User talk:Yopienso/Archive 2

Your statement on the ArbCom Clarification
Hi Yopienso, I've undone your statement/support. The area where you posted is reserved for ArbCom votes, if you want to say it, please make a section under the other statements already on the page and put it there. Thanks :) SirFozzie (talk) 17:39, 3 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Sorry and thanks. I asked here and then got lost. :P Not sure I can find my way. I'm really short of time and not too bright on these matters to start with. Also thinking I should just drop out of this mess. Main reason for hanging around is I learn so much about the topics I edit. But I hate the gaming. --Yopienso (talk) 17:59, 3 November 2010 (UTC)



Peridon (talk) is wishing you Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's Solstice or Xmas, Eid, Diwali, Hogmanay, Hanukkah, Lenaia, Festivus or even the Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!

Spread the holiday cheer by adding to your friends' talk pages.

Ta! Yopienso (talk) 00:12, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

AfD of article you worked on
Please see: Articles for deletion/Richard Sternberg.Wolfview (talk) 11:00, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Footnotes - a quick course
Yes, I thought I had correctly parsed "yo pienso". Or so we think? Perhaps tell you a joke about that sometime.

Back on "Talk:List of scientists..." you said you didn't know how to add footnotes on a Talk page. I gather you normally use some automated little dingbat which isn't available on Talk pages. May I introduce you to the joys of adding footnotes/citations/references manually? It is a little confusing, but mainly because of unfortunate terminology and weak documentation. Even if you do know somewhat about this stuff, I would be pleased to have a run at explaining this stuff, and perhaps you could tell me how well I do. Ok?

At the first level, footnotes are simple. At the appropriate point in the text, just insert a set of &lt;ref> and &lt;/ref> tags, with the content of the footnote between them. Pure HTML here, and the wiki s/w does all the rest. A reflist template (or equivalent) is needed somewhere, but presumably that is already in place. A piece of cake. At this point I would suggest going back to your "Suggested entry for Robert M. Carter" and wrapping all those http links in ref tags. That should make them show up in the reflist.

Next stage: the dreaded cite — or alternately, citation — templates. (At this point I would recommend not going to WP:Citing sources, as it is too confusing.) Either template works, with slight differences of style and parameters that need not concern us at this point. I prefer citation myself, but I believe cite is more popular. (One reason might be that cite comes in different flavors: 'cite book', 'cite journal', 'cite web', etc., which seems to me to be a rather spurious advantage, but suit yourself.) Because there are some slight stylistic inconsistencies, it is recommended that in an existing article you stick with which ever one is already in use.

The purpose of a cite/citation template is very simple: it collects the bibliographic details of your reference. These details are all of the information for finding the reference, and — very important! — distinguishing this reference from others that might be ver similar. (E.g., for books we would want title, author, publisher, date of publication, edition, ISBN, etc.) These are assigned to various parameters, and this point take a look at WP:Citation_templates to see what I'm talking about.

Now here is where it gets confusing. These bibliographic details that cite/citation template collect constitute a reference, or source, to which you are referring. A citation of a source (or reference) is the mention of it in the text. Now you could drop in a "naked" citation right in the text, but all those details would be distracting. So most editors (at the least) put the reference (the cite/citation template) inside footnotes (the 'ref' tags), so it is removed one step and collected in the reflist. The various terms are misleading, just don't take them too strictly.

Almost finished for a first course, but one more detail should be covered. What if you cite a reference more than once? If two or more footnotes (instances of &lt;ref>) are identical, the wiki s/w replaces them with a "named ref". This I do not consider good, but that is for an advanced lesson. Let me know when you are ready for it.

