Welcome edit

Welcome!

Hello, Fredricshaffer, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Aboutmovies (talk) 08:34, 15 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Biofeedback edit

Hello Dr. Shaffer,

I've had a bit of a go at working on the biofeedback page. Based on your user page, you are obviously an expert on the area, and also an editor of a journal. Though I am very, very far from an expert on biofeedback, I am pretty experienced with wikipedia. I have made a variety of changes, and would like to explain them to you. I value your contributions, but have a couple of comments that will help them be more integrated with wikipedia as a whole - things like formatting, linking, sourcing, and more.

  • The biggest change was the layout - one of my edits substantially changed the arrangement of the page, but didn't really affect the content. The normal guidelines on wikipedia for setup and arrangement are the guide to layout. In many cases there are explicit orders of sections - the WP:MEDMOS gives you an idea of what the could look like. However, for biofeedback there isn't really anything similar, so I went with something that seemed sensible. I started with the tri-org definition, then moved on to Modalities (later retitled "Sensor modalities"). I tweaked it a bit more and the "final" layout now has Applications, Clinical effectiveness, Organizations, History and "In popular culture" following. I deliberately tried to keep this edit minimal on content - a lot of changes appear just because the compare function can't tell if you moved something around or not. I also adjusted a lot of the section headings - picking different words so I don't repeat the page or heading name in the section title, as well as eliminating most capital letters.
  • I have sporadically added citation templates. They use a formulaic template to produce a standard citation. The most useful are {{cite book}} and {{cite journal}}. There are a couple tricks that make generating citations easier - you can use the pubmed number or ISBN to generate them automatically using diberri's template generator. Very useful! Filling them in manually takes a bit more practice, but it can be done. There are also a couple tools you can use, but generally diberri does a pretty good job.
  • I rewrote the History section - the way it was before, it was essentially a set of standalone sentences that broke choppily from one line to another. I tried to turn it into a coherent paragraph, and trimmed out some of the unsourced statements. I also removed some primary sources that stood in for secondary claims (i.e. if Skinner published something about operant conditioning, that can be used as a citation to demonstrate or verify that Skinner wrote it, but can't be used to justify say, the impact it had - that would be original research and something not permitted on wikipedia). Also tweaked the content to include citation templates
  • I greatly trimmed the External links section. The EL section should be short, and only have highly-relevant links that are in English. They should not duplicate sources, or be something that could be used as a source. External links are meant to be items that expressly can't be used as a source because they are too long, or are pictures, or are links to organizations. In particular, national organizations are not good choices simply because there are a lot of nations; a single international organization is a good link, one for each country is not.

There's probably more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions - though I can't help much with subject-matter stuff, I am a decent resource for wikipedia-specific things. One thing I haven't done but know I could/should is use adjust the footnotes, particularly the use of refname to avoid duplication. I'll try to get around to it in a bit. I did so once with Yucha, 2008 in this edit, but it'll take a bit more work to see where there are other duplicates and address them. Thanks, WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 19:43, 22 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Hi WLU,

I appreciate all your work on this page. I'm a complete newbie, your changes make perfect sense, and I value our collaboration. I will look carefully at your comments and will gladly use you as a Wikipedia mentor. Thanks,00:55, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Hello again,
I was just looking at the neurofeedback page and have a bit of an inkling that it's not totally kosher. Any chance you could have a look at it at some point? WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 23:31, 22 February 2010 (UTC)Reply
I'll look at the neurofeedback page this week. The International Society for Neurofeedback and Research (ISNR) is one of the largest international neurofeedback associations. I've asked their President-elect to find content experts to update this site, consistent with Wikipedia's spirit and standards. If they decide to do this, would you be willing to advise them? Thanks, again, 00:55, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
Spaced per WP:TALK. I wouldn't mind being a resource to offer comments and suggestions, but there are many options beyond just my input - there is adoption, use of the {{helpme}} template, asking an admin (mostly because they tend to be experienced users, not because they're magic) or the editor assistance pages. I would suggest first of all reading through the simplified ruleset, and then starting with the more common/applicable policies and guidelines - I would start with WP:ENC, WP:V, WP:NPOV, WP:OR, and WP:NOT. Those cover the basics. For general formatting stuff, the manual of style answers most questions. You can also try this essay I wrote for noobs. But overall, I have no problem answering questions, feel free to ask. And thank you for reading my comments and reviewing my changes, wikipedia needs experts! WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 11:57, 23 February 2010 (UTC)Reply
Hi Dr. Shaffer, it's me again. For edits like this one, you may want to try my suggestion of using diberri with the ISBN option. In this case, I pulled the ISBN from the appropriate google books page, plugged it in, and got an automatic template. This one takes a bit more tweaking because you're citing a chapter in a book, but not much. I used a citation template in two steps so you can see the basic paste from diberri, followed by the extra steps to get the chapter info in. Step 1, step 2. Stuff like this isn't vital, but it gives a standard look to all the different articles, and the template generator is much easier and quicker than doing it all by hand. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 00:03, 24 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Hi WLU,

You're absolutely right and I'll follow your suggestion before I post again. I appreciate your patience and understand the importance of a uniform appearance. Thanks, again, Fred

No problem. Please note that content is far more important than formatting - it's easy for someone like me to do the monkey work of formatting a citation, while understanding and summarizing it is more difficult. I just point out these tools and formatting options just because it makes it easy to do both. Once you get the hang of using diberri, you really start to appreciate it. But always, content first. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 20:06, 24 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Biofeedback Certification International Alliance edit

I've placed a speedy delete tag on the article you just created, Biofeedback Certification International Alliance. The correct way to move an article is not to copy/paste from Biofeedback Certification Institute of America, but to use the page-move function. This will retain all the appropriate page history, and move the associated talk page at the same time. TJRC (talk) 01:39, 7 April 2010 (UTC)Reply

Okay, the article you created has been deleted, and I've moved the old article to the new name. TJRC (talk) 04:23, 7 April 2010 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom elections are now open! edit

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:13, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Problems with upload of File:Real Genius 1.jpeg edit

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