User:Imz/My way of becoming more experienced here

Notes for myself.

General personal policies
...on my participation


 * Do not delve into any activities related to an article
 * that is not good enough (yet) for providing me with the information I am looking for right now,
 * that is not a good encyclopedia article,
 * that is about something I'm not a specialist in,
 * and that (therefore) I'm not going to make a good article on this position the way I imagine it.
 * Just switch to other sources of information if this is unsatisfiable. Perhaps,

Ex. (where I thought this): ru:Омар Хайам--Imz 22:14, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * add a link to the article if I find something worth this (a good source of information on this subject), or
 * if I notice something trivial that needs to be done about the bad article, fix it or mark it, but no real big efforts.
 * Also, if I decide to try out a certain feature by making this article better, try it out, but rememeber what you are doing: just a very small thing, do not bother yourself about the article still remaining bad.

Learning trivialities
I want to strongly emphasize 'this'. results in
 * Four single-quotes are not a special sequence :-( :
 * I want to strongly emphasize 'this'.

--Imz 19:16, 22 October 2005 (UTC) bla-bla: karara; Ok. --Imz 22:41, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Learned how to make the in-other-languages links: adding something like  to the end of the article. (After categories. After stub-templaytes etc. or not?). --Imz 23:17, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * How to continue a list entry text after an embedded list?! I mean something like the following (look at karara):
 * blalala:
 * baba,
 * lala,
 * bububu.
 * I don't know a quick way to put a long dash in (at least, English) Wikipedia except for !--Imz 22:29, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * HTML-entities have to be escaped inside a &lt;nowiki&gt; --- &lt;/nowiki&gt; . What about HTML-elements? --Imz 22:26, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * No, this remark is not true for HTML-elements, at least, I'v just tried  inside a , and the code code etc. appeared literally (so, put it outside nowiki if I need it).--Imz 22:32, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Learned to put "Meta"-notices at the beginnning of articles. Ref.: ru:Википедия:Правила и указания.--Imz 19:25, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Learned how to make inline interlanguage links (say, from here to Russian Wikipedia): ru:Some title . Ref.: Interlanguage link.--Imz 19:25, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

More elaborate
--Imz 01:49, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Encountered Template:Fact, which might be handy at some places.--Imz 18:21, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Template:Otheruses4 is quite good for creating disambiguation warnings. Ex.: Persian alphabet.--Imz 23:19, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Learned to mark specialized stubs, like the ones marked by . Ex.: segment (linguistics).--Imz 18:52, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Made up a disambiguation thing: put  (ref.: Disambiguation) at a page with content, and created a dismbiguation page with link to other (basically, more specific) articles with   at the bottom (ref.: Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)). Ex.: Ajam and Ajami (disambiguation).--Imz 03:14, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Saw a template for language links&mdash; gives: Azerbaijani --Imz 17:40, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Found categories of redirects in Redirect, used them. Ex.: Mahabharath.
 * A few my reactions to the usage of Redirects at Wikipedia talk:Redirect:
 * Wikipedia talk:Redirect
 * Wikipedia talk:Redirect--Imz 02:18, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Used the main-article-template like this  (found it in some other page). Ex.: Persian language.--Imz 19:14, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Found Template:Lang-ru (similarly for other langs), Template:Lang (some time before).
 * I think it's good to give names in "native" languages and scripts, the templates are good for that.
 * Also, I came up with a wording that might be useful sometimes, like this :, yeah, and you give a link to wikipedia in that language as an evidence for the statement. ;-) Ex.: Omar Khayyám.
 * One reason these templates are good for is: they mark the text as belonging to a specific language, and doing so is good. Some browsers/tools (search engines) can make use of it.
 * As for me, I'm interested in adding a converter between writing-systems into the browser I use (and perhaps to wikipedia sites). Having texts marked up for languages is quite important for this feature.

