User talk:DeirdreAnne/Mentorship/Themis-Athena

TA:

• One small point, when you post to a discussion page, such as a user talk page, you should put ~~~~ after your post, which will add your WP:Signature to the end of the post. If you want to change your signature, you can do so in your preferences. (three tildes (~~~) will result in your undated signature and five (~~~~~) will result in the date without your signature).
• You may already know, but there are at least four ways to reply to a usertalk post: 1) reply on the page the thread started on (advantage: keeps the discussion together; disadvantage: one user never gets the big orange bar at the top of his or screen to indicate a new message), 2) reply on the other user's talk page (advantage: the big orange bar; disadvantages: the thread is broken between two pages and if there are more than two parties to the thread it gets really messy), 3) copying the entire message to the other users' page - in other words, the method I've just used (advantages: the big orange bar and thread coherance are both maintained and the page history on both pages will contain the entire thread except for the last post; disadvantages: very uncommon - maybe only two users who do it regularly - cumbersome to copy, paste, and delete each time, especially with a long post like this one, and page history can get confusing if you don't use an appropriate edit summary - and it still doesn't work well for more than two users), 4) method 1 combined with {{talkback}} posted to the other user's page - sort of a substitute for the orange bar. There is another way of course and that's to create a separate page for the thread, which is essentially what I've done here. It could be transcluded on the main user talk page but I'm not aware of any way to show the orange bar and an archiving bot might eventually archive it.
• If anything I've already said doesn't make sense, please tell me.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 17:56, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

• • BTW, I don't see your profile on Facebook at the link provided on your userpage.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 01:47, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Reversion

You appear to have used Twinkle to revert yourself and labeled it as vandalism! [1] When you revert yourself, it is best to either use the undo link in the history, or if you want to use Twinkle, there is a choice for "Assume Good Faith" which will not label the prior edit as vandalism. If you revert others you should be very careful never to call it vandalism unless it really is. If you make the mistake of using Twinkle, or the built-in rollback feature, on your own page or one you edit often, you'll find out the hard way that it rolls back to the last edit made by someone else which isn't really what you want if most or all of the edits are by you!

If you haven't looked at it already, please take a look at [[2]], it's a bit disorganized at present but has some good info I think - though much of it is just links for me to remember where I found tools, lists, or templates, that I liked. Not sure if you've looked at WP:AWB yet but please be particularly careful with that one, it's great for making a single change to 400 pages at once but it requires care.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 18:57, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

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• Err, Doug ... I actually found the "vandalism" label attached to my edit when checking my watchlist this morning and clicked on the link because I wanted to find out why someone ELSE might think I had committed an act of vandalism! :( (As you can probably imagine, I was rather shocked to see the whole thing simply disappear as a result.) In any event, I decided to wait until you might be online to ask what you think may have happened. Was this possibly because I moved our prior exchange here? If so, my feeling is that the person who attached the label either didn't look very closely, or if the whole thing happened automatically, someone has set their "vandalism" filter awfully low ... (I even noticed that some of my innocent edits just joining a number of WikiProjects had been labeled vandalism! Or at least they have on my watchlist.) Is there anything that can be done about this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Themis-Athena (talk • contribs) 20:28, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

• • I think what you are seeing is the way that Twinkle sets buttons for you to click. I creates link-like buttons that say (Vandalism) or something like that (I'm not on my home computer right now so I can't see them) and places them at the end of the edit summary of the last edit on any page. Look at my recent contributions, many are in deletion discussions I closed so there are no more recent changes and won't be. If you click the (Vandalism) link, you revert the edit and leave an automatic edit summary "Reverting edits by Doug identified as vandalism using Twinkle" or something like that. It does this so that you can revert blatant vandalism relatively quickly. When you do this it will also normally open a pop-up window (unless you have pop-ups blocked) that will give you the opportunity to send a message to the vandal warning him or her for bad conduct. Twinkle is a great tool but you may not really need it yet, it's primarily an anti-vandal tool and I really don't think that's where you can add the most to the project (if you disagree or if that's the sort of thing that interests you, let me know as it will definitely affect my recommendations for what you do). So, nobody labeled your edit as vandalism (except you), Twinkle simply gave you that option and you unsuspectingly chose it! I'd suggest you consider disabling Twinkle and get used to editing without it first because if you accidentally label someone else's edit as vandalism you might make someone angry. I didn't start using Twinkle until a month before I became an admin and then it was mostly a thought that "hey, pretty soon someone is going to ask me to be an admin, I really ought to know how Twinkle works". I can suggest some tools to you that may be more useful at first if you really want to try some out. If it turns out that you are editing some rather obscure topics in which you are finding a lot of vandalism, we can talk about anti-vandal tools then.
  • BTW, if you should ever label someone ELSE's edit as vandalism, you need to either 1) immediately revert yourself, or 2) make a null edit where you make no change but leave an edit summary in which you say something like "correcting last edit summary - not vandalism". --Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 22:05, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

