User talk:Mbauer4

Hello, Mbauer4, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please see our help pages, and if you can't find what you are looking for there, please feel free to leave me a message or place " " on this page and someone will drop by to help. You can also contact me if you wish by clicking "talk" to the right of my name. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 15:24, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Introduction
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * How to write a great article
 * Manual of Style
 * Your first article
 * Also feel free to make test edits in the sandbox.

Some tips to help you out!
Hi, I thought I'd drop a few notes on your talk page with some help on writing articles :o)

First of all, it may be best for you to do a bit of reading, starting with the Wikipedia manual of style, which will give you a lot of information about how Wikipedia prefers its articles to be written. It's not as hard to follow as it might look; quite a bit of the information there probably won't be vital for you at first.

Second, I recommend you make a user sandbox - which is just an area you can use to practise in, and to make notes in, and to get things ready in. If you click this red link: user:/Sandbox, that will let you create that page (it gives you an edit window to start work in). Anything, anywhere, on the help and information pages which gives you an example, try it out in your sandbox until you're familiar with it.

For your article, the next thing you want to do is start collecting as much information as you can about it. Google searches (particularly in Books and Scholar) will be your best friend for this! Once you've found the information, the next most important thing is to start writing up each fact in your own words (very important, this), and make a note at the same time of exactly where that information came from. Build in the references as you go along; I'm going to copy in, down below this, a whole heap of help on doing references, which was produced by one of our best teachers (Chzz).

Here's another place that you'll find incredibly useful - citation templates which you can copy and paste into your sandbox, between tags; you just fill in the blanks from your sources into the template, and you'll end up with nicely formatted inline citations :o) It all helps.  Remember to add a references section to your sandbox (make a new line, and put ==References== on it, and type  on the next line, so that you can see how your citations look as you do them. Remember to save your page often! You don't want to lose your work.

Hopefully this will give you a good start and make life easier for you.

One last thing to keep as a motto: "It's better to write one good, well-referenced, nicely-presented article than it is to create fifty unreferenced one-line stubs!" Pesky ( talk  …stalk!) 11:52, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Simple references
These require two parts;


 * a)

Chzz is 98 years old.

He likes tea.


 * b) A section called "References" with the special code " ";

Named references
Chzz was born in 1837.

Chzz lives in Footown.

Note that the second usage has a / (and no closing ref tag). This needs a reference section as above; please see user:chzz/demo/namedref to see the result.

Citation templates
You can put anything you like between, but using citation templates makes for a neat, consistent look;

Chzz has 37 Olympic medals.

Please see user:chzz/demo/citeref to see the result.

For more help and tips on that subject, see user:chzz/help/refs.

Something to make your life easier!
Hi there ! I've just come across one of your articles, and noticed that you might appreciate some help with references.

You might want to consider using this tool - it makes your life a whole heap easier, by filling in complete citation templates for your links. All you do is install the script on Special:MyPage/common.js, or or Special:MyPage/vector.js, then paste the bare url (without [...] brackets) between your tabs, and you'll find a clickable link called Reflinks in your toolbox section of the page (probably in the left hand column). Then click that tool. It does all the rest of the work (provided that you remember to save the page! It doesn't work for everything (particularly often not for pdf documents), but for pretty much anything ending in "htm" or "html" (and with a title) it will do really, really well. Happy editing!  Pesky  ( talk  …stalk!) 11:52, 23 October 2011 (UTC)