User talk:Sorceress150

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Sorceress150, 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! bobrayner (talk) 16:05, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In response to your feedback

Thank you for your feedback. I'm sorry you found editing Wikipedia difficult; the interface can be a bit daunting at first. If you'd like some help with specific problems, you can always ask at the helpdesk, or contact me on my talkpage. Yunshui 雲‍水 15:17, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In response to your feedback

Thank you for your feedback. Can you explain what it is that you're finding difficult? If you've got suggestions for improving Wikipedia's interface (and we're always looking for ways to improve), you can add them at the Village Pump discussions.

Yunshui 雲‍水 15:20, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes i responded on the helpdesk, and i just don't get all the signes and stuff like that, if u could tell me a few that would be great thank you.

Sorceress150 (talk) 15:24, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

By "signs", do you mean the code used to create effects and links in text (like boldface typing or links? If so, have a look at Help:Wiki markup; there's lots of explanation there. Hope that helps. Yunshui 雲‍水 15:34, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, I'm going offline now - if you need any more help today, you've already found the WP:HELPDESK! Yunshui 雲‍水 15:34, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you!! Sorceress150 (talk) 15:37, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Personally identifying information

Please take some time to read Wikipedia:Guidance for younger editors. Don't be alarmed, just take the advice seriously. Feel free to message me at my talk page if you need anything. fredgandt 15:52, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, i'll be more careful about that i'll erase both.. sorry!!!!

Sorceress150 (talk) 15:55, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No worries. Don't be sorry, be safe. Literally millions of people from around the world have open access to nearly every page on Wikipedia (some are hard to find), including user pages. We can't be sure what those visitors are looking for, unfortunately. fredgandt 16:08, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Adoption

Hi Sorceress150,

I see you've put yourself up for adoption - good idea! If you'd like, I'd be happy to oblige. Take a look at my contribution history (mostly anti-vandal work recently, with a bit of content creation and deletion discussion thrown in) to get an idea of the sort of areas I normally operate in; if you think I'd be able to help you, drop me a line on my talkpage. Generally I'm available from about 8-3.30 GMT on weekdays, and occasionally evenings and weekends (but not often).

You're under no obligation to accept; if you don't think I'd be the right adopter for you I assure you I won't be in the least bit offended. Cheers, Yunshui 雲‍水 19:07, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

NO! i wrote in your talk page, saying i would gladly accept! All the best, Sorceress150 (talk) 15:25, 27 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Great! It looks as though our editing patterns are not going to overlap very much (once again, I'm just about to go offline, probably for the whole weekend!) so you may find our communication a little stilted. However, as long as you can put up with a bit of a time lag in my responses, I'd be very happy to help mentor you.

I'll try not to be too hands on - I'm not going to monitor your every edit unless you want me to, but I will watch your talkpage, answer any questions you have (post them here) and advocate for you if you get into any disputes. If you'd like tuition in the use of Wikipedia I'd be happy to provide that as well; have a think about the areas you'd like to get involved with (article creation, anti-vandalism, copyediting, finding sources, specialist subjects and so on) and I'll tell you what I know.

The easiest way to learn about Wikipedia is to dive right in - over the weekend, why not have a go at creating an article about something (my userspace page here will hopefully help you to start). Have a look at the cheatsheet for the basics of Wiki markup, which is useful to learn a bit about, and read up on the Five Pillars of Wikipedia - that will give you a good grounding in what the project is all about.

I'm looking forward to collaborating with you! Best wishes, Yunshui 雲‍水 15:29, 27 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Okay! I honestly have NO idea about what i'd do an article about! I'll probably only be online temporarily on the weekend. Thanks, and all the best!

Sorceress150 (talk) 15:52, 27 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Sorceress150. Because you haven't made any edits for a month (your last was your comment immediately above), I'm making the assumption that you've moved on from Wikipedia. If you have, no problem - it's not for everyone, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff in the world to get involved with. However, if you aren't going to be editing in the future, there isn't a great deal of point in retaining this adoption. As such, I'm removing the adopter/adoptee templates from our respective userpages.

