User:Abce2/Adoption

I would like to write about children's books and toys.

You might want to watchlist this page so that you are alerted to changes.

I really need to find out a little more about you than the short sentence above to know how best to help you. For instance, do you already have some special knowledge of children's books and toys and need help building that knowledge into articles? Or do you just feel these are the subjects you want to write about and are looking for some guidance on suitable topics to start?

A new editor will usually not have much edit history to look at, but in your case, as you have been around for a while, I think it would be worthwile if I carried out a review of your edits. Editor reviews can sometimes seem harsh to those that are not used to them: please do not take anything personally, the idea is to highlight things in your editing that can be improved and make you a better editor.

Technical skills: new editors usually don't have any and it is helpful to run a program to coach them in wiki-markup, tables, images, citation formatting, templates, math-markup and so on. In your case, you may already have some of these skills, you may not be interested in learning others. If there are technical areas you particularly want to cover, or there are specific questions you want to ask, feel free to let me know where you need help. Or if you would rather that I drive the program, please feel free to say that also.

There are many pages on Wikipedia with helpful advice on article writing, here are two which give you a good start in what it is all about: Wikipedia:Your first article and Wikipedia:Article development.

SpinningSpark 09:43, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Every day I have to play with some "toy or watch a show etc.", after 2 year old gets out daycare, etc. I was bored one day so I started reaserching about them, you can tell where this is going. And then to answer the Technical skills part, I would like to learn a little about how the math thing works, if you have the time.Abce2|Aww nuts!Wribbit!(Sign here) 18:30, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

The first step is to choose an article to write. Maybe you already have an idea, I don't know. If you are looking for an article, you might want to start by expanding an existing stub, in which case you will be interested in Category:Toys stubs and Category:Children's book stubs. This Google search string turned up a number of interesting lists. Most of them already have articles, but on checking a few that I had never heard of some of them were only stubs. Also worth a look are Wikipedia:Most wanted articles and Wikipedia:Most missed articles, you might see something there that takes your fancy. Once you have chosen an article, I strongly recommend that you develop it on a page in your userspace until you feel it is ready for mainspace. Not only does this prevent "work in progress" being displayed to our readers, but it also gives you an opportunity to have it reviewed by (an)other editor(s) before posting to mainspace.

The second step is to find sources for the article. We can talk more about this once you have chosen an article to write. For now I will just say that it is really important to mark in the article as you write it where each piece came from. If the sources are books or journals, this should include the specific page numbers. If you don't do this as you are going along it can be a complete nightmare to locate the sources afterwards and you will end up with a less well referenced article.

On the math mark-up, I will give you a short primer with some exercises in a minute. It is not totally out of the question that this will get used in a toy article - check out Rubik's cube! SpinningSpark 11:07, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Math markup

Wikipedia math markup is based on LaTeX, a standard intended for the typesetting of books. However, do not expect everything available in LaTeX to be available here; Wikipedia has implemented the standard only so far as needed to typeset mathematical expressions. LaTeX is identified to the parser by inserting it between math tags as you would with HTML tags like so; <math>.....</math>

There is a help page at Help:Displaying a formula and some more information in the Manual of Style at MOS:MATH#Typesetting of mathematical formulas. The very basics are as follows: superscripts are achieved with a ^ (carat) character and subscripts with an _ (underscore) character. For instance x^2 is for x². Functions and operators have a \ (backslash) character in front. For instance \sqrt 2 is for √2. Parts of an expression can be grouped together using {} (curly braces), these are not shown in the rendered expression, they are just used to show that the expression within the braces is to be taken together as a whole by the rendering engine, for instance x_{2+2} for x₂₊₂. Some functions (such as \frac) take two parameters and in those cases curly braces are used to separate the parameters.

