User talk:CaptainMaya

Welcome!
Hello, CaptainMaya, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful: Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or and a volunteer will visit you here shortly. Again, welcome! Mike Peel (talk) 10:57, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Introduction and Getting started
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
 * Simplified Manual of Style

Hello!
Great to meet you today :) If you have questions, want ideas for things to work on or want a hand with anything you're doing feel free to give me a shout on my talk page! Leela0808 (talk) 12:02, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
 * And Hi! from me too. Kat tells me you're interested in templates and coding for them. Templates originally used mainly parser functions and parameters passed to them - they couldn't store a variable for later use, so became very cumbersome to maintain and debug. There's a basic help page at Help:Template and a list of parser functions and "magic words" (built-in variables) at Help:Magic words. More detailed information is available on the MediaWiki at mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions, for example. I would recommend looking at a selection of templates to see how they work, and you can create your own test templates in your user-space - for example, User:Darwinbish has several linked from her user page. You can simply look at the source of a page like User:RexxS/Shakespearean insults to see some simple parser functions and magic words in action.
 * The problems caused by very complex templates were alleviated by the integration of the Lua programming language into the wiki software. I'd recommend starting by having a quick look at mw:Extension:Scribunto. You don't need to know how to install it, but that page contains a number of useful links, particularly mw:Extension:Scribunto/Lua reference manual. Again, it's worth taking a look at Lua programs that others have already made. You could examine Module:Parsedate that I wrote to try to extract a standardised, valid date from any text string - test cases are at User:RexxS/DateDataTest which should show you how to invoke a Lua module from a normal wikipage.
 * That's a lot to take in, I know, but there are lots of folks around who can help, so please feel free to ask me if you get stuck. If I don't know the answer, there's a good chance I'll know someone who does. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 17:12, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Girl Geeks event
Thank you for being part of the Girl Geeks Wikipedia editing day on Sunday. I thought you might like a copy of the list we collected at the end of the day.

Things we learnt:
 * How to link to specific sections of Wikipedia pages
 * Learnt so much I'd never even thought about
 * Useful place to publicly put what I've learnt academically, so it's not just in my head.
 * Learnt how to share photos of kittens, and how to redirect.
 * Learnt how to get inspiration for articles to start editing. Also playing around with templates.
 * Always end up looking at something new on Wikipedia.
 * Learnt about Lua, Wikimedia Commons and the community portal.
 * Learnt about how Wikipedia handles original work (as opposed to copyright violations).
 * Really quick and easy to sign up and to use the editing tools, and how to conduct yourself on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a common sense thing, rather than hard-and-fast rules.
 * Wouldn't have looked at Wikipedia if there hadn't been a group of people to come together to work on it.
 * Now know more about references and citations, what a reliable source is, etc.

I hope you continue to enjoy editing Wikipedia.

If you check your watchlist, you will also see notifications of events that are coming up. These appear near the top of the screen in big text. There is also a list of events on the Wikimedia UK website.

Yaris678 (talk) 11:09, 26 November 2014 (UTC)