If you're just taking a short sabbatical, or if you intend to go back to editing at some point, I'd be more than happy to reinstate the arrangement; just leave a note on my talkpage and I'll gladly re-adopt you. Whatever you decide to do, best of luck. Yunshui 雲‍水 09:47, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry! I have been very busy over the past month, and I will sincerely try to keep up on Wikipedia.

I hope that you will consider adopting me again. The only time that I have been available on Wikipedia is just to look something up quick. Thanks, Sorceress150 (talk) 20:01, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's absolutely fine - no need to apologise. I should be the one doing that, for assuming that you'd retired. There's no obligation to edit regularly; you don't have to keep up a certain number of edits per week or anything like that. Usually a long period without any edits tends to show that an editor has moved on to other things, in this case, it evidently doesn't. My bad, sorry.

Consider yourself-re-adopted; I'll replace the templates that I removed. Nice to know you're still around! Yunshui 雲‍水 23:22, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Suggested project

Hi Sorceress150. With the proviso that what I said above still stands - ie. there is no compunction whatsoever to edit Wikipedia, and no required level of activity to remain an editor - I thought it might help you to find something to focus on. Wikipedia's a big place, and it can be difficult to know where to start. With that in mind, and noticing that you joined WikiProject:Dogs last month, I used the toolserver to generate this list of articles which you might find useful. All the articles listed are of High importance to the Dogs project, but are regarded as low ("Start-class") quality, and need to be edited to make them better.

The issues that these articles face include: poor or unencyclopedic prose, a failure to conform to the Manual of style guidelines, disorganised content that might need reordering, insufficient sources and more. Some will have tags at the top of the page suggesting specific problems that need correcting.

If you're stuck for something to do, go ahead and try to improve one or more of these articles. Or don't - to repeat myself again, you don't have to if you don't want to! Yunshui 雲‍水 10:22, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I have recently fixed up an article from that list: "Puppy." Please check it. Thanks!

Sorceress150 (talk) 14:20, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Woah! Ok, enthusiasm's good, and I'm glad you've got the hang of file uploads, but I'm afraid your edit made a bit of a mess of the formatting. I've reverted it for the time being; I'm going to go through and give you a breakdown of what went wrong in a moment, so bear with me... Yunshui 雲‍水 14:31, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Puppy edit - review

It's clear that there are some editing conventions you aren't familiar with, so hopefully we can clear them up here. Wikipedia has set ways of displaying articles, so that they all adhere to the same style; you can't just adjust them to a layout that you yourself prefer. For convenience in the following discussion, here's the previous version of the page and here's what it looked like after your edit.

First up, you've got the idea of file uploads (as with File:Smallpuppy.jpg which seems to have been deleted whilst I was writing) but you need to understand copyright concepts. Photobucket isn't copyright free, so you can't just pull images off it - someone took that photo, and they own the copyright. If you were the photographer then that's fine (but you should upload the file from your computer, rather than Photobucket) but if you didn't take the picture (or get verifiable permission from the person who did), you can't use it on Wikipedia. You formatted the image correctly, which is good, but it needed a better caption (specifying which breed of dog it is, for example).

Don't indent sections in articles with colons, like this :: . Colons should be used for indenting in talkpage discussions, to make it clear who you're replying to, but the colon indent shouldn't be used in articles. You also break headers if you indent. Headers in articles are written like this:

==Header Level 2==

with equals signs on either side; that takes care of all the necessary formatting, so you don't need '''bold text''' modifiers or -------- horizontal lines.

Don't be discouraged - markup is a tricky beast on Wikipedia, and can take a few tries to get right. Have a look at the cheatsheet for some common examples, and have another go. If you're not sure about how something will look, you can test-drive it in the sandbox or use the Preview button at the bottom of the editing page. Let me know if you need any help. Yunshui 雲‍水 14:52, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A mission for you!

Let's have another crack at that Puppy article, shall we?

A major issue with the article at present is that it lacks inline citations. This means that, although there are sources in the references section, none of the information is attributed to them. Fixing this problem would do a lot towards improving the page.