And let me know if this helps. Good luck. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:04, 3 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much! Do you do this for a living? The first part is very straightforward, except for the mysterious "wiki s/w," and you can see I've already done it with Bob Carter. (To tell you the truth, I did know this, but forgot it. I used to do it, but messed up and got confused at some point and decided to stick with my beloved little icon. I even created a reflist once at some obscure little article by following the directions without a notion of what I was doing. It worked! But it was too stressful an experience to wish to repeat it!)
 * The second part, though, may as well be in Greek. I don't even understand what exactly the subject of the lesson is. :O I'm very familiar with APA and MLA citations in real life. Is this similar?
 * Another thing that would be handy to know is how to make a note within a footnote. Or is that part of Part Two. OK, now a light has just dawned and I do understand your paragraph beginning "Now here is where it gets confusing." It's the difference between a reference (source) and a citation (footnote).
 * Yes, I think you get what Yo pienso does too much! Or so she's told, but she's not fully convinced. I'd love to hear your joke. Yopienso (talk) 01:32, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
 * So you had some confusion, but it's evaporated now? I did insert "template" above where I was possibly unclear.  The confusion is that an instance of a cite or citation template is not necessarily a bibliographic "citation", and similarly for HTML "&lt;ref>" tags and bibliographic "references".  The wiki software is what translates instances of wiki templates into HTML, just as a browser translates HTML into a page image. (But you probably already knew that.)  Basically, all of this software is for producing something comparable to what MLA, etc., describes.
 * And you got the footnotes (&lt;refs>) set up okay. But straight external links are deplored, so you should learn how to put bibliographic details into cite or citation, which really isn't so hard.  (But do not use the prior "Carter" citations as models!  They are badly done.)  Start with the Guardian article, keeping in mind that it is really a newspaper article (or column?), which can be found at that url.  Your other two sources really aren't good, but ignore that for now, just try setting the Guardian piece into a template in your /Sandbox.
 * As to "notes" (footnotes?) within footnotes: no, that wouldn't be good at all, nor even handy. (I have seen it attempted, but believe me: not handy!!)
 * Okay, one little joke: "A pseudo-intellectual is someone who thinks they are intellectual.  I think I am intellectual.  Therefore, I'm a pseudo-intellectual!!".  :)  - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:59, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * LOL--I think, therefore I err (are).
 * I do appreciate your instructions and the time you took to write them, and will try to remember they're right here on my talk page if I ever get ambitious and try to master such arcane ars technica.
 * By notes within footnotes, I meant like #35 or 122-124 at Intelligent design.
 * Happy editing! Yopienso (talk) 01:30, 7 January 2011 (UTC)


 * You should – allow to me emphasize: should!!! – learn the basics of citation, because that is the bedrock which Wikipeida content rests on.  Fortunately it really isn't that hard.  (Trust me.) That folks do have a hard time with this – well, I think that is largely because they really don't know what they are doing.  Intelligent Design is a good (bad!) example here: if you look into the archives you can see the folks there had some big hassles with references/citations.  So what they came up with is essentially two parallel sets of footnotes (using &lt;ref> tags).  One uses straight numbers (like [122]), which they used to create a "References" section with bibliographic "references" (records). (Take your time and tread cautiously through all these confused terms.)  The other set prefixes an "n" before the number (like [n 14]), which they used to create a "Notes" section, which contains material ("notes", quotes, etc.) about the text.  And then to really confuse matters they use the vcite web template (and variants) to create create the bibliographical entries in both lists.
 * Now when you say you would like to "make a note within a footnote" you are perhaps still a little confused. I suspect you mean to make a citation within a footnote.  Keep in mind that you can you use a cite/citation/vcite template (which makes the citation) within the text itself, or within footnotes (created with some form of &lt;ref> tags).  I have to cut and run right now, so I tell what: take a look at Seattle Fault, and perhaps things will be clear.  (Just consider the Harv templates as a magical link; I'll explain later.) - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:57, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
 * You are a dear to spend this time with me, but frankly, most of what you wrote is incomprehensible to me. Joshua has made it painfully clear that I did a poor job on Bob Carter, but I don't understand why. At the beginning, yes, before you reminded me how to do the . ( And now I remember how I got in trouble with those before--in some cases the inner > or < is omitted, as in [The example I tried to show you blanked the rest of this page, so I cut it out.] Or something like that. As I said, it confused me.) But once I did that, it looked great to me. I don't even see the problem, much less the solution.
 * The way I do cites or citations or references or whatever I do is to click after the phrase I want to source, click on the book icon, and paste into the little box labeled "Reference text" the url of the source I'm citing from. Since this is set up for everyone's use, it's hard for me to imagine it doesn't make proper references.
 * I took typing on a little portable mechanical Underwood typewriter in 1970. Everything since then I've figured out on my own. We bought our first computer 8 yrs. ago (I had used one at work for word processing.) and used it for news and emailing. It's dawning on me that the skills I'm so proud of having acquired are deemed annoyingly deficient here. I took the time this afternoon to figure out how to create a sandbox, but since I don't know what I'm doing wrong, meaning, my work looks perfectly acceptable to me, I don't know what to practice doing. Yopienso (talk) 04:51, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, there is a lot to know. Like, I don't even know what you mean by this "book icon".  Do you have some kind of browser add-on?  Some Wikipedia configuration option I don't know about?
 * Some of this might be easier to work out in your (new!) Sandbox. Should we shift this effort there? - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:51, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
 * OK, I've created a sandbox. I have no idea how I'll ever find it again or how you'll find it in the first place. (So I just bookmarked it. Now I can find it again.)
 * I'm astonished you are unaware of the markup buttons. I'm quite sure they show in a bar at the top of every editor's page when editing an article. In the past I've been told that any technical error I might make will automatically be fixed by a handy little bot. Seems that's not necessarily true?
 * My understanding of a bare or bald link or url is this, just pasting in the url. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_%28disambiguation%29
 * If I want to link to it in the way I understand to be proper, I do this. The reader just clicks on the hyperlink and is whooshed off to the other place. This same technology works at the Fun Trivia site I enjoy, in my electronic Blackboard at school, and in hotmail and gmail.
 * For footnotes, though, I have to use the ref tags or the much handier book icon/markup button and have or create a reflist. Please tell me what's wrong with what I've done here. Yopienso (talk) 23:36, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh, that book icon. I didn't recognize it. (The "Wiki markup" pull-down menu below the edit window has similiar functionality.) I rarely use the icon bar as I prepare most of my material off-line, and I'm used to just typing this stuff in.  Sure, that works.  The wiki software will willl magically replace the contents with the superscripted number that links into the reflist), creating the "footnote".  Like I said at the top, footnotes are simple.  (Well, as long as one sticks to the simple forms!)  But this is only a generic "note", there is yet no bibliographic record or citation of same.
 * Where it starts getting a little scary is creating the record (or reference) with the bibliographic details. This is where you ran afoul in the Carter material: you took a shortcut!  You had just a URL (http link) pointing to some place on the Internet.  That is what is called a "bald link", as it has no "hair" (details).  Consider: what if that url changed?  How would anyone find the what you were pointing to?  This is why standard bibliographic practice is to have a record with as much information as possible.  E.g., you referred to the remarks of a certain columnist in a certain issue and page of a certain newspaper.  If you list all of those, then a reader can see right off who said it and where to find it, even if the link breaks. So how do you do that?  Well, let's switch to your Sandbox and we can do some examples. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Timothy Ball
This might be old news to you already... I'm not around much anymore but popped in today and was surprised to see this interesting little tidbit. - Josette (talk) 23:21, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Yopienso (talk) 23:37, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

