User talk:Karenthewriter/Archive 1

I have just spend four hours expanding the article "Keystone View Company". I saved the article, but only the first two sentences are shown. Since I don't have internet at home, and today was my once-a-month chance to have unlimited time on the internet this has me close to tears.

I thought that I'll just bite the bullet and start again. But when I clicked Edit This Page (I believe that's the correct button name) there was the entire article. Once again I clicked Save Page, but there was still only the first line or two.

I spent weeks writing the article, and I tried to be so careful and do everything correctly. Once a month I do vounteer work at a museum, which is when I have access to the internet all day long. Will everything in the Edit This Page be gone by next month when I will have another chance to put the article up?

Should I put only a couple of sentences on each month? --Karenthewriter (talk) 19:25, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * No, you just made a simple mistake. You had when it came to the references. In other words, you forgot to close the tags. I fixed this for you, I think. Ten Pound Hammer  and his otters • (Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP) 19:34, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * As did I, I think we edit conflicted - I saved my changes and re-merged your TPH, please double check that. The   Helpful   One  (Review) 19:39, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you both, the article in now there, although I'm not sure what to do about all the problems listed at the top of it. How can I improve the article by adding references when I already have a citation every couple of sentences?

I suppose the "shirt tale article" is because of all the references to the museum, but that's where all my research came from.

Yikes, half way down, all of my citations are sort of "globbed together" instead of being like the earlier ones. Perhaps those still need to be corrected. But it's late, I need to close up the museum, buy some groceries and go home.

Perhaps I can fix things up next month.

--Karenthewriter (talk) 21:27, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Welcome
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Signing your contributions
Full marks to you for using " ~ " to sign your contributions to talk pages. I see from Special:Contributions/Karenthewriter that you are also trying to sign your edit summaries. This doesn't work! -- John of Reading (talk) 12:47, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Signing your contributions - sorry, I didn't know that was wrong
Oh my goodness, John of Reading, I've always signed my edit summaries, I didn't think you were supposed to put "no name" stuff on Wikipedia. Thank you for letting me know this wasn't correct, no one else told me that.

I'm not sure if you are watching this, and will read it. I clicked on you talk page, but didn't think I should be putting anything there. I hope it's OK to sign this, now I'm not sure what to sign and what to leave unsigned. --Karenthewriter (talk) 15:06, 8 July 2010 (UTC)


 * For edit summaries, the system knows who did which edit, and is careful to display the correct user name against each edit summary. See, for example, the history of this page. So there's never any need to put your name in an edit summary. You are correctly signing your contributions to talk pages like this one - excellent. And you are welcome to add to my talk page if you wish. I'm sorry to have worried you! -- John of Reading (talk) 15:20, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Wide Awake (magazine) has been accepted
 Wide Awake (magazine), which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created. The article has been assessed as Start-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article. You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. . Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia! SwisterTwister  talk  19:00, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
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Gina Gillespie
Thank you for creating the Gina Gillespie article. Much of my work on Wikipedia involves articles about actors and actresses. I'm always glad to see a new article that is well-researched and well-written, as this one is. I appreciate your work on it. I have taken the liberty of making a few changes. If you have questions about any of those changes, feel free to contact me via my talk page or ping me below this paragraph. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:50, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Eddie Blick wow, I thought I'd found everything there was to find about Gina Gillespie but you were quickly able to locate much more. Thank you for improving this article. I've watched episodes of Law of the Plainsman, discovered Gina had an impressive career, and wondered why she didn't have her own article. She does now. And in a couple of weeks I can Google her name, and find half-a-dozen websites that have copied and pasted her Wikipedia article!

Thank you for your kind words about my researching and writing abilities. I'm a good writer because I've spent more than 40 years writing. (Something a lot of would-be Wikipedia writers don't understand...) Karenthewriter (talk) 03:09, 26 April 2021 (UTC)


 * You are correct in your comment, "Something a lot of would-be Wikipedia writers don't understand..." I might also add "... or appreciate." I also noted your use of only reliable sources -- something else that many people apparently don't understand or appreciate. Nearly every day I spend some time removing citations to IMDb, TV.com, and other sources that are not considered reliable for use in WP articles.