What you need to do is this:

First, find something in the article that looks as though it should be referenced. Facts and figures are a good place to start. For example, the first line of the development section claims that puppies are "Born after an average of 63 days of gestation." How can we confirm that?
Get your Google hat on. Do a search for the information that needs a citation, for example "puppy gestation period". Lots of results pop up.
You want to make sure that you cite information to a reliable source; a lot of the search results won't meet those criteria. For something like this, I suggest Google Books: in the Google menu on the left of the page, choose "More", then "Books". You'll see this.
Scroll down through the results. I see, about six entries down, a book called The New Terrier Handbook, which states that "The normal gestation period for puppies is approximately 63 days." Bingo!
Go back to the Puppy article (I often use multiple browser windows to make this sort of navigation easier; the article I'm editing is open in one, and the search is open in another). Enter the Edit screen.
Find the information you want to cite. Immediately after its appearance in the text, add the following string:

<ref>Kern, Kerry; ''The New Terrier Handbook'', Barron's Educational Series, 1988, page 42</ref>

Save or preview the page. If all has gone well, you should see a little blue ^[1] in the text, and lower down, under the References section, the details of the book.

There are more complex ways of citing information (such as the {{cite book}} template), but don't worry about those for now. As long as you put sufficient information in between the <ref></ref> tags, it's fine. The minimum information is the author and title of the book (put the title in italics by placing two apostrophes ('') at either end); if you can also supply the publisher, ISBN, page number and year of publication that's a bonus. You can cite websites by putting the website address in between the <ref></ref> tags (don't forget the http://!) like this:

<ref>http://www.example.co.uk</ref>

again, there are better ways to do this, but for now, the important thing is to learn the use of <ref> tags.

Have a go with the example I've give above, and then see if you can find any more things in the article to reference. Let me know if you need a hand, or if you want anything explained further. Cheers, Yunshui 雲‍水 10:27, 5 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I'll be starting right now. Sorry I haven't been on for some time! Sorceress150 (talk) 13:38, 30 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome back! I'm online (ish) for the next half-hour or so, so if you want me to take a look at what you're doing before then, drop me a note. Otherwise, I'll have a gander tomorrow. Yunshui 雲‍水 13:52, 30 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect! That's exactly the sort of thing I meant. What else can you find in the article that might need sourcing? There's information about their early development; for example, how do we know that dogs have to be socialised at around eight to twelve weeks? Has someone written that somewhere? What's this about docking originally being a protective practice? Is that recorded anywhere? Do their mothers really regurgitate semi-digested food? Can we prove it?

I hope you're getting the idea. You added an excellent source (and you had the initiative to find one of your own, rather than just copying the one I gave above, good stuff!) and in doing so, made Wikipedia better. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Now - add five more sources in the same way (to this or any other article) and I'll award you your first barnstar... Yunshui 雲‍水 23:06, 30 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done! Hope I did an "okay" job!

Sorceress150 (talk) 14:05, 2 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You did a superb job - barnstar awarded accordingly. Well-chosen, reliable sources - really a great improvement to the article. It's clear that you've understood the concept of citation and reliable sources.

You are, of course, welcome to continue adding sources (to any article you find that needs them), but if you'd like to do something else, I can happily introduce you to some other areas of Wikipedia that you might like to work in. Let me know when you want to tackle something new. Yunshui 雲‍水 14:11, 2 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	For adding inline citations and additional references to the Puppy article, I award you a barnstar! Excellent work! Yunshui 雲‍水 14:07, 2 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Another (optional!) task for you

I'm going to offer you a new task now; you can take it or leave it. Welcome to the thrilling and suprisingly addictive world of typo fixes!

Not everyone who contributes to Wikipedia can spell. Many of those that can make the ocasional mstake... Thus, Wikipedia is littered with typos. They are, however, easy to fix. There are several ways to do this (there are even Wikipedia add-ons like Auto Wiki Browser to help); for manual fixes, my preference is the following:

Go to Commonly misspelled words, and take a look down the long, long list of words that are often spelled incorrectly. Pick one.
Copy the incorrect spelling (the second one for each entry) into the Search box in the top right. Prefix it with a tilde, like this: ~misspeling.
The use of the tilde will cause the search engine to find all intances of that spelling on Wikipedia (rather than just looking for an article called Misspeling). You can now see all the pages where this typo occurs.
The next step is obvious: choose a page, find the typo, and correct it. Run the search again, choose another article, fix the typo and so on. Repeat ad infinitem.

