User talk:Lmissik

Hi Leah. I like your user profile.Matumeru (talk) 01:59, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Mentoring
Hi Lmissik, I have a couple quick questions, a comment, and also a suggestion for something you can work on.

There are some things in your course assignment (here) that are a little confusing to me. Unless I'm misunderstanding, the assignment for February 10-4 says to edit an article directly, whereas the assignment for March 5-31 appears to say to work on that article in your sandbox and then move it to the article space when it's ready. So I'm not sure if the instructor expects you to start editing that article directly first, or to first rewrite it in your sandbox and then copy the sandbox version into the real article. (This might depend on whether you're writing a new article from scratch or editing an existing article; some people don't like to make one giant change to an existing article and therefore prefer to edit it directly in a piecemeal fashion, especially if there are other editors who want to review those edits; for a new article, on the other hand, there's nothing wrong with writing the whole thing in your sandbox and them importing it to mainspace in one big chunk.)

The reason this matters is because the time you start editing an article will make a difference if you decide to edit the article for WP:Did you know later. (Did you know, or "DYK", is a project that identifies brand-new or recently-expanded articles and features 1 fact about them on the main page for a few hours.) DYK only accepts articles that were created or expanded in the past 5 days, which means if you start editing the article on February 10-4 and keep working on it throughout March, when you nominate it for DYK someone will say "this article is not new enough" and that will be it. If your instructor expects you to get the article onto DYK as part of the assignment (or if you just want to), then it might be better to prepare your material in a sandbox first and then copy it into the real article all at once when it's ready.

Another thing about DYK: if you are working on an article that already existed (rather than writing a brand-new article), you need to expand it fivefold to be eligible for DYK; they don't care how much you improved the text that was already there, they only care about the character count. For instance, Municipal solid waste was 3437 characters long when you started working on it (you can calculate this by going to Special:Mypage/monobook.js and editing the page and adding ; after you save your page and bypass your cache by clicking Shift+Refresh, it will add a "Page size" button in the toolbox on the left-hand side of the page). Therefore, if you wanted to nominate it for DYK, you would need to expand it to about 17,000 characters, which is quite a lot (although probably doable, since there's still a lot missing from that article). On the other hand, if you can't write that much text (there is an upper limit to how long an article needs to be to express all the relevant encyclopedic information, beyond that it's just too wordy; see WP:Article size) but you can significantly improve what's already there (by copyediting, adding references, etc.), it may not be eligible for DYK but it may be eligible to be reviewed for WP:Good article status (GA), which is a more involved review and takes a bit longer (but generally carries more "prestige").

Ok, that was supposed to be my "question" (sorry it got so wordy!). Now for the comment. I see you and your classmate had some trouble working on an article Solid Waste. By now maybe you've already figured out what went wrong (and if you have, you can ignore this), but if not I can try to explain it a little. As you've noticed now, Wikipedia already has an article Municipal solid waste, which seems to be about the same topic, and we don't like having multiple articles on the same topic. In cases like this, where there are multiple names for the same topic (or multiple ways people might search for it), we usually use WP:redirects: in other words, if someone types "Solid waste" into the search bar at the top of the page, they will automatically get taken to Municipal solid waste; you can try it and you will see a small message at the top that says (Redirected from Solid waste). What you guys were editing was Solid Waste with a capital letter; capitalization matters on article titles, so "Solid Waste" is considered a different page than "Solid waste", and no one had made a redirect at "Solid Waste" (I made one this morning, see here). Generally Wikipedia uses lowercase titles; see Article titles for guidelines. Anyway, it looks like now you and your classmate have both found the right article, so that's good.

Last thing: I noticed in your course outline that none of the assignments specifically ask you to practice adding footnotes in articles. The formatting for adding footnotes is sometimes confusing for editors who don't have experience in HTML or some other markup language, and it's important to be able to add footnotes (DYK nominations won't be accepted, for example, if they don't have footnotes), so if you feel like you need to learn that we can practice it. Or you may have already come across it when you went through the WP:tutorial.

