User talk:Srich32977

Welcome[change source]

Hello, Srich32977, and welcome to the Simple English Wikipedia! Thank you for your changes, especially what you did for Lauri Törni.

You may want to begin by reading these pages:

For some ideas of pages to work on, read Wikipedia:Requested pages or the list of wanted pages.

You can change any pages you want! Any changes you make can be seen right away. You can ask questions at Wikipedia:Simple talk. At the end of your messages on talk pages, please sign your name by typing "~~~~" (four tildes).

If you need help just click here and type {{helpme}} and your question and someone will reply to you shortly.

Good luck and happy changing! GeorgeBarnick (talk) 18:25, 20 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Red links and attribution[change source]

Hello, Srich, and welcome to Simple English Wikipedia. I noticed that some of your edit summaries mention removing red links. Please don't remove red links just to get rid of them. We like to keep the red links here, because it shows us articles that we need to create. Some of our editors look at the list of redlinked pages to decide what articles to create.

What we do need when you bring articles here from English Wikipedia is for the text to be simplified and to have attribution, giving credit to the original source of the article. You can read about how to give attribution at Wikipedia:Transwiki attribution. This is very important because it is a legal requirement.

Let me know if you have questions about this and, again, welcome! --Auntof6 (talk) 18:33, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just like the "Sea of Blue", which detracts from reading, a Sea of Red can be even more distracting. In the Carl Eytel article, which I just created, there are all sorts of redlinks. (I wish Simple Wikipedia had a sandbox feature.) I agree that certain redlinks are helpful. For example, the Navajo people have an article, but the Hopi people do not. Thanks for the Transwiki attribution info! I will add the version numbers. S. Rich (talk) 18:49, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe red links can be distracting, but we want them anyway. That's probably one of the ways this Wiki is different from English Wikipedia. The red links can be eliminated by linking to a related topic, or by actually creating the article they point to, at least as a stub.

I'm not sure what you mean by a sandbox "feature". If you mean a place where you can work on articles to get them ready for here, you can do that on a subpage in your userspace. Many people do that, including me. Let me know if that's not what you meant. --Auntof6 (talk) 19:04, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm -- I take a Good Article from the English WP, paste it over here, and put up an under construction template. As part of the process I seek to remove a lot of distracting redlinks, which are not likely to generate new articles. (Really, many are for rather abstruse topics.) Seems that WP:REQ is a better place to generate new pages instead of reverting edits to a new work in progress. :-( S. Rich (talk) 19:41, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I understand where you're coming from. I came here from English WP, too, and had to learn the many different ways that things are done here. Here we really discourage removing red links, so please don't do that. It doesn't matter how obscure the topic might be -- we need a lot of articles on a lot of topics! This is explained at Wikipedia:Red link. WP:REQ is a good place to request articles when someone has a specific article in mind, although not a lot of editors know about it. Having the red links as well lets us see what articles are most in demand, based on how many other articles already link to them. Take a look at Special:WantedPages to see where they show up. --Auntof6 (talk) 20:02, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You know, Aunt, I am still upset that you reverted the redlink removal in Carl Eytel. (So I'm going to get this off my chest.) The revert was high-handed and rude and wrong. I had just started the article and I was actively working on it. I posted the under construction template from the get-go, expecting that interested editors would leave it be. Also consider -- what if I had undertaken simplification and redlink removal at the same time? Would you have reverted the whole thing? Or would you have gone through the article and selectively added back the redlinks?

Redlinks are proper for articles will that "be created soon or that an article should be created for the topic because the subject is notable and verifiable." There is no way that the sea of redlinks that you restored would encourage anyone to create new articles. Moreover, when redlinks are created, they should be created only after some searching is undertaken for similar topics which already have articles.

You could have looked for me on the English WP, and discovered that I'm not just some newbie. And you could have discovered that Carl had GA status on the English WP. And you should have discussed the redlink issue some more.

Most importantly, your comment that redlinks are wanted contradicts the criteria for Good Articles and Very Good Articles (e.g., few/no redlinks). So, if anyone is going to improve Carl to GA or VGA status, they will remove (or convert) the redlinks. Consider, the article already has 214 brackets, plus a number of author-links in the citations.

I've told you that I did not appreciate the revert. But you have not apologized. (So there. It's off my chest!) S. Rich (talk) 18:22, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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OK, I respectfully disagree, but I accept your criticism. To address some of your specific points:

The "under construction" tag specifically says "You are welcome to help." Any article in mainspace can be changed by anyone -- to say otherwise is to claim ownership, which is against Wikipedia policy. I didn't make substantive changes, even though it was still unsimplified. If you don't want anyone else to touch an article, the way we handle that here is to work on it in your own userspace.
If I hadn't been able to put the red links back without affecting anything else, I would have left it alone. That is why I didn't put the red links back on Lauri Törni.
I completely disagree with your point that starts "Redlinks are proper". Seeing the red links in any individual article might not make someone want to create an article. However, seeing multiple links to the same thing in places like Special:WantedPages could. (That is the most current place to see what is red linked. It says it isn't being updated, but that text is out of date because it has been getting updated.) The more links there are to a given term, the higher it is on that list, and people do look there to get ideas for pages to create. To be able to do that, we need the red links in the articles.
I don't think you are "just some newbie". I think you are an experienced editor with very good intentions, just as I was when I started editing here after having edited on English WP for a long time. It's just that there is a lot to learn about how things are done differently here, and one of the biggest differences I found is leaving red links in place. English WP pretty much has articles about everything that's significant, so a red link there is less likely to be to anything important. Here, we have so few articles (comparatively speaking) that we use the red links in the way I described and discourage removing them.
I'm not sure what your point is in saying that the article on Carl is a GA on English WP. If you're planning to nominate it for GA here, it would need to change quite a bit to be simple enough.
Saying that red links are wanted does not contradict the good-article criteria. For one thing, we're not talking about a good article nomination here. For another, those criteria do say there shouldn't be many red links, but they also say "All important terms should be linked". Many of the red links that I put back were to significant terms. Taken together, those two things mean that if you want an article with red links to become a good article, articles should be written (or, possibly, redirects made) for those red links. If links are removed from terms that are deemed to be important, they would need to be put back. That is exactly the reason we want the red links left -- they result in articles being written.

So maybe I acted too hastily. If so, I apologize for the haste, but not for the action itself. If you keep removing red links, other editors will also ask you not to do that, and maybe then you'll believe what I've been trying to explain. --Auntof6 (talk) 23:56, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have raised a question about redlinks at Wikipedia talk:Red link. S. Rich (talk) 03:19, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OK. Please publicize it at Simple Talk. Thanks. --Auntof6 (talk) 04:19, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Carl Eytel moved to your userspace to keep it from getting deleted[change source]

I noticed that you removed the in-progress tag from this article. However, it is not simplified from the English WP article, so I moved it to your userspace. It is at User:Srich32977/Carl Eytel. If I had not done that, another admin might have deleted it, because one our quick deletion policy allows deletion of articles that are unsimplified copied from English WP.

Please do not be discouraged by this. You have created good articles and we appreciate that! --Auntof6 (talk) 20:12, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I removed the underconstruction template because I did not appreciate the redlink reversion. The subpage creation is a good idea, and I wish I had thought of it on my own. S. Rich (talk) 20:19, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]