User talk:Pixelgirl/Adoption

Adoption request

Hello there, Pixelgirl! I'm Dylanfromthenorth and I have been around for quite some time now. I'm messaging you because I've noticed that you've indicated that you want to be adopted on your user page. I'd be happy to adopt you. If you need any advice, either on the adoption process itself or more generally about wikipedia, you can contact me on my talk page. Alternatively, you can click here to view the list of adopters. Happy editing :-) Dylanfromthenorth (talk) 09:39, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

I appreciate the offer to adopt me. pd_THOR reached out as well, and since he's already assisted me with my first faux pas here, I thought it would be smart to take him up on his offer. If you do have anything you'd like help with though, please don't hesitate to hit me up for assistance. I'm trying to spend at least an hour a day looking through other's edits and the tutorials here, so I'm checking this page at least once a day.

adoption and COE note

Firstly, I want you to know I'm assuming you're Krystyn Heide, a Squarespace team member. A few things on that: (a) Be very careful about avoiding conflict of interest concerns; I'm certainly not assuming ANY malice or impropriety on your part, and I plan to keep an eye on the Squarespace article & will attest to vetting and corroborating anything that's done there (as I do with many articles on which I work). It's just something to be aware of, that others might not be so careful in assuming the intent of your edits. (b) I did remove you from "key people" in the Squarespace infobox because of concerns re: the previous, but also because of the honest rationale I made on the article's talk page: the other five members are specifically delineated by the "About" page, but to include your name and not the gentleman listed before you, nor the 26 proceeding you, would require explanation beyond the fact that you edit the article. Does that make sense?

As for "adopting" you, I'd be happy to rise to the challenge, if you're willing to accept this as my inaugural attempt to do so. It's up to you. FYI, I've edited Wikipedia since December 2004 and have accumulated 24,632 edits under my belt. I've never been blocked, and though I've helped with a few featured articles, I only have a few good articles on which I was the primary contributor. I tend to focus moreso on taking an poorly-sourced or un-sourced article and doing my very best to bring it up to code w/o any policy, guideline, or stylature violations. They may not wind up sufficiently comprehensive as required for GA/FA statuses, but they're 100% accurate and reliable to the best of my ability. Hopefully, they can be relied upon to be useful to readers and a credit to Wikipedia's reputation. My user page should be a good representation of my contributions and interests.

Either way, if you have any further questions or concerns, I'll be watching this page and will reply duly. If you have anything particular to the Squarespace article though, we should keep those discussions centralized there for the benefit of other editors. — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 21:33, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the follow up/clean up, and yes, that definitely makes sense. It certainly wasn't my intent to raise any eyebrows! After seeing the Orphan notice, I asked on the Talk page if adding more people to that area, and the references associated with them, would add credibility to the page. (Everything else I could think of had been covered.) Now that I've walked through several tutorials and looked at other pages, I see how references are not related to Orphan notices. As I now understand it, it refers to other articles within Wikipedia linking to the article.

I'll just stay off that page, I see now it's clearly a conflict of interest.

I am still "up for adoption" and would be grateful to work with such an experienced mentor. Other than removing my adoption request from my User page, is there anything else we need to do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Krystynheide (talk • contribs) 21:50, 27 October 2010

I'm glad you're taking this process well. My frequent concern is that my intentions will not come across correctly in a textual medium, so please realize that I always eschew conflict and am almost always on the side of ration and good-naturedness.

As for the "orphaning", you're exactly right. It's just lonely, if you will. That doesn't make it a bad article in any way, but it may be harder for a reader to stumble across it since there are few links to it in other articles. I generally will place a few links to the article in a few places where I'm 100% sure they won't be contentious, nor will it seem like I'm just dropping links all over the place to get rid of the {{orphan}} template. If it stays there for a bit, that's okay. I'll just usually check the incoming links every once in a while and see if it warrants removal yet.

Please don't take it from me to dissuade you from editing Squarespace. Not doing so is certainly an option, and feel free if it makes you more comfortable. My stance on it—for this article in particular but also for all articles to an extent—is to critically evaluate any edit you want to make to ensure it's as neutral as possible, and (if adding material) cited to a reliable secondary source. That way you can later point to the external source for the material if anybody were to accuse you of inserting promotional or questionable info.

I've added the {{adopter}} and {{adoptee}} templates to our pages (please forgive the impropriety), which is the end of the "official" adoption process as far as I can tell. As for the helping: first of all, my talk page is always available for you to drop in and ask anything. This template, which I'll forego transcluding here, has a lot of good links to browse through. My first two questions will be (a) Are you comfortable with the "Wikimarkup" (the manner of typing/coding/linking/etc.) used in the edit window? You maneuvered the Squarespace infobox without much apparent difficulty, but if anything in the process wasn't clear enough for you, please tell. (b) Aside from our communal article, do you have any specific article or subject you'd like to work with? Whether it be writing or re-building a whole article, or just improving one that looks perhaps abandoned or stagnant? — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 06:14, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the follow up! In regards to (a) I work in the web/software industry and the markup seems pretty logical to me, though if something specific comes up I'll be sure to ask. And, please do let me know if I do anything that jumps out at you. To answer (b), I think it's best if I focus on subjects where I have experience and know where to look for good documentation: web design, graphic design, typeography. I'd also like to help improve existing articles that need serious help or are in danger of being deleted. Are these posted somewhere that I can just tackle a list one by one? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Krystynheide (talk • contribs) 17:19, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Articles that need help can be found categorized in a number of places. For example, if you want to find sources for articles which have none, they are categorized by date at Category:Articles lacking sources. Articles that have been written, but just consist of raw text and need to be "wikified" can be found at Category:Articles that need to be wikified. The super category for all of these is Category:Wikipedia cleanup; that category is divided by types of cleanup, and each subcategory will be divided by how long (by month) they've been needing cleanup. I don't go through articles needing cleanup nearly often enough, and is always a good place to hone your skills.

Articles that are facing deletion can be found at WP:AFD#Current discussions, divided by date (today's discussions, for any given value of "today" will always be at WP:AFD/T). These can be harder to wade through, because an article's deletion or retention will usually be weighed against its compliance with policies and guidelines. You can't just argue for keeping an article because it's interesting or useful, nor can you argue for its deletion because you don't like it, or others like have been deleted before. I would shy you away from those for the meantime, and would instead point you to a policy to read and familiarize yourself with first. In my opinion, the Verifiability policy is amongst the most important. — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 01:13, 6 November 2010 (UTC)