just in case
i replied at the help desk thanks. Jesanj (talk) 02:12, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Pennock
Please do not attempt to claim to know what exact source-material I based proposed article-material upon, especially when you don't have access to the full source I explicitly cited. (i) It is bad manners to attempt to speak for others' material. (ii) It is liable to add to confusion if your guess (and it was only a guess) is wrong -- as was the case here. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 04:59, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

The Magpie
Hi. I know you are interested in art history, so I thought I might ask for your help on User:Viriditas/The Magpie (Monet). If you know of any other good sources to add or if you want to help contribute, feel free. You may even be able to get a DYK out of it. Viriditas (talk) 02:23, 15 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi! Yes, I'm interested in art history, but am not a trained art historian. I learn about art from Sister Wendy :) and from Olga's Gallery (better have pop-up protection to venture there), Artchive, specific museum sites, my local library, and good ol' Wikipedia! I saw some of Monet's water lilies for the first time last Spring in Chicago, and must confess I was unfamiliar with "The Magpie." Thanks for sharing it with me.


 * As far as writing goes, the only article I ever created was written specifically to illustrate to my students why I would not allow them to cite Wikipedia. (It was about the Caquetá River and has since been merged into Japurá River.) I mainly just copy edit or add info or correct what I perceive to be error on whatever page I happen to be consulting on my reference work of first resort. Regards, Yopienso (talk) 18:09, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm trying to recall the first time I heard of or saw Sister Wendy; I think it was the mid-1990s, and I enjoyed her programs very much (on KTEH I believe, but I could be wrong). Yopienso, you might also enjoy reading Jonah Lehrer, specifically, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007).  Lehrer has received criticism in some quarters, but I've found the main thrust of his arguments to be quite solid.  Also see John Brockman's  The Third Culture (1995). Viriditas (talk) 22:41, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much!! You've uncannily identified my interests. I read about Lehrer's book some time back in Slate; made me think of my uncle, a neurosurgeon, who, before he retired, was into biofeedback and now spends his time writing poems and playing baroque music on flute and piano. Had never heard of Brockman's, which sounds even more interesting. "So many books, so little time." Have you ever read Harold Morowitz's collection of essays, The Thermodynamics of Pizza? Ciao. Yopienso (talk) 06:12, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

On another subject, Viriditas, if you happen to be watching this page, your tenor with Alex Harvey and Thepm seems at odds with your friendliness here and with the pulsating heart on your talk page. Yopienso (talk) 03:38, 18 April 2011 (UTC)