User talk:FeministDoc

Welcome editor[edit]

Clearly you didn't need me at the 500 Women Scientists edit-a-thon now running. Nice to see you doing so well with Catherine Blish, and I hope you'll find time to keep up the good work. It's not just a day or a month task, y'know. There's more to learn, and more to do with what you learned today. Anyway I'm glad to see smart people who are ready to pitch in. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:36, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Jim, but rather than not needing you I think its more that so much is new one doesn't know quite where to start. For my start in editing I decided to add small things... Here's a question for you, am I supposed to answer Talk comments by editing them as I did here? FeministDoc (talk) 18:50, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We have thousands of rules, standards, customs and practices, most in writing and nobody understands a tenth of them. Not a problem; when we trip, usually the one who notices is, according to custom, polite about it. So, as for this little question, you made it slightly too simple. We insert a Colon : at the beginning of a reply. This indents it. Often a reply to a reply gets two colons, and three, so it starts to look like

This

Followed by this

And more

And someone outdents

And the next one indents again

And again. There's actually a guideline on how many indents to do, but few pay attention to that one. No big deal; in talk pages we're not talking to civilians; we're insiders and only have to understand each other, somewhat. As with other cliques, we practice snobbery in several forms including jargon and dumb tricks of the Wikitext markup language which we dare not show to outsiders. Don't let it bother you; when someone visibly sneers someone else will point out how gauche that is. Oh, and right; make small errors and don't repeat each one too many times. Every new way you find to mess up can easily become a lesson. The conservative bias is your friend; easy to make an error and even easier for the editor who sees it to undo it. Jim.henderson (talk) 00:04, 14 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]