 * Do you have a subscription to Newspapers.com? You probably noticed that I used it to add information. If you don't already subscribe, you can apply for a free subscription via the Wikipedia Library. I often use it to find information about actors, actresses, and other topics. Subscriptions to NewspaperArchive.com are also available, but I like Newspapers.com better.Eddie Blick (talk) 23:25, 26 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Eddie Blick I'm an amateur historian who grew up before the Internet was a research option, and I've spent many an hour in libraries, searching through card catalogs filled with thousands of cards in alphabetical order. Today my landlord includes WiFi in with my rent, and used laptops can be bought at bargain prices, so I now do much of my research online. But I grew up believing good references are news magazines and non-fiction books published by university presses, so I try to find "respectable" sources – though I spent a pandemic year with closed libraries, and hunted up movie roles for William Fawcett (actor) and Jack Orrison on Google Books' preview pages of reference books published by McFarland. And dang it, there are times when IMDb and ctva.biz are the only places that lists what I'm looking for.


 * (Jack Orrison starred in a DuMont Television Network series, and I'm trying to preserve little scraps of DuMont info. Some scraps are found on ctva.biz, and it hurts my heart when that data is deleted from my articles, but I appreciate the opportunity to publish on Wikipedia, and know rules need to be followed...even when it effects my ability to post everything I've found about my beloved DuMont.)


 * Yes, I do have a free subscription to Newspapers.com, but I tend to forget about it because I don't have a high success rate in finding anything there. Karenthewriter (talk) 04:09, 27 April 2021 (UTC)


 * At age 75, I can identify with the old-style research techniques. Card catalogs, indexes to periodicals, and reels of microfilm were invaluable for research. Unfortunately, many WP editors now seem to put a term in Google and use whatever results come up as sources, with little or no attention to reliability. One thing that struck me about your work on Gina Gillespie was inclusion of a citation for each film in the filmography. That kind of documentation is rare, and I appreciate it.


 * Since you mentioned using McFarland publications found on Google Books, let me ask if you knew that you can get free PDF versions of McFarland books via Wikipedia. I think the limit is five per editor per year. This page will give you more information. Also, are you familiar with Media History Digital Library? You can search a number of old film-related publications that are housed on the Internet Archive.Eddie Blick (talk) 23:58, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Eddie Blick I'm pleased that you liked the film citations in the Gina Gillespie filmography, but that is just a bit of a fluke. I'd been researching Gina off and on for many months, expanding a document on my laptop, listing numerous film and TV roles, with the references for where I found them. When I decided to write the article I tried to think of famous actors so I could see how their filmographies were done. I looked at James Stewart, and there were different formats for his film, radio and theatre roles -- and theatre had references listed. Since I had references for all the Gina roles I'd found I went into Edit, copied and pasted Mr. Stewart's theatre roles format into my article, then deleted his roles and put in Gina's.

Quite often my actor / actress research gives me a lot of roles, without good references to attach to each one, so in that case I'm not about to use a format showing references for each one.

I was not aware that I could get PDF versions of McFarland books, and did not know about the Media History Digital Library. Thank you for informing me of them. I added Media History Digital Library as a Favorite, so I can easily bring it up on my laptop. I may apply for the McFarland books, in case I come across a book that I believe would be a useful reference book to access completely.

My original Wikipedia goal was to expand or write articles connected to classic children's literature, especially children's magazines from the 1800s. That's long been an interest of mine, but the printed reference books I'd used at local libraries are being eliminated, since few use them, and librarians tell me to find information online. I'm concerned that younger readers who become interested in classic children's literature will only have online research sources, so I want to see that they have good information available.

Then I got sidetracked from that project into writing articles about actors and old TV series (probably because of depression, and wanting to lose myself in obsessive online research). I'm trying get my life more under control, and get back to the rather staid life of researching children's magazines, so I don't know if having a lot of McFarland books available would be helpful in getting my researching under control. I'll have to think about that source of research. But I do appreciate being told about that source of information. Karenthewriter (talk) 03:14, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Re: Teahouse post
Hi, Sorry to hear you aren't too well. I had a whole load of life-threatening health issues ten years back, and I was exhausted for months on end. I find the herbal preparation St. John's Wort is really helpful for keeping depression at bay if you're into that sort of thing, and not on any heavy-duty meds. It just shuts the trapdoor down to the dark basement of your thoughts, and keeps it shut, with basically no side-effects. Hope you improve. By the way, I see that you get 'Disambiguation link notifications' from my old friend DPL bot. Wikipedia can warn you when you link to a disambiguation page, just go to Preferences → Gadgets, scroll down and enable "Display links to disambiguation pages in orange". It does what it says on the tin. It's surprising how many other articles with the same name there are. Also, you can quite happily delete those sort of messages, and ArbCom notices as well to keep your talk page clean. If you need any help with anything, I'd be happy to try and help if I can. WP can be really complex at times, and the Help pages are often abysmal. I don't do Barnstars, but here's some pictures of a barn near where I used to live. Best wishes, MinorProphet (talk) 02:49, 9 May 2021 (UTC)


