Quetlin

A welcome from Sango123

Hello, Quetlin, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions; I hope you like the place and decide to stay. We're glad to have you in our community! Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• If you haven't already, drop by the New user log and tell others a bit about yourself.
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Though we all make goofy mistakes, here is what Wikipedia is not. If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to see the help pages or add a question to the village pump. The Community Portal can also be very useful.

Happy editing!

-- Sango123 (talk) 19:21, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

P.S. Feel free to leave a message on my talk page if you need help with anything or simply wish to say hello. :)

Pleasant

Regarding your question at the new user log, your article about Mary Ellen Pleasant looks fine for a developing article. Of course, it's not yet featured status, but it will improve with time. Eventually, the wikifiers and the copy-editors and the categorizors and even the vandals will probably contribute to the article. Just wait and see. And don't feel discouraged if they make major changes to the article. In the meantime, you can explore the links that Sango123 gave you, and maybe you can continue to improve the Pleasant article yourself. You can also create your own user page, which is the page that others see when they follow the link in your signature. Your user page is User:Quetlin. Once again, welcome. --TantalumTelluride 05:33, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Mary Ellen Pleasant Reference Style

Hey there! I hope you are enjoying Wikipedia. I noticed your article Mary Ellen Pleasant and was scrolling through when I noticed the references. As a newcomer you probably didn't know that Wikipedia has a standard for citing sources. WikiBib is a quick and easy way to created Wikipedia-compliant citations. Have a good day =), TDS ^{(talk • contribs)} 02:03, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

My reversion of your recent edits to Pearl of Lao Tzu

Greetings.

I noticed today that you had recently made a number of edits to the Pearl of Lao Tzu page, none of which had edit summaries. On examination of those edits, I saw that they had done various sorts of damage to the page -- trashing <Ref>s, turning what previously been superscripted links to References section items into plain-text square-bracketed numbers, modifying text supported by previous cites without explaining the modifications or citing better sources, etc. From what I can see, the damage done didn't look malicious, but rather as if you might be unfamiliar with how to edit wikipedia pages containing references to supporting sources. I have attempted to revert your edits and the reversion seems to have been done, but (as of this writing) the reversion does not show up in the page history. I'm guessing that there is currently some sort of lag or problem in updating the page histories, and that the page history will show my reversion shortly.

Please take a look at WP:FN for information on how <Ref> tags are used on wikipedia pages to place footnotes containing info about sources supporting assertions made into a References section. That should give you a good idea how to redo your edits without damaging citations which have been put into the article by previous editors. You might also want to look at WP:V, WP:RS, WP:CITE, and WP:TEMP. Please also provide an edit summary when saving your future edits, summarizing info about what you've done and/or why. If I can help, feel free to contact me on my talk page here. -- Boracay Bill 06:03, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Citing sources with cite.php tags

I've bounced this discussion from my talk page back to yours. No, even though I live in the Philippines I have no special info about the pearl on the page we've been discussing. I have no special interest in the pearl either. I happened to stumble onto the page while doing something else and, which got it onto my watchlist. Seeing continuing activity on the page, I've kept it on my watchlist for now.

This is the most common method of citing sources in use, and the method used on the page in question. There is some variation from article to article but, generally, a <Ref> tag is placed inline in the text, some stuff is put after that -- possibly some simple text, possibly an external link to an outside source, possibly one of the WP:CITET citation templates with appropriate fields filled in, and then a </ref> tag is put in and the text continues.. The stuff (citations and/or footnotes) which is placed inline in the text this way doesn't appear inline where it is placed. What appears instead is a clickable superscripted numeric link in square brackets. The stuff between the <ref> and </ref> tags is expanded elswehere in the page in a numeric list numbered so as to match the superscripted numeric links placed inline in the text. The location of that expansion is at a point where the <References/> tag appears. This is usually done in a section named references which is located near the bottom of the article.

Example from the Pearl of Lao Tsu page: The '''Pearl of Lao Tzu''' (also referred to as '''Pearl of Lao Tze''' and '''Pearl of Allah'''<ref>[http://www.research.amnh.org/invertzoo/malacology/research/pearls/famous.html Famous Pearls]</ref><ref name="Service Mark">Service Mark owned by Gina Diane Barbish and Victor M. Barbish, registered July 18, 2006</ref>{{failed verification|date=May 2007}}) [...]
...much vertical separation...
==References==
<References/>

This example produces two footnotes, apparently in support of the assertion about the naming of the pearl. footnote 2 Just makes a claim about the ownership of the service mark (trademark) on the name of the pearl (or on one of the three names? that's not clear). Someone has challenged the second source by placing a {{failed verification}} template after it. Footnote 1 is a link to an external web page published by the American Museum of Natural History (probably a reliable source by the standards of WP:RS), which says, among other things:

Pearl of Allah · The largest pearl on record, from a Giant Clam (Tridacna gigas) of 160 lbs, this specimen is 23.8 cm long, and weighs 6.4 kg (about 14 lbs). It was reportedly collected by a free-diving pearl diver named Etem, on May 7, 1934, at Palawan Island, Philippines (Jungbluth, 1999). At one time it belonged to Wilburn Dowell Cobb (Cobb, 1939), who allegedly received it as a gift from a chieftan of Palawan after having saved the life of his son. On May 15, 1980, Cobb’s heirs sold it at auction to Peter Hofman, a jeweler from Beverly Hills, California, for US $200,000. In 1966, it was valued at $3.5 million (McCormick, 1966). According to te Guiness Book of Records, the San Francisco Gem Laboratory has valuated it at US $40-42 million. Its present owner is unknown. Also called the Pearl of Lao-Tsu or Lao-Tse. See also http://www.thebeadsite.com/REC-PRL.html; Mangiacopra & Smith, 1998.

I would say that the assertion about the naming of the pearl passes muster by the standards of WP:V. It may be that there are other sources of similar apparent reliability which make differing assertions abut the naming of the pearl. If that is the case, as I understand it, that could be mentioned by a wiki editor. If I were aware of such a source and I were to do this, I might remove the two <Ref≥s from inside the parenthetical remark, and add after the initial sentence something like Information at the [American Museum of Natural History] website confirms the naming of this pearl., but information from other sources of similar reliability contradict this.<ref>[http://www.research.amnh.org/invertzoo/malacology/research/pearls/famous.html Famous Pearls]</ref> (followed by other <Ref>s citing those other reliable sources. Actually, I probably wouldn't use that precise wording, but I hope you get the idea. (excuse the glitchy formatting in the preceeding example -- I'm not going to take the time to track down and try to fix the cause of it).

I hasten to add that I'm just a normal wikipedia like you, not any sort of guru. I've been doing this for a few years, though, and perhaps have a bit of a better understanding of this stuff than you do at this point.

I hope the foregoing has helped. I'll watch your talk page for a while -- if you want to continue this discussion, just respond here.

Cheers. -- Boracay Bill 02:10, 4 June 2007 (UTC)