User talk:Jimroberts

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Hello, Jimroberts, and welcome to the Simple English Wikipedia! I hope you will be happy helping here. You should begin by reading these pages: Wikipedia:Useful, Help:Contents, Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines, and how to write Simple English articles. If you want some ideas of which pages to work on, read Wikipedia:Requested articles or the list of wanted pages.

Even though it is a good idea to research an article (like looking at the discussion page) before making large changes, please be bold and try! Any changes you make that are not perfect can be fixed later. We are also working most on core articles and the most common topics until this Wikipedia grows.

If you want to ask a question or talk with other members, you can visit our version of the "village pump" at Wikipedia:Simple talk. Administrators on Wikipedia can also help you with more difficult problems. You can also ask me for help. The best way to do that is to leave a message on my talk page. You should always sign your messages on Talk pages by typing "~~~~" (four tildes) at the end of your words.

If you would like to test Wikipedia, please use the sandbox. Please do not test Wikipedia by editing its articles.

Good luck and happy editing!

Claimgoal 07:02, 26 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Jim Roberts!

Can I sugggest that you go back and take a look at your Owl page. It has been through some changes. You can track all the changes if you go to the article's history page. You will see that another editor made fairly radical revision. I have rejigged it, added to it and returned your galleries, which were deleted.

Comments

  • Every article, unless its only a stub of 4 lines, needs an intro. The intro makes the most important points, which can then be repeated and elaborated further down
  • After the intro, make a heading. The information needs to be in paragraphs, not single sentences. If it isn't, then someone is likely to run it all together, possibly losing the sense.
  • Some editors have a blitz against the inclunsion of galleries. In fact, Wikipedia does not exclude galleries. I'm a regular Art editor on the main Wikipedi and use them all the time. I consider them a very useful tool on Simple Wiki.
  • When using a gallery, make every picture convey specific information. A heading like "Types of owls" with four pics, and names is probably suficient. If the gallery is going to remain, it must demonstrate its relevance. If you cann tell the story in two pics, rather than 4, do it. Put your written info into the box.
  • I always balance the gallery so that it doesn't have four pics in one line and three in the next.
  • If you blow pics up huge, they simply don't work on some screens. They will be ruthlessly diminished to thumbnails next time you look. The only case for a very large pic is if it contains a lot of information that cannot be seen small, or if it is a panorama. See Assisi and Pope John Paul II.

Happy editting! Amandajm (talk) 01:30, 29 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Communication[change source]

One way to make sure you get messages is to use the "watch" tab at the top of the page. You cann watch any page. Somme people always reply on the page they talked on. In other words, if I leave a message on your page, you respond 'on your page. This works well for some people. It doesn't work terribly well for me, because I never watch other people's pages. So I hop over to their page to responnd to anything on mine, and hope they will do the same. The problem is that the conversationn ggets split between two pages and you can't always track down your side of the story.... So it's a good idea to keep talk about a particular page on thhe page it pertains to, but remembering that any interested person can buy into it.

About adding the cultural info... just go ahead and do it. This site is not as strict as Wikipedia about supporting everything with citation. The important thing is not to include anything that is likely to be challenged. So, if, for example, you say that the Indonesian Eagle Owl is the largest owl in the world, then you need to support it. If you say that Owls are significant in Indonesian mythology and are believed to bbe ghosts... it's unlikely to be challenged, particularly if you can name an example of a story or something.

About the positioning of pics-

  • There is this ghastly problem of info boxes. I hate them, but there are many other people who like them and insert them whereever possible. The problem with them is that they take up a lot of space that would otherwise be used for 2 or 3 pics, in the intro and down the right side of the page. Many of the pages on Simple Wiki are short, and the info box is frequently longer than the info itself.
  • I much prefer pics within the text. But because of this other little problem, there is often nowhhere to put them.
  • Also, because of the nature of Simple Ennglish wiki, it's often convenient to have lots of illustrations, and gallleries lend themselves to this.
  • Usually, if the article itself is short, the gallery pics are best all underneath, so the text can be read without a break. I have recently added a lot of small galleries to short articles. Flint for example. (I haven't checked to see if it's still there.)
  • On the other hand, if it's a medium length or very long article, little galleries are a good way to go. See Gothic architecture. I added the galleries to Bird and had to justify keeping them there. I think thhat they really add to the article, because they show so many variables that you can't describe easily.
  • If you take a look at Cattle and house, I used a different method. Just made the images "thumbnails" and put them in a single pile. The advantage of doing this is that regardless of the format of your screen, the images just flow down the right side. If you link them to the text, they can cause big separations on a different shaped screen. If your monitor is squarish, then you can fit a lot of pics. When someone with a wide screen monitor looks at them, it messes everything up. I currently have a wide screen, so whatever I do might not look quite so good on a squarish screen but at least it doesn't cause great gaps in the text.

As for coping with other editors... you find people that you can work with very easily. There are some gems on wikipedia. I've got a pet copy-editor who is brilliantly efficient and so fast. He rips and slashes through my articles, reordering sentences and fixing all my ghastly typos and saying "exactly what do you mean by this?" You can't afford to be sensitive about things like that.

One of the things that I find fun is collaborating with people who have similar or overlapping interests but come from different parts of the world. There is an editor who never signs in but makes succinct and highly pertinent changes to my architecture articles. The sort of people who realy bug me are the ones who spend all their wiki-time on non-creative edits, and keep a tally of how many they have made. There are people who do nothing but cruise around adding "citation needed" tags by the thousand. Or "Disputed article" which is even worse because you often don't even know which bit of the article is in dispute. Certain things cause absolute rage, and edit wars that go on interminably. More lines have been written on wikipedia about whether Leonardo da Vinci was gay than about his paintings. As soon as it seems to be under control, it breaks out again.

Hang in there! It won't take you long to find your way around!

Amandajm (talk) 05:39, 29 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I reverted it because you didn't log in and only appeared as an IP address; therefore it looked like vandalism. I'm not sure people will agree with your edits, but I won't undo them. Cheers fr33kman t - c 05:51, 18 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]