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Hello, Teddy.bear307, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

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Thank you Biografer! Any friendly advice is appreciated :) --Teddy.bear307 (talk) 20:02, 27 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Joseph Conrad edit

Dear Teddy.bear307, welcome to Wikipedia!
Thanks for your edits today on "Joseph Conrad". I have very limited knowledge of the more technical aspects of Wiki-editing, so I can only assume that those edits have improved the article.
There is, however, now some kind of technical snag at the "Language" section, which will be immediately obvious to you. Can it be remedied?
Many thanks!
Nihil novi (talk) 22:48, 12 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Nihil novi, Thank you for your message yesterday. The only thing that I did was to remove a double (redundant) been been and replace it with been in the Themes and style section. I too am limited in my knowledge of the more technical aspects of Wiki-editing. At present I am confining my efforts to typo corrections which are minor edits. As for the technical snag you referred to in the "Language" section, no it is not immediately obvious; perhaps the citations look strange? I have no experience with that sort of edit, so I cannot say if it can be remedied, many apologies. Also I am unsure if this is what you were referring to. Finally, if my edit caused said snag, I would be most happy to click the undo button and erase my edit. Feel free to click on undo on my edit if that will help.
Many thanks to you as well!

Teddy.bear307 (talk) 15:40, 13 December 2017 (UTC)Reply


  • In similar vein, you made a lot of syntactic and markup changes to V8 engine (and Protease) which are not how we use wikitext markup. Please don't. Andy Dingley (talk) 23:41, 12 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Help me please edit

Hello, I am a fairly new Wikipedian. I am hoping to continue to do minor copy editing work, gnome work, and typo corrections as I find them, being that these seem to be rather important. Yesterday I used the visual editor to make some typo corrections (I am not versed in editing with code yet, so I don't attempt to), and I received a message from Andy Dingley (talk) regarding 1 edit to V8 engine and 2 edits to Protease. Please see the details on my user contributions page.

At any rate, could someone please explain what my error was on these edits? Shall I simply click undo on those edits or would that cause further harm? How can I best avoid making the same mistake(s) in the future? How do I best apologize to Andy Dingley (talk) ?

Thank you very much, Teddy.bear307 (talk) 16:40, 13 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

  • No apologies are needed, we've all started somewhere.
I'm concerned that these changes have come from the Visual Editor. The VE is "a problem", to say the least. I'd be most unhappy to see it making these changes for itself.
Your changes seemed to be useful typo fixing - turning "been been" to "been" for one. Yet for some of these changes that's all that happened (which is good) - for some though, a lot of markup changes happened as well which we don't want. Can you see why there was a different behaviour? Did you use the editor differently somehow? The page Special:Contributions/Teddy.bear307 ("Contributions" on the top of the screen) can be useful to see what changes you've made. For the moment, I'd reverted the markup changes and re-applied your typo fix, so it's all good.
Personally I avoid the Visual Editor. Wikipedia is horribly confusing most of the time, but it's not the syntax that's the real problem! Andy Dingley (talk) 18:31, 13 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thank you, Andy Dingley, for your kind words. I was very concerned at first, thinking it was me, but glad it is in fact a problem with the Visual Editor instead. Yet, it is indeed unfortunate to know the Visual Editor is "a problem". I tried to go back and look at the revision history that shows the differences in code but was unable to find the line containing my edit... nonetheless, I was shocked at the amount of (what my untrained eye sees as) possible "garbage" code added in to the V8 engine article that seems to be part of my edit. Yet I only actually edited the one phrase I listed in my change notes. As far as I can recall, I did all of my edits yesterday the same way.
Thank you so very much for your comments and I appreciate your reversion and re-application of my typo fix. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to learn. I am now beginning my study of wiki markup, and I will start moving away from using the Visual Editor.
Any further pointers you may have are greatly appreciated.
Have a wonderful day, Sincerely, Teddy.bear307 (talk) 21:51, 13 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
A great place to brush up on the code is the Cheatsheet, which gives a bunch of examples of the most common types of coding used to display different things. If you want more help, change the {{help me-helped}} back into a {{help me}}, stop by the Teahouse, Wikipedia's live help channel, or the help desk to ask someone for assistance. Primefac (talk) 23:30, 13 December 2017 (UTC)Reply