Here are some exercises for you. Typeset the following expressions in math markup; SpinningSpark 14:38, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

• Exercise 1. 2+2=4
• Exercise 2. sinc x = sin x/x
• Exercise 3. Formula (4) on this book page
• Exercise 4. Formula (3) on this book page

$2+2=4$ $sincx=sinx/x$

Well, that is readable, so half marks for that, but it is not formatted entirely correctly. Here is how I would do it;

$2+2=4\,\!$

$\mathrm {sinc} (x)={\frac {\sin(x)}{x}}$

• First of all, it usual with formulae to indent them from the text with a colon (:) for readability. This has the added benefit of forcing each formula onto a new line; you will notice that although you have written your two answers on separate lines they have been rendered by the browser on a single line.
• Another thing you may notice is that your version of 2+2=4 is in a different font from mine. This is because the rendering engine has typeset it as an HTML string in your case but as a PNG image in my case. Whether it does this or not depends on the settings in the user's preferences and the skin they are using, but the default preference is to use HTML for very simple expressions, otherwise PNG. In an article with a sequence of equations, you generally want them all to have a consistent look, so it is usual to suppress the default and force them all to PNG. You do this by including something that cannot be rendered in HTML. Most often, something will occur anyway in the natural expression. If it does not, the usual thing to add is the code \,\! somewhere in the expression. This is LaTeX markup for a small space followed by a negative space which has a net effect of nothing but the rendering engine thinks it can't do it in HTML. If you put it at the end of an expression most browsers will entirely ignore it anyway as unwanted whitespace so just putting in one of those elements will work but I would recommend still putting in both to make sure the effect is the same in all browsers.
• The second expression should have the function names in upright characters, not italics. It is wrong in your expression because the maths engine has read the functions names as being variables. For the sine function and the other common trig functions, these are built-in and will be recognised as functions. For sine, the function to use is \sin. The sinc function is a well known function in maths but it is not built in to LaTeX. In those cases you use the function \mathrm to force it.
• The variables of functions are usually enclosed in brackets. It is acceptable to omit the brackets for very common trig functions like sine when the variable is just a single letter, but in all other cases the brackets should be included.
• Using the "/" character for the dividing line is a little unprofessional and in a complicated expression will often be ambiguous as well. There are two ways to get a dividing line: one is to use the function \frac (fraction) as I have done; the other way is to use the function \over between the two expressions to be divided.

If you are serious about wanting to learn the maths markup I would suggest you practice typesetting a few more simple examples. SpinningSpark 21:23, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

FA, GA, DYK

The first thing you need to do is write an article to submit to one of these processes. You are not ready to submit anything to FA yet, I suggest you try getting a few on DYK first and then work your way up. Because DYK requires the article to be no more than five days old, I suggest that you write it in your userspace first so you can spend as much time as you want getting it ready before moving to mainspace. This also gives you the opportunity of getting an editor to review it for you first. SpinningSpark 21:23, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

An article I've been working on alot, Earwig, has been up on GAN for about a month. Ah...what to write about. Wikipedia has so many things already covered.Abce2|Aww nuts!Wribbit!(Sign here) 17:47, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

That has been there for a long time without finding a reviewer, but perhaps show patience for a little longer. One thing I have noticed about your editing right away is that you rarely leave an edit summary. This is VERY BAD and I recommend that you change this right away. It could partly explain the absence of a reviewer, it is difficult to get an overview of what you have been doing to the article without opening up each and every edit. I know a lot of your edits are minor fixes, but even here, a summary is helpful to other editors. Some are so minor it is difficult to locate what you have done sometimes. You do not have to write a whole essay in the summary, for instance, a deletion of a comma could be summarised with just -, which at least gives a clue what to look for. SpinningSpark 18:55, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

