User talk:Aartea

Hi Aartea, Welcome to Wikipedia! Unionpearl (talk) 13:29, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Welcome
I met you at the Wikinic in Cambridge. Let know if I can be of help.--agr (talk) 20:12, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I was there too. Your sandbox article has a lot of great content and sources. The tricky bit looks like converting all of your sources? I know you were looking for some face-to-face interaction, but if I can be of virtual help let me know. -Reagle (talk) 13:07, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Adding references (with Template:RefPage)
I am glad you got to meet some local Wikipedians at yesterday's Wicnic, and asked some questions regarding your current attempt to finish your first article. Lots of help is available online, both in prewritten documentation and introductory tutorials, as well as from other editors. My initial impression of your draft article is that its content and references are good, but you just need some basic help with formatting.

I recommend editing the Wikipedia source code either in the traditional editor ("Edit source") or in Visual Editor, if you prefer. Many longtime editors prefer the traditional Wikipedia editor, or use both as needed. Editing in Microsoft Word introduces a lot of overhead and extraneous formatting which needs to be removed, and is not generally recommended for Wikipedia. An exception is if you are expert at using Word macros and need them for specialized automated editing. Wikipedia itself has a number of automated editing tools, which are designed to work with the traditional editor interface. These tools and shortcuts are not enabled by default, to avoid overwhelming new editors, but are easy to enable if and when desired.

You may find the article Help:Referencing for beginners useful in learning how to build complete and well-formatted references in Wikipedia. The methods shown in Using refToolbar are particularly handy for enabling efficient cut-and-paste construction of a proper Wikipedia reference. The refToolbar method is very helpful for both novice and experienced editors, because it uses a simple form to cue an editor to include the most important parameters (for example, author, date, publisher), while it takes care of the formatting details automatically. For websites, books, and academic journals, many fields can automatically be filled in, and only need to reviewed for accuracy.

You can skip the later sections in the tutorial, on manually building references, until/unless you need to "look under the covers" to make custom modifications.

I would also like to point out a technique used in Wikipedia to show the page numbers in footnoted references, without triggering an absurdly large number of nearly-identical full citations. The abbreviated format is described at Template:Refpage, which was designed specifically to handle this problem. This and other useful techniques for efficiently formatting references are explained at Help:Referencing for beginners.

If you have questions now or as you progress in editing, please feel free to ask me on my Talk page, or on your Talk page here. I will be monitoring here for the next few weeks, in case you post any questions here. Best wishes, Reify-tech (talk) 19:11, 17 July 2017 (UTC)