JayhawkTerp

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Hello, JayhawkTerp, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Brianda and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Improving citation instructions

Hi, JayhawkTerp,

At Brianda's page, in regard to citations you added to the article Hair and wig designer you said:

Some of those fixes were made by others after I published my article. (I have no idea how my References list got reversed when I did my first inline citation or how someone managed to remove the row of little superscript numbers for me.)
In general, the instructions on citations would benefit from being a lot more detailed and specific.

Thank you for this. The edit that introduced the reversed citations at the bottom of Hair and wig designer, as well as the inline citations, was your edit of 16:17, 9 April 2023 (diff). The gory details: the row of reference numbers in the references section was from four references that looked like they were intended to be in a WP:List defined references section in the appendix (which maybe was something that Visual Editor tried to do internally, in response to your edit; I have no idea of VE internal workings) but ended up as plain refs with no param |refs= container, thus generating the row of little numbers floating at the top of the references section that you can see in the previous revision. The little reference numbers were removed in the edit of 19:18, 9 April by User:Uncle Spock (diff), by moving all the references up into section § Aspects of the job in the body of the article (diff; perma). (If this all sounds cryptic, don't worry; it's mostly intended to provide hooks for further investigation, if someone wants to follow up.)

Otoh, I'm always interested in improving documentation to make it more comprehensible and useful, and it's rare that anyone offers feedback on it, so your comments are very valuable. If you could start by {{reply}}ing below and linking the page you refer to as "instructions on citations", I'll have a look, and then will probably have some follow-up questions for you. Thanks again for your comments, hopefully they will lead to improvements in our citation documentation. Mathglot (talk) 05:44, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

I just saw @JayhawkTerp's comment and was about to respond when I saw this. Thanks for this explanation @Mathglot. The "instructions on citations" they're referring to might be the Wiki Ed Adding citations training module, but JayhawkTerp can let us know for sure? To second Mathglot, the feedback is valuable and will be taken into account as we edit our training materials. Thanks! Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:44, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I was indeed referring to the Adding Citations training module. I found it very confusing trying to go from the Bibliography to the References list; didn't know why I had both and learned the hard way that I couldn't simply copy/paste from my Bibliography to my article sandbox to create my reflist. I don't mind this kind of fiddly work but I do want excruciatingly detailed instructions at least the first time I do something new. Is this process different if I'm not creating a new article as part of a course? JayhawkTerp (talk) 00:44, 12 April 2023 (UTC)