What to write about . . . well what are you interested in? There are still long lists of unwritten articles in just about every topic you can think of. SpinningSpark 18:55, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh, okay. I try to start leaving edit summaries. And I'll check into the unwritten article list in little bit. Thanks! Abce2|Aww nuts!Wribbit!(Sign here) 19:08, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Sooo...I was busy. and forgot about this. Earwig was failed, but I have been doing alot of article editing. I also installed that thing that won't let you save without an edit summary. So, anything more?Abce2|This isnot a test 19:27, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh, there's lots more, I just didn't want to be "looking over your shoulder" all the time. I think your main problem is that you seem to find it hard to communicate with other editors. For one thing, looking at the history of the earwig article, you are still leaving very few edit summaries. But it goes deeper than that; one of the reasons the GA review was ended was they got the idea the article was unstable - and you were named as an editor who had been reverting others. Now I am not saying you were to blame for the article failing - it clearly had other deficiencies which were going to take time to put right - but this is still very bad, edit warring is the very last thing that is needed during a GA review and even a hint of it will end the GA early. If you revert another editor, you must give them a proper explanation of why you are reverting, at least in an edit summary, but preferably a full explanation on the article or user talk page as appropriate. Given that this happened during a GA review, which you say you were taking part in, and you were referred to on the GA page, I am very surprised that I do not see any posts from you there. Nor is there any thing on the article talk page except for a very brief comment.

Wikipedia is a collaborative project, and it only works if we all talk to each other and understand each other. If you can't do that, you should probably stay away from articles like earwig and find something obscure to write about that nobody else is interested in. In fact, I think it would do you good to do that anyway, you are going to learn far more by writing your own article from the bottom up where you are taking the lead than you are by tinkering with something that is already quite mature and taking your cue from others. SpinningSpark 20:20, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Huh, I don't remember edit warring. Sorry about the communication issue, I've been more of a quiet person, not trying to attract attention. Although it does have some uses in real life, it clearly doesn't here, so I have been atempting to change that. Also, when I said article editing, I meant Wikignoming. It's strange how many people forget to put the last comma in a list. Abce2|This isnot a test 01:45, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

I didn't mean to say you were edit warring, of course you weren't. But did you not notice that the GA reviewer quoted this from the GA criteria "Stable: it does not change significantly from day-to-day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute" and that this was in response to comments about your edits. This clearly required an immediate response from you if the GA had any hope of being saved. The best response you could have given would have been to undo the edits that were troubling them. Even if you felt you could not do that, an explanation was needed. Even now, I cannot read the GA page and get a clue to the thinking behind your edits, I can only guess, and I would suspect the other editors felt the same.

There is nothing wrong with wikignoming. That's fine if that's what you want to do, but GA reviews are anything but behind the scenes wikignoming. They are open, public affairs and you need an entirely different mindset here.

By the way (not that I care too much about such things), the serial comma is largely a matter of editorial choice and you probably should not be changing them wholesale except for article consistency. SpinningSpark 21:22, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Okay, sorry about the serial comma thing. Where I grew up it could only be one way, so I had no idea there was another. I see that now. Also, just a question, how do co-noms work?Abce2|This isnot a test 14:49, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

What kind of nomination did you have in mind? FA, RFA, AfD? Or maybe you are considering this kind of nomination!. By the way, there's no need to message me when you write here, I have the page watchlisted. SpinningSpark 12:45, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

RFA.Abce2|This isnot a test 01:33, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Co-nomination is agreed between the nominators beforehand. There is no special process, it just means that more than one person is nominating. They may make a joint statement or separate nomination statements, it's up to them. Self-nomination is also possible. SpinningSpark 02:34, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Okay. Sooo...Abce2|This isnot a test 01:49, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

If you are asking will I nominate you for admin, then I am sorry, the answer is no, I do not think you are anywhere near ready. You need to be on Wikipedia for a little longer and you need to work on your communication skills before I could support you, let alone nominate you. Sorry if that's not what you wanted to hear, but I need to be fair to you. Best of luck if you go ahead with your self-nom but my recommendation would be to wait a while and work on improving a few things first. SpinningSpark 12:09, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't. I was just asking if you had anything in mind for me to know about, like a policy thing or something about GAN. I'm not trying to hint anything. Oh, the RFA thing I made, I'm just waiting for the time for it, but for now I'm just working on questions and stuff. I wouldn't even think about transluding it yet. Sorry for the misunderstanding, Abce2|This isnot a test 12:15, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

I had seen your post but I did not reply because you did not seem to be asking a question. My advice to you remains the same. Write a new article or add a substantial section to an existing one. Do you have one for me to look at? SpinningSpark 00:33, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Citations

An edit you did yesterday seems to be indicate you need some advice on citations. First of all, the bare url, while better than nothing, is not considered to be good practice. WP:CITE explains the correct way(s) to format sources. There are also templates which help you get the formatting right. In this particular case the best one would probably be {{cite web}}.

