User talk:DKaufman

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Alice Beck Kehoe
Hi, and thanks for creating the article on Alice Beck Kehoe. While the article is currently interesting, I am concerns that it amounts to original research, and may be a suitable candidate to be deleted. Please familiarize the Guidelines on notability for academics and adjust the article accordingly. To compare your effort with a decent article about an academic, see this. – Freechild ( ¡!¡!¡!¡ ) 17:51, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Tables
Hi there Dave. Re you question on tables, my first suggestion would be to start 'em off plain, tweaking the formats and presentation can be done later once you get a handle. Suggest also avoiding using merged cells at first, stick to a plain m rows by n cols format.

For an overview and examples of using wikimedia table markup, see the meta-wiki help guide H:TABLE.

A basic table structure for a 3x3 cell array would be: which produces: Basically, all the cells in one row (each beginning with a pipe   character) appear in-between 'row-break' separators  

As long as each row has the same number of cells, hard to go astray.

You could also try looking at an article like Mayan languages which contains a number of tables, I imagine with a similar purpose to what you'd like to achieve with Q'anjob'al language. Give it a go, and if it's not coming out the way you want one or the other of us will be glad to suggest ways to correct. Best, --cjllw ʘ  TALK 04:55, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Lost work on Q'anjob'al
Hi Dave, re your query about some of your edits to this article somehow being lost along the way - did you go through the article's edit history to see if any of your edits mistakenly overwrote another? I did see one edit where some material in tables got eliminated, dunno whether that was intentional or not.

Alternatively, every now and then something may go astray with data being transferred across the web to wikimedia servers. I gather that at certain peak load periods, or when lots of background proccessing is in train, you can sometimes get a "wikimedia foundation error" screen if at the moment you've hit "save" the wikimedia server's are too busy to respond. Can be annoying, but a lot of the time the data you've entered remains in your browser memory, so if that happens by hitting "refresh" or browser equivalent a few seconds later to re-transmit the data, that will work.

Other times the wikipedia database itself may get locked for short periods of time, say if a developer needs to let some processes terminate to lighten the load. When that happens you won't be able to save, but there should be a message displayed in the editing pane telling you that the db is locked and to try again later (normally situation only lasts couple mins, if that).

Only other suggestion, when writing an extensive section is to write/save it in some text editor first, then transfer across. Sorry if you lost a whole bunch of work, I know how annoying that can be. But them's the breaks on a live-edited system, I guess!

ps. I set about converting the citations in the Q'anjob'al language article to follow the WP:CITESHORT method, hope you don't mind. Basically, for this you just put the abbreviated cite in-between opening and closing  tags after the sentence, like so:. You would then also add the full expanded reference appears to the 'References' section, kinda like a bibliography entry.

pps. You had one cite appearing as "OKMA (2000)". I expanded this reference on the basis that you meant the publication Variación dialectal en q'anjob'al, so I hope that was right. Another cite appears as (Mateo 2008: p.c.); I gather the author here is Eladio Mateo Toledo, but am not sure on which individual publication of his this is a reference to. Would you be able to clarify in the article? Cheers, --cjllw ʘ  TALK 04:23, 22 September 2008 (UTC)


 * You're welcome Dave, and kudos for the expansions and improvements to date you've made to the article. Just to note, one of the differences between writing for wikipedia and, say, a journal paper, is that on wiki we try to avoid relying on unpublished sources, such as pers comms, in an effort to adhere to guiding principles of our verifiability and reliable sources policies. Not that I doubt for a minute the accuracy of the info Sr. Mateo provided to you, but just that in the long run it would be best to have some published and verifiable source to cite. In this case the info cited is neither critical to the piece nor controversial, so there'd be no hurry to scramble & find a published alternative. Just for future reference. Cheers, and keep up the great work --cjllw  ʘ  TALK 04:58, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Vowel table
Sure Dave, will take a look at it shortly and see if I can get it to come out. Saludos, --cjllw ʘ  TALK 01:57, 24 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi dave- afraid I got caught up in some things so may not be until tomorrow that I can look at it. --cjllw ʘ  TALK 09:51, 24 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi Dave- apologies for the delay. I've now made some changes to the table coding, so I think it is now showing as you intended. Pls take a look and let me know if needs any more tweaking. Regards ,--cjllw ʘ  TALK 01:42, 26 September 2008 (UTC)