 * - So sorry to hear you're not doing well .. you have my very best wishes and prayers Karen - hope you're back to 100% in a hop, skip, and a jump. Best always. — Ched (talk) 03:06, 9 May 2021 (UTC)


 * MinorProphet and — Ched, thank you for your kind words and concern. It was foolish of me to become so flustered, and then mention that I was feeling a bit unwell. Everyone has their share of difficulties, and I'm fine if I don't do too much. But I got off on a tangent about improving one of my pet projects – making sure the online world has good information about subjects connected to the DuMont Television Network.


 * I need to try to be satisfied with working on nice easy projects, using easy-to-find references, because hunting for U.S. Census and death record citations is way out of my comfort zone. Karenthewriter (talk) 04:40, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

draft:Jose Perez (actor)
Hi Karenthewriter,

You were kind enough to give me some very helpful feedback over at the Teahouse on the article I’ve been trying to create for a while now. I’ve made many edits since then and I was hoping you might take another look and see if you think it is good enough to submit it again, or if you might have any more suggestions you would be willing to make. If so, I would be very grateful! Either way, thank you for your time. Perrydigm (talk) 06:34, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

Hello again Karenthewriter,

I just wanted to let you know that the article on the actor Jose Perez that you helped me so much with has been accepted (finally) and is published! If you take a look, I hope you will approve of the form it got accepted in, and take some pride in the result. I seriously doubt I would have gotten through the process without your help!

Perrydigm (talk) 06:29, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Perrydigm I'm pleased that your draft was accepted. Though I was not aware of Jose Perez until reading your draft he has an extensive acting career, and certainly seemed notable enough for a Wikipedia article. Karenthewriter (talk) 18:04, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for creating the Judge Roy Bean TV series site!
Karenthewriter, thanks for creating the Judge Roy Bean article. That's something I've been trying to get around to for many years and I was relieved when it popped up as I was reading a different article today. I've always been quite the admirer of Edgar Buchanan's work to begin with and I dimly remember the series from childhood. It is certainly unusual to learn of a 1955 series shot in color since hardly anyone had a color set back then; in fact, I'm not sure any color sets whatsoever had been marketed that early but evidently some must have if a few stations were willing to go to the expense of broadcasting it that way. I dimly remember Buchanan's series from childhood, undoubtedly from having been syndicated somewhere along the line after cancellation. Buchanan was always an extremely fine actor; you can see him in an early large supporting role in Penny Serenade with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant circa 1940. Now I'm going to tell you a story that you won't believe but I swear it's true. When I was a child in the early 1960s (maybe very late '50s), I remember briefly, for just a moment, seeing a full Technicolor-reminiscent picture coming out of a black and white television screen with my peripheral vision. Then when I turned my head to view the screen directly, it was black and white again. These were black and white sets, supposedly incapable of broadcasting any color picture whatsoever, but the color I saw with my peripheral vision was like blazing Technicolor in a movie theatre. I was living in a small southern city in which anything out of the ordinary was immediately reviled and ridiculed: seeing color coming out of a black and white set (and this was so far back that I don't believe any color sets had ever been marketed there, if indeed any even existed yet) could get you marked for life as "the guy who saw color on a black and white TV," and you'd literally never hear the end of it as long as you live, so I don't believe I mentioned it to anyone at the time except whomever I was with at that moment. It only occurred maybe 2 or 3 times but it was almost killingly frustrating. I chalked it up to the sheer power of my own wondrous imagination until many decades later, I read about an experimental color television process in which color was being broadcast on black and white sets in some small southern cities back during that period. I read about it online in an article about color television, possibly in Wikipedia, but haven't been able to find it since. The disturbing thing about this is that RCA, knowing how much money they were going to make marketing those shoddy early color television sets, must have bought the process and killed it. Very reminiscent of Sarnoff in the '40s decreeing that American television have a minimal amount of lines in the picture because that was a little cheaper, when we could have had real HDTV from the very outset of commercial broadcast television. And of course that's nothing compared to what he did to Philo Farnsworth, the actual inventor of electronic television. The Final Edict (talk) 14:32, 19 July 2021 (UTC)


 * The Final Edict I'm pleased that you appreciate the Judge Roy Bean article. My landlord includes cable TV in the rent for my tiny apartment (former motel room) and 10 or 15 years ago some cable station broadcast Judge Roy Bean. It was fun to watch, but I didn't think about it for years, until the recent election brought out lots of annoying comments and opinions, at a time when I was stressed out by my limited social life disappearing during the Covid Shutdown.