More importantly, as far as I can see, the source is not actually verifying the sentence to which you have attached it. I was expecting the source to say what the definition of a core game is and/or identify whether the games mentioned in that paragraph are core games or not. The purpose of inline references is to identify the source of the facts in the article, not to link to another article that discusses the same subject. My apologies if I have missed something there, I was not really interested in reading the whole article. SpinningSpark 00:33, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Ohh...thanks! I was going to fix that, but I was in a rush, so I may have entered the title incorrectly. Abce2|If you would like to make a call.. 03:23, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I do have WP:CITE bookmarked, but as I said before, I was in a rush. I did use it on the earwig article when I was helping User:The Earwig.Abce2|If you would like to make a call.. 03:26, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Review

Any thing else you'd like to tell me about anything?Abce2|If you would like to make a call.. 01:32, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

As I have mentioned before, you need to write something substantive for the encyclopedia. The best way for you to learn is to give it a go and the best way for me to understand where you are and what knowledge I need to pass to you is for me to see some of your work. You came to me asking for guidance on writing articles, but of your last hundred edits none are a new article or a substantial portion of one. I see lots of wikignoming, corrections, vandal fighting and talk page posts, but the only substantial article work I see you working on is the one in your user space. So identify a piece of work you want me to review (including anything in userspace) and I will take a look, there's not a lot of point giving you random advice that you either already know or are not ready to make use of. On the other hand, if article writing is really not what you wanted to do then you need to explain that to me and where it is you want to go. SpinningSpark 11:00, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Could you check out the one in my userspace? Besides the refs, what else do I need to fix on it.Abce2|If you would like to make a call.. 01:48, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

For the avoidance of doubt, I am reviewing this article. You say besides the refs, but that issue is not a "bolt on" extra for Wikipedia, it is an essential. If there are no references, what are you going to use for sources? You need sources of information to be able to write the article in the first place. All your current references are to Bakugan.com, which is good for "in-universe" information, but a Wikipedia article needs to be more than that. On a games wiki you could write an article that is entirely in-universe. For an encyclopedia, you need to explain its relevance to the real world, which means you need to find some independent reviews which discuss attributes in particular. Bakugan.com is not independent and it is not reliable for any information other than the in-universe stuff. Perhaps something that puts it in context with other games/shows, historical development of ideas, what is novel about this one, what was inherited from its predecessors - that sort of discussion. Remember, an acceptable article needs to establish that its subject is notable, in this case not just Bakugan, but Bakugan attributes needs to be notable.

The context I found a bit baffling at first. You need to bear in mind that some of your readers (like me!) may never have heard of Bakugan up to the moment they read your article and you need to explain in the lede exactly what the article is about and where it fits in to the scheme of things. I had no idea this was anime until I followed the link to Bakugan, or that the show was a TV show. I also found the headings "Notable Anime Users" (by the way, see MOS:CAPS#Section headings) somewhat confusing. These are fictional characters, right? not real life players?

It has certainly come a long way since I last looked at it but you still need something extra in there before it could be moved to mainspace. That's not to say that you could not get an article out of this. It certainly gets an awful lot of ghits, but you need to do the work going through them picking out the reliable (and useful) ones. As someone who is obviously interested in this, you may well know of some offline sources as well such as newspaper and magazine articles.

SpinningSpark 16:55, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

When I said, besides the refs, I meant that I know I have to fix the refs, I just wanted to know what else their was.Abce2|If you would like to make a call.. 16:51, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

How is it now?Abce2 (talk) 01:22, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for not replying, I am taking an unofficial wikibreak so I am not paying much attention to Wikipedia at the moment. Can you explain to me how you think the article has improved since I last reviewed it? SpinningSpark 08:42, 29 March 2010 (UTC)