User:Neuromath/New user history

Date of registration: 2006-12-10
The calendar date 2006-12-10 is in a format specified by ISO 8601, which is an international standard.

The links below, detailing the work I have done on Wikipedia, include only work done since my registration as "Neuromath" on 2006-12-10. (I contributed some very minor edits, as an unregistered user, before that; I can't even remember which articles were involved.) I have never worked on Wikipedia as a registered user under any username other than "Neuromath". (For an exposition of the problems that can arise from editing under more than one username, see Wikipedia:Sock puppetry.) However, since 2008-08-25 I am serving notice that I may make contributions as an unregistered user; this is not for purposes of sock puppetry, but to avoid going to the trouble of logging in for every edit. Contributions after this date are likely to be mostly too minor to be worth the trouble of logging in for; see my main user page for my reasons for disaffection with Wikipedia.

Newbie mistakes
This section is intended to help new users to avoid certain traps for the unwary by offering illustrations of cases where I myself made such mistakes. There is a huge amount of information on Wikipedia about preferred style, but not all of these rules are equally likely to be violated (by a well-intentioned user) in practice. I hope my experiences will give any other new users who might read this page a sense of which things to watch out for in particular.

Editing talk page entries after first creating them
When I added the section Only High importance, not Top? to the talk page for Osmium, I omitted the words "naturally occurring" before "chemical element". I realized later that my statement could be taken to imply that a print encyclopedia would be gravely deficient if it did not mention, for example, Ununhexium. For this reason, I edited my remarks to add the two missing words. To my surprise, I discovered still later that editing one's own remarks on a talk page after first entering them, except when leaving the original struck out ( mistake like this), and with a few other exceptions, is considered behavior that is unacceptable according to the talk page guidelines. A talk page is considered to be a historical record of a conversation, not a work subject to continual improvement after the fact (as Wikipedia articles are).

Failing to add edit summaries to all edits
This is one of the commonest newbie mistakes, and I was no exception. To avoid it, and to appreciate the importance of avoiding it, read Help:Edit summary.