Meta-markup
That relates to doing something by wikipedians:


 * Found ru:Шаблон:Объединить. Ref.: ru:Википедия:Шаблоны:Перемещение содержимого. Ex.: ru:Караханиды--Imz 19:09, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Found and used English notices for Merging and moving pages--Imz 05:12, 26 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Found . Ref.: ru:Википедия:Викификация.--Imz 20:07, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

User accounts

 * I intend to set 17 as the number of lines in the inout field (otherwise it might happen that all the stuff around the field doen't fit nicely into my Firefox "main area").--Imz 01:34, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I decided not to change the interface language at wikipedia-in-other-language sites from the default language (their native language) in order not forget that this is primary language there, and I should better write the changelog entries in that language (because of other users).--Imz 22:35, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Started to fill out this page (English).
 * Started to do links from my user accounts at other Wikimedia projects to here. (This is terribly awful --- having independent accounts everywhare! :-( Ex.: См.&amp;nbsp;en:User:imz. at ru:Участник:Imz.
 * Simultaneously, I should try to keep a list of my accounts here, in section.--Imz 22:23, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Interwiki

 * It is possible to make a link from http://meta.wikimedia.org to English Wikipedia (this page) by writing either  or  . And , too. That doesn't look quite systematic yet. Ex.: m:User:Imz  --Imz 20:25, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
 * To by, say,  . (Ref.: oldwikisource:Wikisource:Scriptorium)--Imz 00:57, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Doing things

 * Found how to do reverts not manually: Revert.--Imz 21:06, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Small things
So, I refer to this kind of edits in the chnagelog as "formatting and essential terms mark-up (unclear or keys)", "форматирование & отметил важные термины (непонятные или ключевые)".
 * In an "alien" article, I am often able to make improvements that are small things (so, perhaps, the article is awful or perfect on the big, but that's not my bothering). I found it convenient to join several kinds of them in a single edit:
 * formatting:
 * fixing typos,
 * improving spelling,
 * punctuation
 * and some other formatting (specific for the electronic way of presentation; e.g.,
 * quotation marks, emphasis, etc.,
 * Russian ё (I don't want to impose its use, but if there is some inconsistency in its use, I'd fix it.));
 * wiki-linking things that are unclear, so it would be better for the understanding of the artic;e if there is a link;
 * make wiki-links out of essential terms (that must be keys in wikipedia; so perhaps, we even can't hope to write much more on this matter in the new article, but it should be there to enable people to look-up this key-term; it might simply give a short note and point at this article for further reference).

Примеры?.. --Imz 18:25, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * The formatting part should be probably called copy editing according to the common word usage (How to copy-edit).--Imz 20:32, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Browser and other tools

 * Toggled the value of the network.standard-url.encode-utf8 parameter of Firefox, as told on ru:Википедия:Справка.--Imz 15:43, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Noteworthy things
...but no real use yet, maybe in future, I'll involve these thing somewhere somehow:

For content

 * ru:Википедия:Проект:Википедии на языках России--Imz 22:14, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

For controlling content

 * A branching technique by means of templates (can be useful for special language cases in Template:Lang, e.g., direction of writing): m:Help:Template names, variable names and parameters depending on a variable or parameter.--Imz 16:10, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

For meta (proposals, etc.)

 * Naming conventions--Imz 19:47, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Naming conventions (Arabic), can be "translated" to other languages, scripts (such Devanagari/Sanskrit). I'd propose
 * to always include additionally an IPA transcription (people have to learn only one system to be able to understand how it is pronounce rather than several tranliteration systems traditionally used for different languages)
 * to move parts of the information to footnotes (or hide by some other means): transscription + perhaps transliteration (when?)--Imz 00:47, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Pages I touched
Just to keep track for myself.

(Main)

 * Omar Khayyám
 * Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
 * Bhagavad Gita
 * Konkani
 * Oblast
 * Time zone
 * Bharata war
 * Kurukshetra District
 * Kazakh language
 * Russian orthography
 * Yakov Karlovich Grot
 * Ukrainian I
 * Russian alphabet
 * Cyrillic alphabet
 * Decidable
 * NP-complete
 * Skolem's paradox
 * Decidability (logic)
 * Propositional calculus
 * Meditations

Templates

 * Template:Lang-fa
 * Template:Hindu scriptures

Discussions

 * Talk:Omar Khayyám
 * Talk:Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
 * Talk:Russian alphabet
 * Talk:Ukrainian I
 * Talk:Undecidable