User:MacGyverMagic/Adopt/MilesAwayGirl

Adoption page - talk page []

Hello, MilesAwayGirl! Welcome to your adoption/mentorship page! This page, and its talk page, will be a centralized discussion point for the two of us in relation to anything to do with your mentorship; this way, we won't risk cluttering up our talk pages quite so much, and everything will be in one place instead of spread all over. Getting here isn't hard - you can keep a copy of the link I gave you around, or there's a link to the Adoption Center at the top of my userpage. Searching for "MacGyverMagic/Adopt" will also get this page among the first few hits.

You'll also notice I've put up a status box for you at the right here - you don't have to use this if you don't want to, however it could be useful if the two of us need to get together for a quick chat or something. This template does require a bit of setup to work the way it is intended, but it's nothing too involved.

Since I already know what you're looking for I'm skipping the usual questionnaire and go right to the first lesson. Take as much time on it as you need.

Should you ever need to contact me about something relating to the mentorship, feel free to post to this page or its talk page. I'm watching these pages and will be notified as soon as something comes up. If it's urgent or unrelated to the program, then you are of course more than welcome to drop a note on my main talk page at User talk:MacGyverMagic. - Mgm|(talk) 10:11, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikimarkup 101
The first thing to learn is how to edit pages, one of the most important features of Wikipedia. The interesting bit, however, is getting things to look, well, interesting. There are a number of different bits of code that you can use in your editing to create different effects when the page is saved - they can be as simple as bold text or italics, but different bits of code can be combined to make a very appealing layout.

I should warn you that in most cases, special formatting is frowned upon in articles. It should only be used in certain situations, and when it is necessary to illustrate a particular point. Aside from those cases, text in articles should be just as you see it in this sentence - plain black, with only the occasional wikilink to spice things up.

Here, I'm going to show you what each of the buttons on your editing toolbar does and how to use the particular bit of code it produces. There are rather a lot of them, so what I'm going to do first is show you where you can go to test all this out while you're reading. There are two places: you can go to the main sandbox that everyone uses at Sandbox. This is a special page that is cleaned out every hour automatically, that gives editors a place to play with new code and vandals a place to vandalize other than our articles. The only problem with the sandbox is this: Whatever you save there isn't likely to stay for long, and there is a high chance of you getting hit with a few edit conflicts. So, to avoid that, you can create your own sandbox! On Wikipedia, you are able to tack "subpages" onto your main user page to use for testing things out, writing new articles, or other projects like what we're doing here. The main adoption page (User:MacGyverMagic/Adopt) is a subpage of User:MacGyverMagic, and the source of this lesson (User:MacGyverMagic/Adopt/Wikimarkup) is a subpage of that subpage. You can create user subpages by searching for the page you want to create in the search box. It won't find it, of course, however a red link will appear at the top of the page. Click on that, and edit away! For example, try searching for User:MacGyverMagic/Example and creating it.

To make your sandboxes, we're going to skip a few steps. This is a handy little box that we can use to start making a new page. Replace the word "YOURUSERNAME" below with your user name ("MacGyverMagic", for example) and click the button. It will bring you to your own personal sandbox, which you can start using right away.

Now that you have somewhere to test all this code out in, let's start showing you what all it does. Here we go!


 * Table syntax is complicated, and we'll cover that later on.
 * This is a table.
 * Like I said, we can cover this in a separate lesson if you want. It's not something I'm going to require.
 * rowspan=2| [[Image:Button reflink.png]]
 * Add a reference (footnote)
 * blah blah
 * Two "ref" tags around the reference text.
 * blah blah
 * rowspan=2| References are displayed using the code parameter to the first instance of a reference, you can make the same reference appear more than once. I have these footnotes displayed below the table so you can see how they appear.
 * Add a duplicate reference
 * blah blah blah blah
 * The duplicate reference has a slash at the end of the tag.
 * blah blah blah blah
 * }
 * blah blah blah blah
 * }
 * }

The references
(That was a level 4 header, with four equals signs)

, and will cause it to run off the page if it is long enough. A colon will cause a block indent, with all lines starting away from the edge of the page.

An asterisk (*) will make a bullet. A pound or number sign (#) makes a numbered list. You can mix and match the last three characters to get several different effects. The only caveat, though, is that you must have a continual line of #'s in order to maintain the numbering. This does not mean, however, that the numbered list has to be displayed at all times. See below for an example: Note that you don't have to hit enter twice when starting a new line from one of these types of paragraphs. However, when you don't use them, you do. Those last two sentences are on a different line from this one in the editing box, but there is no line break when they are displayed.

That's all I have for now. Please let me know what questions you have, although try playing with the code in your sandbox first. That will answer most of your questions, but I'm here if you still need help! - Mgm|(talk) 10:24, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

About verifiability and sources

 * One of Wikipedia's base policies is verifiability (check this link in edit mode; it's a piped link that actually points to WP:V links like these are called shortcuts and are used to easily get to common policy pages and other highly visited pages on the site). Verifiability means that we should strive to provide readers with reliable sources so they can check the veracity of our articles. Since you're interested in maintenance this is a key skills. There are a lot of articles left from times when criteria were less strict that still need sources. Your assignment this time is to read User:Uncle G/On sources and content and apply what you've learned to an unreferenced article. (WikiProject Unreferenced Article Cleanup may be of help in finding one.) If you come across any unreliable sources in your search, I'd like you to mention a couple in a section on the adoption page and say why you think they're not reliable. - Mgm|(talk) 19:27, 9 February 2009 (UTC)