Best, r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 14:34, 6 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks so much for your response and willingness to help! Sorry it has taken me a little while to get back to you. I actually am not sure about your question as to whether our assignment is asking us to edit our articles directly or in our sandboxes. I sent an email asking about it but haven't heard back yet, hence the slight delay. We have a Wikipedia lab tomorrow night, though, so hopefully the question will be addressed then. Regardless, I'll keep you updated on where my group is making edits. Also, thanks for the tip about capitalization of article titles. I didn't know that before. And I do have some slight experience with HTML, but I will let you know if I run into any trouble with creating footnotes. We actually might address that tomorrow night in the lab. Anyway, I will keep you updated and will let you know the next step my group will be taking after we next meet! Thanks again! Lmissik (talk) 03:42, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
 * It is up to the students to decide whether or not they would like to edit in a sandbox or directly to the article. DYK would be nice, but is not a requirement nor a goal per se, as I understand it. I am trying to schedule a meeting with the professor to clarify this, but this is my current understanding of the assignment. None of these articles are going to reviewed for GA or FA, Rjanag, so none of those criteria apply. It is very low pressure. When it comes to footnotes, we showed the students how to add citations using the "cite" templates. They should all have turned on the gadget in their preferences - that way they don't have to learn the markup. Awadewit (talk) 22:53, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification! This is good to know. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 01:07, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Article plans
Hi Lmissik, the stuff you have collected in your sandbox looks great. I agree that the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act is not in good shape; it seems to just parrot the various sections of the policy, and not actually talk about the policy in an encyclopedic manner. The article structure you have outlined in your sandbox is much better, it's lain out very clearly and in an encyclopedic manner. A discussion of "effectiveness" might be more appropriate as part of a "Criticism" section rather than its own stand-alone section (if there is extensive commentary on whether or not the policy is effective), but I guess it will be easier to make that decision once you have the content written and have a better idea what you are working with.

One other small comment, I think Solid waste policy in the United States might be a slightly better title than United States solid waste policy; I don't know why, it just sounds to me more like a typical Wikipedia article title.

Everything looks great so far! Let me know if any problems arise or if you need feedback anywhere. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 01:55, 8 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Sure thing, I'm in the middle of stuff right now but I'll try to take a look at the sandbox in the next couple days.
 * As for your referencing question, this is in fact a matter over which there is not agreement among the Wikipedia community, and different people have their different styles and are always debating which is better. There is no right or wrong answer, although you can check out WP:CITE (particularly WP:CITE) for some rules of thumb. The way I usually work is, I try to avoid repeating a reference over and over again if I can, and if it's clear from the text that the one footnote at the end is "covering" all the preceding information (this is especially the case if several sentences logically "flow" from one to the next). It is always possible, though, that what seems to be clearly cited to you might not be so clear to someone else, or, even worse, that in the future someone will change the text or add other text in the middle that was not originally in the reference you cited; if you think either of these are likely to happen, you can re-cite things to be safe. I'll try to find some more specific links to discussions of this matter, but as a rule of thumb I would say yes, it's ok to cite the same source multiple times consecutively if that makes things clear and verifiable. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 01:50, 28 March 2011 (UTC)


 * This looks really good so far; I'll try to look a little more closely soon. The only thing that jumped out at me is that the article has not been added to any categories yet, so you might want to try doing that soon, which will make it easier for people to find it in the future. You can see Help:Category for more information on how to add the article to a category (it's basically just adding text such as  at the bottom of the article), and Categorization for guidelines about how to choose which categories the article should go in.
 * Also, I used Wikipedia's move tool to move User:Brijeshkrishnan/Trialruns to the article title Solid waste policy in the United States; this preserves the article history to that people can still see the edits when you or Brijeshkrishnan added any given bit of text to the article. I think you also made a couple changes whem pasting the sandbox version into real article space, though, so I restored those; the current version s hould be the same as the version you posted.
 * Best, r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 16:57, 31 March 2011 (UTC)