User talk:MimiBelle

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome!
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * Tutorial
 * How to edit a page
 * How to write a great article
 * Manual of Style

Welcome to Wikipedia, Mimi! :)


Hi Mimi,

Thanks so much for your really nice letter! You sound like a wonderful Wikipedian; I hope you have a good time here and stay a long while. :) You can Talk to me anytime, by going to my Talk page and editing it.

I'll be glad to help you however I can with your first article; it sounds really interesting! Writing articles is really not that hard, and there are all sorts of things you can do to make your article as attractive and fun to read as possible. I should admit, I usually can't make my articles as nice as they should be all by myself, but my friends come to my rescue and give me different perspectives, new ways of understanding and reading the article, that make it much better and richer. It's more fun that way, too; I sometimes get a little lonely if I'm editing all by myself.

It sounds like you've written up much of your article? If so, you can create a page for it, by typing the name of the person in the Search box at the left? That will bring you to a page that shows your article's name in red. Click on that red-link and it should bring you to an editing page. Add the text of your article in the big blank box, plus an edit summary like "first draft" in the small box near the bottom, and then click "Save page". Congratulations — your article should then be part of Wikipedia! Then you can tweak and edit your article further by clicking on its "Edit this page" tab at the top. You should also be able to see a link to it once you've clicked on "My contributions" at the very top of the page, towards the right. After you get started, we can Talk about a few details, like how to categorize your article so that others can find it, and that sort of stuff.

They do have a lot of rules here, but the first one is "Ignore all rules". ;) I do my best, but I have to confess, I've been bad about learning them all.  But really, it's never been a problem, even when I brought some articles to Featured Article status.  I think the most important thing to remember is to stay serene and happy, to be selfless and try sincerely to make a contribution.  If you do, others will see your good will, and try to help you.  To be sure, there are some gruff people here, but many of them mean well; they're just being critical to help improve the article.  I try to learn from them, see the world through their perspective, and not get too attached to my own vision of How Things Ought To Be. ;)  There are very many good-hearted people here, even if they're not the loudest; sometimes I even imagine I can hear the faint beating of angels' wings, here in our little echo of Eden. :) Willow (talk) 17:17, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Mimi
I happened to stumble upon your new home page and saw you were just learning the ropes, and were trying to fix the size of the image on your main page - I took the liberty of resizing it for you just to show you one way of doing this - I hope you don't mind. Play around and change the settings (right/left/center or different px values) and see what it does!! Mostly when I'm adding images to articles I use the same format Willow has used above (look at he code :o))! Welcome and enjoy editing here.  ~ Ciar ~  (Talk to me!)  06:51, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Hey, thx for the reply! I meant the code in Willow's picture:


 *  [[Image:William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - A Childhood Idyll (1900).jpg|thumb|right|450px|Piping a playful tune! :)]] 


 * So there you have the image name, followed by "thumb" (this allows you to add a caption below the image), followed by the position (right, left or center - I think default is right if you forget to add this), followed by size (in pixels) and finally the text that will go under the pic. The image name always goes first, and the image text always goes last, but I think the order of the rest isn't too important!! And the categories are all separated by a pipe (|).  Hope this helps!!!  Best of luck  ~ Ciar ~  (Talk to me!)  19:36, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Your recent edits
Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( &#126;&#126;&#126;&#126; ) at the end of your comment. On many keyboards, the tilde is entered by holding the Shift key, and pressing the key with the tilde pictured. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot (talk) 06:58, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

New skills
Hi Mimi, Good to see you're picking up your new tools of the trade! The next one you asked to learn was indenting. You do this by putting a colon in front of your text.
 * The more colons, the bigger the indent.
 * so things can move further
 * and further
 * and further to the right!

Glad to be of help! Take care, ~ Ciar ~  (Talk to me!)  04:08, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

H'mmmm, not sure I know what page you're talking about? One of the pages I've been editing here? PS. I noticed you didn't get the official welcoming package so I popped it at the top of your talk page - it give links to all kinds of useful stuff to get you started!! All the best, ~ Ciar ~  (Talk to me!)  19:12, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Photographs of Dixie :)
Hi Mimi,

I see that you're having fun and learning a lot, which is half the fun of Wikipedia. :) I've met Ciar before, too, at his first Featured Article, on the immune system.  He's super-smart and he seems to get ever nicer with time — and he started off very nice. :)  He's Scottish, so he has an automatic leg-up on being cool. ;)

I asked someone knowledgeable about uploading Dixie's photographs. Her name is Durova, and her Talk page is here. She's done a lot of work with older photographs and I think she knows the area much better than me. She volunteered to work with you to find a good way of licensing the photographs so that they can be uploaded. I think the basic idea is that Dixie herself should release them into the public domain, or something equivalent.

Oh yes, and you asked about editing the lead paragraph? I already changed her birthplace, but you can do that by clicking on the "Edit this page" tab at the top of the page. That should show you the whole page, including the lead section. Ideally, the lead section should be a little summary of everything that follows in the article below it, you know, kind of like converting whole paragraphs of the main article into single sentences of the lead.

Hoping you're doing well, and send my affections to Dixie — I'm her latest fan! :) Willow (talk) 21:13, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi
Thank you. And yes, my user space got attacked by one of our site trolls a few days ago. Not to worry. :) Durova Charge! 03:18, 4 December 2008 (UTC)