User talk:RM Dechaine

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Pipelinks
FYI, since you were asking for some advice, you should look at pipelinks, which are important navigational tools. I've noticed that consistently you just use bare URLs even for intra-wiki links, so for example:


 * A3 Locality: A key aspect of the study of sentence structure (syntax) is the recognition that elements that combine with each other depend on one another, and that this dependency is "local" in some way. A consequence of this view is that dependencies that involve elements that are apparently non-local — called "non-local dependencies" or "long-distance dependencies" — are in fact local. The apparent non-locality arises from the application of "movement transformations" that displace (i.e. "move") elements from one position to another in a sentence.


 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_(linguistics)

The preferred syntax would be Locality (linguistics) rather than. In an article, you'd want to go even further and use locality. Basically, any link that's on the "en.wikipedia.org" domain can be turned into a pipelink by copying everything after the "/wiki/", even anchored links, so if I want to link to the place where I found the "A3 Locality" text, I'd use link title, which would resolve to link title. Spaces are encoded in URLs as _, but don't need to be encoded that way, so the same URL can be reached by the following syntax: Theme A: Conceptual Foundations (Theme A: Conceptual Foundations).

Additionally, if you need to use an external link, but don't want it displayed as a bare URL, you can use the following syntax: Example Link - Example link. Best of luck with your course! 0x0077BE [talk/contrib] 15:09, 5 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the pointer, and done (i.e. links are now corrected). The only two that I didn't touch were the projects that are currently associated with two distinct entries (i) Adjectival_noun and Adjectival_noun_(noun) ; (ii) Inalienable_possession and Alienability_(linguistics). Do you know who I contact about collapsing them into a single entry? --RM Dechaine (talk) 18:20, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I have now performed the requested merge. --Boson (talk) 14:12, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Advice for course project articles
Though assessment should be left to more experienced editors, it might be helpful if your students familiarized themselves with the assessment criteria at WikiProject Council/Assessment FAQ. If you click on "show" beside the relevant class, you will get more details. I would suggest looking at the FA (featured article) criteria, but first aiming at B-class. For editors in an academic environment, criterion B6 might be particularly relevant: "The article presents its content in an appropriately understandable way. It is written with as broad an audience in mind as possible. Although Wikipedia is more than just a general encyclopedia, the article should not assume unnecessary technical background and technical terms should be explained or avoided where possible."

As a rough guide, for this sort of topic, I would suggest the level of something like the Scientific American, i.e. aimed at an educated, interested reader but without assuming any background in the particular area (so a Linguistics article should at least be understandable to a middle-aged physician, with only the occasional necessity of clicking on a link to another article). It depends, to some extent, on the probable expectations of the reader: an article entitled "Bound variable pronoun" can probably be a little more technical than one entitled "Adjectival noun". Also, the reader should not be expected to read the sources, or have access to those behind a firewall, even when such sources are necessary for verification.

The use of numbered examples can be problematic in a Wikipedia environment. It is helpful if subsequent editors can add or remove examples without renumbering the whole article.

Another useful resource is the Wikipedia Manual of Style.

As regards references, different editors have different preferences, but usage should be consistent within an article. The existing style should not be changed without consensus, but for new or stub articles this is not really a problem. For articles of this nature, where there are several footnotes referring to the same source, I would, personally, prefer use of the sfn template. It can be a little awkward, but it provides footnotes to references and links to the bibliography. An example of its use can be found at Manchester Ship Canal; I believe that uses the template sfnb, which puts the year in parentheses.

Feel free to contact me at my talk page for assistance   (though I can't guarantee that I will be available or able to help). --Boson (talk) 13:58, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

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Section headings
Hello, RM Dechaine. You recently edited some section headings on Code-switching. I think you added the word "code-switching" to each of the headings you edited. Per MOS:HEAD, though, headings should "not redundantly refer back to the subject of the article [...] unless doing so is shorter or clearer." I'm not sure that "Linguistic theories of code-switching" is any clearer than "Linguistic theories" or "Grammatical theories". I'll leave it to you, but the edits struck me as unnecessary. Happy editing, Cnilep (talk) 03:01, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

What did you intend to say?
In this edit you created the phrase
 * "... they differ in whether or not the permit the expression of ..."

Had you wanted to say "they"? Perhaps you could review the rest of your editing there? Shenme (talk) 22:16, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

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