If you enjoy this sort of thing, you can also adopt a typo of your very own, and go around fixing it wherever it's found. Have fun! Yunshui 雲‍水 14:29, 2 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I see you've got the hang of that particular task very quickly, good work. Never again will the word "usualy" darken our encyclopedia! Yunshui 雲‍水 12:47, 8 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

And another...

Because there are so many areas to concentrate on within Wikipedia, I'm going to continue throwing tasks like this at you. It's a good way of learning all the different facets of the encyclopedia. Hopefully this will lead you to find areas that you particularly enjoy working in, and we can then concentrate more heavily on those. You've already demonstrated competence in referencing and typo-fixing (which leads on to copy-editing), two very important tasks for improving content. Now we'll look at something that involves more interaction with other editors: anti-vandalism.

Wikipedia gets hit by vandals thousands of times a day. Most instances of vandalism are cleared up pretty quickly, thanks to both a dedicated cadre of editors and the rather impressive automated program, ClueBot. You can help! I've created an introduction to counter-vandalism here; read through it, and then have a go. Start with really obvious vandalism - "lol"s and "gay"s are easy to spot and revert - and you should avoid treading on anyone's toes.

Like all my suggested tasks, this is totally optional - if you don't think you'd like to work in anti-vandalism, let me know and we'll move on to something else. Yunshui 雲‍水 12:47, 8 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry I haven't been on for so long! Anti-vandalism seems like a good topic, but I must say it is all very complicated. I have looked through the recent changes and read your article a bunch of times, but still I am not very good at doing it... Sorceress150 (talk) 13:38, 31 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No worries, we can always shelve that until you feel a bit more confident. How do you fancy learning about categories? Yunshui 雲‍水 14:09, 31 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds Great! Sorceress150 (talk) 14:31, 31 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent. Okay: basically, categories are a method on Wikipedia of associating various article with similar topics. They can be fairly vague (like Category:British people) or highly specific (like Category:People executed by the Achaemenid Empire). Categories help WikiProjects to find articles of interest, help editors to navigate, and aid in the construction of portals and navboxes. What you need to know, though, is how to work with them.

The easiest solution is to use an automated gadget, a handy Wikipedia subroutine that does much of the hard work for you. For categories, you'll need HotCat. At the top of your screen, go to the "My preferences" menu, then choose "Gadgets" from the tabs along the top. Under "Editing" check the box next to HotCat. Then scroll to the bottom of the screen and press "Save".

Back in Wikipedia mainspace, you'll notice that the Category bar at the bottom of each article looks different - you should now be seeing something like this:

You can use the little + and - signs to add and remove categories. For the time being, stick to adding them. Pick a page from this list, which shows all the pages tagged as uncategorised. Once you have idea of the subject, hit the + sign in the HotCat bar, and you'll be presented with a box to type into. Start typing a category that you think the article belongs to - if it's about a musician from Nigeria, for example, you might start typing "Nigerian musicians".

This is where HotCat earns its keep - as you type, it will display a drop-down list of categories that it thinks you might be considering. The beauty of this is that you don't have to know the names of all the available categories; you can find them on the drop-down list by typing the first few letters. If what you're typing doesn't bring anything up, then that category doesn't exist yet (or exists under a different name), in which case, you'll need to try something else.

Two things to do here, then - first, add a gadget, second, put it to use categorising lost pages. If you need help, as ever, you know where to find me. Good luck! Yunshui 雲‍水 18:44, 31 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Adoption

Hi Sorceress150. Some months ago, I pointed out that there's no minimum level of activity required to edit Wikipedia. That's as true today as it was then, but in order for an adoption to be successful, some degree of regular editing is required. Since you haven't edited anything for the last three months, I'm inclined to suggest that official adoption isn't ideal for you. As such, I'm going to close the adoption and remove you from my list of adoptees. It's nothing personal, and please don't take it as a criticism (there is nothing wrong with not editing!); it's simply that we're overhauling the adoption process at present and need to expunge inactive adoptees to keep the categories clear.

That said, please feel free to contact me with any questions or problems you have with editing. I'm more than happy to help you out if and when you need a hand, I just don't think that a formal adoption arrangement is going to be particularly beneficial for you. Look forward to seeing you around - enjoy Wikipedia! Yunshui 雲‍水 12:21, 19 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]