Hello, Mr Dissociation! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already loving Wikipedia you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Happy editing! WLU (t) (c) (rules - simple rules) 17:54, 17 November 2008 (UTC)Reply
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Citation stuff

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Hi Mr. Dissociation, here are some tools to help you with the addition of citations to pages:

  • Citation templates - fill in the fields and it'll produced a standardized version no matter what the order, and you don't have to worry about formatting.
  • Google scholar autocitation, a google-style search engine and reference generator. Useful when the article doesn't have a pubmed number (old, social sciences or humanities) but the citation template isn't as neat and it does not fill in ISBN or pubmed numbers (currently broken, I hope one day it'll be fixed).
  • ISBN searchable database, used in conjunction with Diberry to find, and generate citation templates
  • pubmed/isbn Diberry's template generator, incredibly useful, uses the pubmed number or isbn to automatically generate a citation template for you; the most useful if you already have a pubmed or ISBN from a book

In addition, you may be interested in this essay I wrote for new editors. It's long, but is a pretty broad overview to wikipedia. WLU (t) (c) (rules - simple rules) 17:57, 17 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

Tips

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Hi,

Note the changes I made here - I'll highlight some of the changes. They're pretty common among new editors, pointing them out now will save yourself or other editors corrections in the future. You probably won't remember them all, but eventually it'll probably sink in  

  • Using raw references (i.e. Spalding & Wokney, 2006) in pages with footnotes looks odd; you can turn any reference into a footnote by surrounding it with the tags "<ref></ref>" - <ref> opens the tag, </ref> closes. <ref>Spalding & Wokney, 2006</ref> in the edit pane becomes [1] and at the bottom of the page where the {{reflist}} template is, you'll see this:
  1. ^ Spalding & Wokney, 2006
  • Capitalization is pretty strictly regulated, the relevant page in the manual of style is MOS:CAPS. The short form is, only capitalize proper names and the first words of sentences. It's always "Dissociative identity disorder is a psychological condition that...", not "Dissociative Identity Disorder" is a psychological condition that...".
  • "It is often believed that..." is an example of a weasel word, that we are supposed to avoid. Things like "may people believe", "it is often the case", etc. Basically, if it's often true, we should be either able to reference it, or simply state it flatly (we don't have to reference everything, just what may be controversial - if it's actually often the case, we should be able to say it in a way that isn't weaselly).
  • We should always build the web - link to relevant content if possible. I use popups to preview and allow direct links, I also edit with a second window open to check spelling and existence of pages.
  • Google books is usually a great source to link to and search for sources - when possible, it's also good to link to external sources that allow readers to verify any content for themselves.

All this stuff becomes second nature after a couple months. Let me know if this is too much nagging, I can stop (though on pages where we both edit, I reserve the right to wikify and make corrections - it's virtually impossible to stop a wikipedian from doing so - we're all meddlers). WLU (t) (c) (rules - simple rules) 23:35, 18 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

Question

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Hi Mr.D,

In this edit I wikified the citations; could you confirm if the reference for Boon & Draijer the correct one? Thanks, WLU (t) (c) (rules - simple rules) 20:08, 26 November 2008 (UTC)Reply