User talk:Mikeblas/Archives/2020/September

Tagging users in corrective edits
Hey Mike,

Just writing in regards to you tagging me in this edit. I just wanted to ask if you could please not tag me in future, as it makes me feel and appear to other users as incompetent. I assume that it was done in good faith, but I felt I should let you know how I feel about it. It isn't the first time you've tagged me in an edit summary, and I chose to ignore it the first time, but things like this are starting to negatively affect my time on Wikipedia. I'm trying my hardest, but I do unintentionally make mistakes from time to time, so I apologise if they are difficult or a nuisance for you to clean up.

In future, if you have issues with any edits of mine, may I please ask that you let me know on my talk page instead. (Note: I'm sorry if any of this message comes across as being rude, it certainly isn't my intention, I just wanted to get it off my chest.)

Thanks – Sean Stephens (talk) 05:39, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi Sean! People make mistakes all the time. Don't sweat it -- I don't think anyone thinks you're incompetent. In fact, Wikipedia's corpus is pretty ethereal. You'll probably find that, over a long enough time, edits you make erode and disappear naturally anyway. When I make ambiguous fixes, I tag people in edit summaries so they have the opportunity to see that I'm modifying what they (apparently) intended to change, and can verify I've done the right fix. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:42, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for explaining the reasoning behind these tags. I guess I can get behind that. Your edits have encouraged me to ensure I leave no error messages behind when I edit a page, so now I give the reflist a glance over once I finish editing a page. Also, I apologize for taking so long to respond, it only just occurred to me to check back here (I hadn't watchlisted your page). Thanks again! — Sean Stephens (talk) 11:32, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Re restored coding at ARW
Hey. I will happily concede that I need all the help I can get on coding; I've just begun actively using the HarvRef system for about a month. For some reason I was stuck in the 'newbie' barely-not-deprecated alternate footnoting system that has kept some of my articles from advancing in the past decade.

I wonder what the utility may be for a bit of restored code ? At the only existing place in the American Revolutionary War article coding, you restored at a 'reference' footnote, "". It now seems to be innocuous code where I was once alerted to a problem (as I say, 'newbie-like', I really do know not why it was generated). I had replaced a previous variation that reported a HarvRef ERROR message with one I wrote manually to conform to the convention I've adopted throughout to remove all previous ERROR messaging - trouble-shooting in the dark, so to speak. I will be happy to accept your answer. Thanks in advance.

Also, do you know the proper footnote convention for second-and-subsequent edition dates? My inclination is to cite the editor-sighted edition date in the footnote, then include the first edition date at the Bibliography with an 'orig-year=' parameter. A previous editor(s) had either (a) replaced the current edition identified in the 'url=' parameter, or (b) showed both dates for editor-sighted edition and first edition in the footnote together CITE-YEAR (FIRST EDITION): "Jones 2000 (1970), p. 14", while sometimes listing both in the Bibliography citation, sometimes not. Any guidance you may have would be welcomed. - TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 07:39, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Hey there!
 * When I visited the article, I saw this revision. Scrolling to the references section, the problem should be clear: we see a big red error that says "Cite error: The named reference autogenerated1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page)."
 * The error means what it says: the article tries to re-use a reference with this code:, but that reference isn't defined anywhere in the article (or in any of the content that the article transcludes or gets from a template or ...)
 * The error is caused by your change here, which removed the name  from the reference definition used previously in the article. Looks like you wanted to change the way the reference worked or was anchored -- and that's fine. But the   name is used elsewhere in the article and must be defined.  Or, other uses need to be remoevd or updated to match.
 * I hope that helps! -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:10, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh, sorry. And: I'm not too sure I understand your question about second-edition dates. I guess it would come down to the specific referencing style you mean to use. For me, I prefer "shortened footnotes"; so I just use . If there are multiple editions, they'll have a different date in the detail referenced by the footnote and everything works out fine. It's possible that new edition is published in the same year, and there are ways to work around that issues. Different citation styles will have different solutions. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:15, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Ref note
Hi. I noticed a note about a ref on 2008 Tibetan unrest. It was associated to the ICT ref still located below it on the page, (currently ref 7: International Campaign for Tibet, 2008-2009 Protest Logs, https://savetibet.org/archived-research/2008-2009-protest-logs/) from which the dates and numbers were cited. It was cited above the Xinhua dates and numbers. Was the ref undefined? If so, I'll redefine it. Thanks. 09:42 16 September 2020 (UTC) Pasdecomplot (talk) 09:42, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Hello! Looks like the undefined reference was named , and the reference you have for that article at savetibet.org is named  . As you can see, they're different! -- Mikeblas (talk) 15:03, 16 September 2020 (UTC)