User talk:Mynameisnoted

Welcome!

Hello, Mynameisnoted, 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
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! -Arch dude (talk) 00:31, 13 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank for your work on Orders of magnitude (mass)

I have this page on my watchlist, so I have noticed your work. Thanks! This is exactly the type of edit that is needed for this page. It appears that you know what you are doing, so I doubt that you need the above "welcome" entry, but it's traditional to start an empty user's talk page with this entry. Your edit history qualifies you as a WP:wikignome, if you choos to self-identify as such. This is one of the most important classes of wiki editor. If, for any reason, you wish to discuss your edits (or anything else) with someone, feel free to contact me via my talk page. I have no more (or less) authority than you or any other editor, but I've been here for awhile. YOu may want to create at least a minimal user page to describe why you are here and what you want to accomplish, but it is certainly not mandatory. (And again, thanks!) -Arch dude (talk) 23:37, 12 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Arch dude! Because of you I've made a page about myself and my goals. Now that Orders of magnitude (mass) is fairly reliable, I may work on more pages in Category:Orders of magnitude. But those pages vary somewhat in their formatting, so I'd like to see more consistency in style. There ought to be a discussion about unifying the style of all these pages. How can I find out where that discussion would go? Mynameisnoted (talk) 07:36, 20 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Alas, there is no consensus among the various editors on the formatting, and opinions are fairly strongly held on both sides. Start by reading the talk page at Talk:Orders of magnitude (mass). See also Talk:Kilogram#Decigram redirects to Kilogram, which is how I got involved in the first place. "Mass" is only one that uses the single-page approach while the others use a page-per-magnitude approach. There have been well over a million Wikipedia editors over the years, and there are perhaps 100,000 editors who have been active during the last month. If you wish to try again to create a consensus, I recommend that you raise the issue at the Wikipedia:Village pump, and specifically that you ask for help on how to proceed to gain consensus from those guys. I personally now stay away from anything contentious, but someone need to do this. At one point several years ago, I found myself spending more time on policy stuff than on actual editing, and I realized that I just didn't enjoy it that much. Since then, I just edit articles and (rarely) engage in discussions. -Arch dude (talk) 00:31, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this excellent information. I didn't know about this history, or about Wikipedia:Village pump. I think I'll follow your wise path and avoid policy debates for now, because there is plenty of other work to do. And time may give me better insight into the right answer. Mynameisnoted (talk) 05:55, 27 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Reference templates

Both "cite journal" and "cite doi" allow addition of extra parameters like url link, just add "|url=" - there is no need to change between citation types. While "cite journal" clutters the article code with details, code-breaking misprints are more difficult to locate in "cite doi". Cheers. Materialscientist (talk) 22:39, 16 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am only a novice editor, but it seems to me that "cite doi" has one nice feature that "cite journal" does not: if more than one page uses "cite doi", they all benefit from the "|url=" that I add to the "Template:Cite doi/". Can you give me more details on what you mean by "code-breaking misprints"? That would help me understand the tradeoffs in using "cite doi". If wikipedia has a guideline discussing these issues, I'd love to learn more about this. Mynameisnoted (talk) 00:15, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. Can you explain a bit more if more than one page uses "cite doi", they all benefit from the "|url=" that I add to the "Template:Cite doi/".? Wikipedia accepts various citation styles with no preference. We have a wonderful user:citation bot which you can use to semi-automatically tidy "cite journal" templates, but "cite doi" and "cite pmid" templates are expanded even without user activation. As I mentioned, "cite doi" reduces code clutter. The page breaking is a personal observation, and I can probably dig out examples. The effect was like that: a vandal types a random string in "cite doi" reference, and half of the article disappears without locating the error. Same effect could be produced by breaking a "cite journal" reference, but then the wikimedia software locates the breakpoint. Another advantage of "cite journal" is that the whole article code can be accessed and fixed at once. For example, citation bot garbles letters like ü in German names (can't fetch some codetables), and that can be fixed in one edit for "cite journal" refs.

That all being said, there is no general guideline or preference :-). Materialscientist (talk) 00:44, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Materialscientist, thanks for the explanation. I hadn't thought about vandalism or the possibility that Citation bot garbles errors!

I'm thinking of a situation where two separate Wikipedia articles cite the same journal paper. If both articles cited the paper using "cite doi", then they both use the info in a "Template:Cite doi/" entry. When I update that template entry, both articles are updated at once.

This comes up for me when Citation bot can't find a free version of the journal paper, but I can. After I update the "|url=" value in the "Template:Cite doi/" template to link to the free paper, then both Wikipedia articles automatically link to the free paper. I don't have to go find the Wikipedia articles that cited the journal paper to update their citations one by one. Similarly, if Citation bot garbled a character, I expect it could be fixed it once and for all in the "Template:Cite doi/" entry for the article.

Is there some way to accomplish this with "cite journal"? Maybe some kind of bot? Mynameisnoted (talk) 05:58, 18 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I see. If you want to reuse the same reference in several articles then probably "cite doi" or "cite pmid" is the best way. Many editors also define similar templates for books (e.g. {{Greenwood&Earnshaw2nd}}) and then reuse them with different page numbers (which are added as a parameter to the template, like {{Greenwood&Earnshaw2nd|page=386}}). There is a chance that someone uses the same doi in "cite doi" in another article, and that article keeps another style (author names, etc.), but this is very rare. Vandalism to the "cite doi" templates can be reduced by removing its "edit" button. To sum up - many citation styles have their pros and cons, and maybe this is why they are all tolerated :-). Materialscientist (talk) 06:20, 18 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting practice with the book templates. This is all great to learn. Removing the "edit" button hadn't occurred to me either. You've given me a lot to think about, thank you! Mynameisnoted (talk) 07:49, 18 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:50, 24 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]