 * I coped with an unpleasant time by going on Wikipedia binges. I was reading lots of articles, and when I saw there was none for a subject I thought should have one I researched, wrote, and often discovered former articles had been deleted due to copyright problems. Fortunately I learned to research and write during pre-Internet days, when writers had to actually write, and not just copy and paste!


 * I'll take your word about color scenes on a black and white TV, for I know nothing about that. (I'm a northeast U.S. person, so not knowledgeable about southern city experiments.) Best wishes. Karenthewriter (talk) 22:09, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Karenthewriter! I've created god knows how many Wikipedia pages across the decades (it's addictive and the way I temporarily escape is putting in a new gibberish password that I can never reconstruct, and stop for a while. It inevitably pulls me back in, though, and I've forced myself to assume a new name since I can no longer access the previous one. Everyone should be careful lest Wikipedia becomes the only writing they manage to do.) In any case, I kept hoping someone would create the page for this Buchanan TV series so I wouldn't have to, and you finally did!  By the way, do you remember whether the episodes of the series that you watched on cable were in color?  So often the early color shows, seldom seen in color during the dawn of color television, don't make it into the present intact and now only exist in black and white.  For example, there was actually at least one color episode of Wagon Train back when Ward Bond was still the wagonmaster (before succumbing to a heart attack in the wake of his legendarily profligate non-stop boozing) but no color prints from the Bond era survive, now they're only in black and white.  Anyway, it's a privilege to have you in our ranks! You sound like such a kind person, Karen.  The Final Edict (talk) 00:59, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

The Final Edict I'm pleased that I sound kind. I try to be, but have my off days. I have no recollection of whether or not Judge Roy Bean was shown in color. Over the years I've seen reruns of a lot of old westerns, and they all tend to blend together in my memory. I checked eBay to see if any episodes were available. Some DVD sets state B & W episodes, but there's a TV Guide Presents DVD with 6 episodes in B & W and color, so at least one episode survives in color. Karenthewriter (talk) 02:19, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

 * Hi Karenthewriter! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
 * The Teahouse new editor help space
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-- 20:09, Sunday, October 31, 2021 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for November 24
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited One Desire, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Barry Curtis.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:00, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

 * Hi Karenthewriter! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
 * The Teahouse new editor help space
 * Wikipedia Help pages

-- 03:48, Monday, December 6, 2021 (UTC)

"The Little Corporal"
Hey! I noticed that you were talking about this on the Teahouse and couldn't help but say this: Napoleon isn't actually short. He's average height for the time. On the article Napoleon it actually says this, "At 1.57 metres (5 ft 2 in), he was the height of an average French male but short for an aristocrat or officer (part of why he was assigned to the artillery, since at the time the infantry and cavalry required more commanding figures). It is possible he was taller at 1.70 m (5 ft 7 in) due to the difference in the French measurement of inches." So really he wasn't actually all that "Little". Not saying that the title of the book is wrong since most people think of Napoleon as being short. ― Blaze The WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:12, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
 * @Blaze The WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 I don't know that much about Napoleon. The U.S. magazine I'm researching started right after the U.S. Civil War, and is named in honor of the "army" of children who raised money to help wounded U.S. soldiers. The magazine lasted a decade, and became the most popular children's periodical of the era. I tried to find a magazine cover, and when I searched for Images of The Little Corporal magazine I'd get a hundred pictures of Napoleon. I wanted to see if there already was a The Little Corporal article and I was redirected to Napoleon. For decades I thought of The Little Corporal as an important U.S. children's magazine, and a couple days ago I discovered it's also a nickname for a famous Frenchman, so I was beginning to think he may have been rather short. Thank you for letting me know Napoleon was of average height. Karenthewriter (talk) 20:29, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I have sent you a note about a page you started
Hello, Karenthewriter

Thank you for creating The Little Corporal.

User:Shushugah, while examining this page as a part of our page curation process, had the following comments:

To reply, leave a comment here and begin it with. Please remember to sign your reply with ~.

(Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 09:08, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

thank you for your kind words. I had put the newspaper urls in the citations, but Show preview showed them all "garbled up" even though I'd formatted them as I'd done with ones that appeared properly in earlier articles. My plan is to come back later and see if I can get them formatted properly, so the links are available. My brain's rather worn out right now, for I've just spent about five hours straight posting this article. Karenthewriter (talk) 09:27, 10 December 2021 (UTC)