User talk:Sirephil

Welcome!

Hello, Sirephil, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created, such as Philippe Bidabe, may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines, and may soon be deleted.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

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 have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Questions or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Dipankan001 (talk) 15:40, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of Philippe Bidabe

If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.
You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

A tag has been placed on Philippe Bidabe requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, contest the deletion by clicking on the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". Doing so will take you to the talk page where you will find a pre-formatted place for you to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. You can also visit the page's talk page directly to give your reasons, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, you can contact one of these administrators to request that the administrator userfy the page or email a copy to you. Dipankan001 (talk) 15:40, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed deletion of Philippe Bidabé

The article Philippe Bidabé has been proposed for deletion because, under Wikipedia policy, all newly created biographies of living persons must have at least one reference to a reliable source that directly supports material in the article.

If you created the article, please don't be offended. Instead, consider improving the article. For help on inserting references, see Referencing for beginners, or ask at the help desk. Once you have provided at least one reliable source, you may remove the {{prod blp}} tag. Please do not remove the tag unless the article is sourced. If you cannot provide such a source within ten days, the article may be deleted, but you can request that it be undeleted when you are ready to add one. Ronhjones ^(Talk) 00:13, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Frédéric Cermeno

Hello Sirephil, just wanted to let you know that I saw that you created the new article Frédéric Cermeno-- Have a fun and productive day! Cheers, Jipinghe (talk) 04:12, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Some tips to help you out!

Hi Sirephil, I thought I'd drop a few notes on your talk page with some help on writing articles :o)

First of all, it may be best for you to do a bit of reading, starting with the Wikipedia manual of style, which will give you a lot of information about how Wikipedia prefers its articles to be written. It's not as hard to follow as it might look; quite a bit of the information there probably won't be vital for you at first.

Second, I recommend you make a user sandbox - which is just an area you can use to practise in, and to make notes in, and to get things ready in. If you click this red link: user:Sirephil/Sandbox, that will let you create that page (it gives you an edit window to start work in). Anything, anywhere, on the help and information pages which gives you an example, try it out in your sandbox until you're familiar with it.

For your article, the next thing you want to do is start collecting as much information as you can about it. Google searches (particularly in Books and Scholar) will be your best friend for this! Once you've found the information, the next most important thing is to start writing up each fact in your own words (very important, this), and make a note at the same time of exactly where that information came from. Build in the references as you go along; I'm going to copy in, down below this, a whole heap of help on doing references, which was produced by one of our best teachers (Chzz).

Here's another place that you'll find incredibly useful - citation templates which you can copy and paste into your sandbox, between <ref></ref> tags; you just fill in the blanks from your sources into the template, and you'll end up with nicely formatted inline citations :o) It all helps. Remember to add a references section to your sandbox (make a new line, and put ==References== on it, and type {{reflist}} on the next line, so that you can see how your citations look as you do them. Remember to save your page often! You don't want to lose your work.

Hopefully this will give you a good start and make life easier for you.

One last thing to keep as a motto: "It's better to write one good, well-referenced, nicely-presented article than it is to create fifty unreferenced one-line stubs!" Pesky (talk …stalk!) 09:53, 12 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How references work

Simple references

These require two parts;

a)

Chzz is 98 years old.<ref> "The book of Chzz", Aardvark Books, 2009. </ref>

He likes tea. <ref> [http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com Tea website] </ref>

b) A section called "References" with the special code "{{reflist}}";

== References ==
{{reflist}}

(an existing article is likely to already have one of these sections)

To see the result of that, please look at user:chzz/demo/simpleref. Edit it, and check the code; perhaps make a test page of your own, such as user:Sirephil/reftest and try it out.

Named references

Chzz was born in 1837. <ref name=MyBook>
"The book of Chzz", Aardvark Books, 2009. 
</ref> 

Chzz lives in Footown.<ref name=MyBook/>

Note that the second usage has a / (and no closing ref tag). This needs a reference section as above; please see user:chzz/demo/namedref to see the result.

Citation templates

You can put anything you like between <ref> and </ref>, but using citation templates makes for a neat, consistent look;

Chzz has 37 Olympic medals. <ref> {{Citation
 | last = Smith
 | first = John
 | title = Olympic medal winners of the 20th century
 | publication-date = 2001
 | publisher = [[Cambridge University Press]]
 | page = 125
 | isbn = 0-521-37169-4
}}
</ref>

Please see user:chzz/demo/citeref to see the result.

For more help and tips on that subject, see user:chzz/help/refs.

Here's a little bit of magic which can save you an awful lot of time and effort!

You might want to consider using this tool - (tools:~dispenser/cgi-bin/webreflinks.py) - it makes your life a whole heap easier, by filling in complete citation templates for your links. All you do is install the script on Special:MyPage/common.js, or or Special:MyPage/vector.js, then paste the bare url (without [...] brackets) between your <ref></ref> tabs, and you'll find a clickable link called Reflinks in your toolbox section of the page (probably in the left hand column). Then click that tool. It does all the rest of the work (provided that you remember to save the page! It doesn't work for everything (particularly often not for pdf documents), but for pretty much anything ending in "htm" or "html" (and with a title) it will do really, really well all by itself. For those it can't do by itself, it gives you a pull-down (or up) menu of templates to choose from, which you can then fill in manually. Often the problem is "No title found" - sometimes the title is obvious (especially if it's a pdf), bit, if not, just open the page yourself and choose something appropriate if there's not already a clear title there. Happy editing! Pesky (talk …stalk!) 09:53, 12 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]