• • I fixed this one] too. Though you can see by my edit summary that I wasn't paying attention to the fact that this came from Commons. Instead we should make the same changes on Commons. Do you have a Commons account? BTW, do you have a Single User Login account on all projects? You should.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 22:19, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

________________

• • • Thank you so much for cleaning up the mess I've already managed to create!! I just hope you're not going to have to go on doing this for VERY much longer, and I'll be able to contribute in a more meaningful way soon ... ;( --Themis-Athena (talk) 09:44, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

• • • • Don't worry about it, I think we can safely say that accidentally reverting yourself is inconsequential. This is what a line in my contributions looks like to me:

• 18:55, 16 December 2008 (hist) (diff) User:Doug/Tools ‎ (→Specialized scripts and tools I use: Update) (top) [rollback] [rollback] [vandalism]

• • • • Though some of that is in italics and most of it is made up of clickable links that I don't want to try to replicate here. On this view I cannot click the date/time. Clicking the "(hist)" link will give me the last 50 edits of page history for the page. Clicking the "(diff)" link will show the WP:Diff for this edit, i.e. the difference between this edit and the previous version this is also sometimes called a "permalink". Clicking "User:Doug/Tools" will take me to the current page and clicking the right arrow just inside the first parenthesis will take me to the "Specialized scripts and tools I use" heading on the page. "Update" is simply my edit summary and isn't clickable. "(top)" shows me that this is the last edit on the page some tools make this boldface. The first "[rollback]" is a button you don't have, it's the WP:Rollback privilege which used to be only available to admins but is now available to any established user with no history of edit warring - it leaves an automatic edit summary, the default is something like "Reverted 5 edits by John Doe". The second "[rollback]" is generally much better and comes with Twinkle and allows for a custom edit summary via a pop-up, it is boldface. The "[vandalism]" button is also part of Twinkle and leaves an automatic edit summary to the effect of "Reverted 5 edits by John Doe identified as vandalism" and opens the last editor's talk page and a pop-up warning window. The "vandalism" link is boldfaced and defaults to red.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 11:25, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

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• • • • Signing off for tonight (long day here), but at least I wanted to say thanks again for all your support and explanations. Things are SLOWLY beginning to make sense ... :) --Themis-Athena (talk) 21:24, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Wikisource

Doug, as you suggested, I checked and saw that my account is active on a number of Wiki sites (including Commons and Wikipedia Germany). However, when checking Wikisource -- following a suggestion by Xover regarding some of the material I have compiled on Project Hamlet -- I noticed that though my user name shows as part of the header links, it does so in red. Is that the case because I haven't contributed any material on Wikisource yet, or does it indicate that I'll have to set up a separate user profile page there? As always, thanks a lot in advance for your explanations!--Themis-Athena (talk) 13:57, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

• Well, I thought it meant you didn't have a userpage (i.e. you haven't created it yet) but now I don't understand, I just checked all three and you have no userpage on any of them so your name should appear red on all three. Take a look at my user page on all three of those projects. In order to have the link look blue, you should have to put something on your userpage, at least a template to say that it's an SUL account or that you are TA and you usually hang out on enwiki or whatever. If you have a blue link on dewiki or commons then I'm very confused because they look like non-pages to me. I can see in the logs though that you have automatically created accounts on them, so at least that worked for you. Not contributing yet shouldn't have any effect, though it might cause the "my contributions" link to be red. I have an account that predates the unified login, so I have recently been having to go around trying to take over "User:Doug" on various accounts. You can see from my userpage here that I have not been completely successful. It appears you won't have to deal with that, you did a pretty good job of picking a unique username. :-) --Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 04:21, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

• • (Sigh.) You're perfectly right again, of course, Doug. Checking my unified login data, I just saw that it said my account was active on the other sites, too, and without further ado assumed that this also meant they would be linking to my Wikipedia profile page. I now realize this isn't the case -- not just on WikiSource but on the other sites as well. Oh well ... ;) I think I'll start worrying about that once I've actually done something useful there! Once more, thanks for blowing away my self-created cobwebs!! --Themis-Athena (talk) 19:36, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

• • • Your welcome but it's what I'm here for, this does take some getting used to. I do think that getting used to one project at a time is probably a good idea. I only got an account on Commons after I uploaded a photo for an article I was drafting and then only several months later did I do anything with the account (Until a few months ago you didn't automatically get an account on any other project you signed into). I wanted to make sure you had a unified account but now that we've verified that, let me know what you need help with.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 02:38, 20 December 2008 (UTC)