User talk:Musiceastcoast

Forq article
Hi ! Welcome to Wikipedia. I'm sorry for accidentally reverting your edits to the Forq article -- the formatting of your references made me think something was wrong. I put your edits back the way they were, and I also reformatted the references to include authors and source dates. I have some ideas for how to continue to improve the Forq article, perhaps by adding an infobox. Let me know if you want to work on this, or if you need help with anything as you continue to edit!

Also I know it can be confusing to use Talk pages at first. To reply to me, just edit this page and write your reply below my message. -- Cloud atlas (talk) 03:23, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi! Yes - I'm a Wiki moron! I'm sorry for my formatting errors on the Forq page. I kept editing and comparing it to previous entries, although it still felt that the formatting wasn't quite right. I'd love any help that you care to offer with this page. Thanks!


 * sure thing! I think the easiest way to add references is with the visual editor (as opposed to the wikitext editor).  To use the visual editor, you click on the pencil in the upper right next to the blue "Publish changes..." button, and select the visual editor.  Then to make a citation, you click the "Cite" button in the top toolbar, and just paste in the URL to autogenerate a citation.  You can edit it to add more info that the automation missed, which is usually the author and date.


 * I think the next thing you should do to the article is add an infobox, which a lot of articles for musicians have -- it's the box in the upper right of an article, like this one. In the visual editor, you click "Insert", then "Template", and then type "infobox musical artist".  The first thing it will ask is to fill in the "Background" -- that's the color of the box, which is coded to the type of artist.  You should enter "group_or_band".  Then you can click to open up more fields, and fill in as many as you know (and have sources for in the references section).  This page explains what all the options are in that infobox.


 * Last hint -- when writing messages on Talk pages, you can indent them (like I did with this message) using a colon, and you can sign them with four tildes (Cloud atlas (talk) 03:54, 18 June 2018 (UTC)) at the end of your message.


 * Let me know if you need help with the infobox.
 * -- Cloud atlas (talk) 03:54, 18 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks again for your continued help. I added an infobox to the Forq page.  It would seem that visual editing doesn't work there, and therefore I have no links in the infobox.  Am I correct in assuming that I'll need to edit those in code?  Thanks again!  Musiceastcoast (talk) 16:38, 18 June 2018 (UTC)


 * nice work! I think the infobox looks good.  I made the caption on the photo say something more substantial, and I also changed the header of the "Biography" section to "History", which I noticed is what is usually in an article about a band.  "Biography" is used more for articles about individual musicians.  I know what you mean about adding links to the infobox.  I usually do what you did, which is let the visual editor create the template for me, and then it's pretty easy to work with the wikitext.  But you can also put wikitext into the template wizard, i.e. you can add links by putting double brackets in the fields in the wizard.  Whatever works.


 * If you want to keep working on the article, I think you could also add a "Musical style" section, because I think your sources describe the band enough. Here's an example of a section like that.  It might also be good to expand the lead (the first part of the article above the "History" section), to have two or three sentences that sort of sum the article up.  That's the part of the article that shows up in a page preview (the pop-up when you hover over a link to the article), so it's a good idea to make it informative.  You can see what this looks like by going to, say, the article on Michael League and hovering over the link to "Forq" in the infobox.


 * It looks like the article is getting some good traffic: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=this-year&pages=Forq. Some of that is probably you and me, but still.  You can get to that page on any article by going to "View history" and then "Page view statistics". -- Cloud atlas (talk) 04:43, 19 June 2018 (UTC)


 * These are great ideas. Thanks again for your help.   I'm guessing that any musical style descriptors need to be backed by citations, but I believe that those citations would already be in the articles that are previously cited.  Do they need to be cited again?  Thx in advance!Musiceastcoast (talk) 18:11, 19 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I think you don't technically need to cite them again (since the source is there in your References section already), but I tend to do it when I'm using a specific factoid or pulling a direct quote. I think that helps the reader double-check the info if they want to.  It's easy to re-use a citation: when you click the "Cite" button in visual editor, there is a "Re-use" option. -- Cloud atlas (talk) 01:42, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Hey -- just thought I'd check in and see if you needed any help with editing the Forq article or any other article. Let me know! -- Cloud atlas (talk) 05:22, 28 June 2018 (UTC)