Smiley200

Hi Smiley200 - I see you're looking for someone to help you learn the ropes here at Wikipedia. Maybe I can help. I'm a reasonably experienced Wikipedian - but if you accept you'll be my first adoptee. I've been working on Wikipedia off and on for a couple of years - I have about 6,000 edits under my belt - and I've gotten a couple of articles onto the front page (of which I'm unreasonably proud and utterly immodest!). If you're still interested in 'adoption' (weird term...but there we go) we can chat either here, or my talk page (User_talk:SteveBaker) or by email at <sjbaker1@airmail.net>. Let me know what your interests are - what stuff you need help with - that kind of thing. SteveBaker 06:02, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Adoption - Accepted.

Hi!

Well, I can certainly help you out here. In the message you left on my Talk page you said that you didn't feel that you had the knowledge to edit facts into articles - I bet that's not true! Pick something (anything!) that you know a lot about and I guarantee there is an article out there that would benefit from your help. But let's assume for a moment that you are right. You could spend time doing what I do quite a lot - being a 'WikiGnome' - find articles that have lots of good info in them - but which need cleanup (fixing spelling, grammar, layout, adding categories, that kind of thing).

So where do you find that kind of thing? Well - a good place to start is Category:Wikipedia_cleanup_categories - which is a list of the kinds of problems Wikipedia articles have - pick one of the lists and you'll find dozens of articles that could use a little help from a WikiGnome. So, for example, if your Wiki editing skills are reasonably good - you could go to Category:Articles that need to be wikified (which has a backlog of articles going back to November last year!) - then pick almost anything off that list. Picking one of the April 2007 articles at random, let's look at: Ancient inscriptions of Raju Rulers - yep, that's a stinker. All of those ugly one entry lists - those should probably be definitions...but whatever - right there you can find about 10,000 articles that need simple editing cleanup.

If you'd really like to help - cleaning up factually OK articles to make them shiney and polished is quite a rewarding activity. I recently did a major cleanup of the Antikythera mechanism - which was a subject I once knew nothing about - but now I've gone through the article and performed about 20 major edits on it. The article looks cleaner - and I've learned a lot about obscure greek mechanical gizmos!

Oh - yeah - you also asked about user boxes. These are curious things - you tend to just sorta find them. If you see a user box on some other user's page that you feel applies to you - then open up their page for editing - find the line that describes the box - it'll probably look something like {{User British}} - which is the box that says "This user is proud to be British." - anyway, copy that little snippet of text into your clipboard then leave the edit page without saving (don't want to mess up someone's user page!) - then edit your own user page and just paste it in there. There are a few collections of user boxes - but as far as I know, there is no one place where they all live - finding them is half of the fun!

If you end up with a lot of user boxes, you can collect them together using {{Boxboxtop|About Smiley200}} at the top of the list and {{Boxboxbottom}} at the bottom.

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help you out - you can leave a message on my Talk: page - or you can email me at <steve@sjbaker.org>. If you'd like another userbox to add to your page, you could add: {{Adoptee|SteveBaker}}! SteveBaker 03:45, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Your image.

OK - the image at Image:Foxfurneb.jpg looks like it's incorrectly attributed. Unless User:Acom owns a 100 inch reflector telescope, the copyright still belongs to whoever took the original photo - no matter how much either Acom or your you messed with it in Photoshop (or whatever). That being the case, Acom should not have posted it with "I, the creator of this work, hereby grant the permission to copy...." etc - because Acom wasn't the creator (almost certainly). Now, in general, when you take someone else's work - you need to get permission from them to use the photo before you can post it here (even if you heavily remangled it along the way). In this case, it's possible that this is a NASA photo - if so, then there is a way around the usual rules because NASA is a branch of the US Government and the freedom of information act means that you don't need permission - although you STILL can't claim to have created the image yourself - there is a special template for the purpose of flagging such images. But if you're going to use a NASA image - why not get a decent one! Head over to the NASA site and search for 'Fox Fur Nebula' and you'll get much nicer photos than that god-awful thing. If you find one, you should tag it with {{PD-USGov-NASA}}. The precise details of how to properly use NASA images are laid out here: Category:NASA_images. That little article is definitely worthy of some cleanup though - well done! SteveBaker 19:43, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

(I replied to your message on my talk page - I can't carry out cross-page conversations!) SteveBaker 17:03, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your update on the User:Acom situation. I really think you (or perhaps 'we' or 'I') should do something about this person. Aside from the truly terrible quality of the graphics we're seeing, much of his/her work is marked as "made by self" - when in fact they are clearly taken from elsewhere. There are several mechanisms for dealing with this kind of person. Whilst I could take the necessary actions myself - perhaps it would be better if I merely helped you do it yourself...it's valuable experience, etc! Let me know if you'd prefer that I took action - or whether you need help with figuring out the correct procedures to follow. It could get messy - but this kind of thing is an all-too-common part of WikiGnomeing. SteveBaker 04:20, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Yeaahhh! Go Smiley200! Your post to User:Acom was right on the money - polite but firm. You should probably wait a few days - if you don't get a reply - or if the images don't get withdrawn voluntarily - start listing the offending pics under WP:MfD. SteveBaker 01:54, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Xbox 360

Hmm - I see from your userbox that you are an XBox 360 fan. That's interesting. I work for Midway Studios - writing games for the XBox 360 (http://www.blacksitegame.com). So keep buying those games - it's paying my salary and leaving me with enough time to hang out on Wikipedia and adopt Xbox fans - and so the great circle of life is complete! SteveBaker 19:51, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Stub sensor

Hi, I hope you didn't mind that I finished the section you had claimed. I was just anxious to see the project come to a close and there were no free sections left. Pax:Vobiscum 12:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Adoptee status?

Hi! I was doing a checkup on my adoptees, see how things are going, that kind of thing. I hadn't heard from you for a long while and aside from a couple of vandalism reversions and some chat - I don't see a whole lot of activity on your account.

Is there anything I can do to help? I know you were wondering what you could work on.

Let me know if there is anything I can do.

SteveBaker 20:09, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Dropping Adoptee status.

Hi!

I was doing a routine check of my various adoptees and it looks like you've been pretty much inactive on Wikipedia for 3 months - I guess you probably lost interest.

If it's OK with you, I'm going to remove your adoptee status so I can help someone else out instead.

If you do get interested again, do let me know - and I'll be happy to help you with any problems you might have.

SteveBaker (talk) 02:39, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stubsensor

As a previous volunteer at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stubsensor I though you might like to know there is a new set available for work at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stubsensor/20100826. Hope to see you there. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 10:54, 1 September 2010 (UTC)