. – VisionHolder « talk » 18:40, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

I had deleted everything in my sandbox that wasn't my original work, but I already put my work into the original article. I thought I would edit within that now. Michelle.K.Rico (talk) 14:29, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Perfect! – VisionHolder « talk » 15:01, 7 April 2011 (UTC)