User talk:CBrowns

References and Table of Contents seem off to me. Guidance appreciated. Thanks.

--CBrowns (talk) 05:13, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I happen to love refs. How can I help? // roux   05:22, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Roux, Thanks. Sorry for the delay. All of my refs are coming up as 1. How do I get them to sequence?
 * That's because it's the same ref all the time - if you want to use that standard ref placement, place at the bottom of the page and to title the ref, do

. Hope that helps. Queenie 19:54, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Hey Queenie, thanks for your suggestion. The thing is, they are all different references. I put the links to each one inside the brackets. What part of the code designates the ref numbers? Thanks for your help!

CBrowns (talk) 01:02, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Draft article
Hi CBrowns - saw your question over at the new contributors' helpdesk. I'm very happy to help out. I see you have a problem at the moment with references, which I'll cover first; then, I can talk you through some elements of tone, internal linking, and formatting.

I'd also suggest that you move the draft article to a subpage of your user space, rather than keeping it as your main userpage. This is by no means compulsory, but since this page is linked from your signature, users may arrive on it when they're looking to learn more about you as a Wikipedia - from that perspective, landing on a draft article could be confusing. If you agree, let me know whether you know how to move pages, or need some help with that.

The references problem: this is happening because you're using the same refname in all your reference tags. The "Refname" tag is a kind of shortcut in referencing: if you want to use the same single source multiple times within an article, you can give that source a name the first time you add it to the article, meaning that the next time you want to include it in the article you don't need to type it out in full but can simplylist the shortcut. For exmpale, would be if you wanted to cite the webpage example.com several times, the first time you wanted to place it in the text you would type. The next time you wanted to place it in the article you could just type, and the full reference would show up there too.

Because you've given all your references the same refname, only one reference is showing up. You need to replace the tags with simple needs to become

How does that sound? I can do this for you, but let me know if you'd prefer to do it yourself. Gonzonoir (talk) 12:11, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Draft article Reply
Hi Gonzonoir and thanks very much for your help! I'm going to try some of this now.

Ok ... I'm not having much luck. It might be that I have not had the account going long enough. If you're out there Gonzonoir ... maybe you could take another look. Thanks!

CBrowns (talk) 01:44, 17 March 2009 (UTC) CBrowns (talk) 01:25, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Hi there - happy to help. Unfortunately, my unclear advice led you to move your entire userspace, when all we really needed to do was to create a user subpage. I got an admin to reverse the move - apologies, the fault is all mine. The rest of my advice will be better, promise! :-)


 * So, the situation now: your draft article is in a shiny new user subpage at User:CBrowns/Draft_of_Steve_Waldman_Article - there's a link to it from your main userpage in case you lose it. You might also want to add it to your watchlist if you haven't done so already. You can now work on the article here until it's ready for the main article space, at which point we can move it without all the associated hassle I brought in this time :)


 * You've done a grand job on the refnames: a good next step would be to clean up that reference list a bit. All your references at the moment are labelled "Link text", which isn't so helpful to the reader. You have a couple of choices on how to make them more readable:


 * Removing the "Link text" element from each of your reference tags will display the URL of the link in the reference. This is pretty basic, but still an improvement.
 * You can replace the "link text" element in each of those tags with a brief description of what the link points to - e.g. "New York Times, 1st January 2009". That would help readers see straight away what you're referring to, and is a good first step in establishing that those sources are reliable and meet Wikipedia's standards for demonstrating notability.
 * Best practice would be to add a template into each of your references. This is a standard way of formatting references, allowing them to be displayed according to reader preferences and in a uniform manner. Here's one from the featured article Elk: the template  gives a nice, neat reference reading
 * This template can be a little overwhelming to begin with, though, so if you don't want to get that involved yet I'd say the second of the two bullets above would be the best to go for.
 * This template can be a little overwhelming to begin with, though, so if you don't want to get that involved yet I'd say the second of the two bullets above would be the best to go for.


 * Once you've decided what to do there, a good next step would be to add internal links into your article. Internal links are an important part of the Wikipedia guideline to "build the web", or create links between articles to help readers find out more at the click of a button. The idea is to identify ideas in the text that readers might want to investigate further. You can turn them into wikilinks by adding two square brackets either side of the word or phrase, like this.


 * How to decide what gets linked? There's a guide at WP:MOSLINKS, which should explain what's appropriate for linking. You can also try Can We Link It?, an automated link-suggestion tool. You still need to apply common sense with this tool - it'll suggest some words that don't need linking, and some links that aren't appropriate for the sense in which the word appears in your article - but it's a useful start.


 * I'll leave you with these two for now, but do just shout if any of this needs clarification. Looks like we're in very different timezones, but I'll pick up your messages when I'm online. Gonzonoir (talk) 09:29, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Gonzonoir, you are the best! Thanks! I'm trying to do this, but am so sleepy, that I'm passing out. Will attempt again tomorrow. CBrowns (talk) 01:44, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Mentoring = Adopt-A-User
You would probably be interested in Adopt-a-User. Just follow the instructions there to put a box on your page saying that you want adoption, and ask someone on that page if they're willing to be doing the adopting. Have a nice day! ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 15:58, 20 March 2009 (UTC)