VerneDurand
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Tips- Don't be afraid to edit! Just find something that can be improved and make it better. Other editors will help fix any mistakes you make.
- It's normal to feel a little overwhelmed, but don't worry if you don't understand everything at first—it's fine to edit using common sense.
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- Always use edit summaries to explain your changes.
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Happy editing! Cheers, JarrahTree 09:24, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
Welcome!
editHello, VerneDurand, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
- Introduction and Getting started
- Contributing to Wikipedia
- The five pillars of Wikipedia
- How to edit a page and How to develop articles
- How to create your first article
- Simplified Manual of Style
You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help. Need some ideas about what kind of things need doing? Try the Task Center.
Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! JarrahTree 09:22, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
your edit summaries suggest that more links for useful guidelines might be of help
editI might have guessed wrong, of course...
There used to be a gigantuous page full of links to interesting things, many links, have seem to have mislaid it for the moment. JarrahTree 09:26, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
@JarrahTree: (do I need to ping or are you notified for a reply anyway?)
Thank you! You're not wrong, I've previously read talk pages/edit history investigating attribution and dived in to get something particular fixed/added so I'm not wholly unfamiliar with the site, but I haven't really sat down and made an account/jumped around to try to help (although I did start with Flanagan page after spotting the citation needed while reading).
I'm fairly comfortable poking around the style guides for particular questions, but the five pillars page is useful, and a few of the others seem like a clearer 'root' to find other pages. Is there:
- a guide/discussion on how to approach submitting edits mechanically (I instinctively split them to make decoding easier but that might not be necessary, and is it better practice to reread more thoroughly or patch typos after, also when should I make a note in the edit summary vs open something on the talk page)
- similar for systematically breaking down article improvement (Catfishing has clear issues with confusing structure, repeated information and a narrow perspective, which I think I could dig into fixing, but I'm not sure what my immediate next step would be or how to decide what a 'better' structure would be)?
VerneDurand (talk) 11:04, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
- As far as I can tell edit summaries are transient spaces and too many people fill them with small novels. It all depends, by each case may be different.
- A very important thing for new users is to get simpler tasks under the belt to show that you are in good status - as your edits grow - you are able to get a better picture of the overall processes -
- there are clues on the section on the page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels#Confirmed. and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_permissions/Confirmed
- to jump in feet first can be like at catfishing
- in the old days I would ask- can you find a similar article - and reverse engineer to look at it or review it?
- if you do change things, short edit summaries are always better
- I could rant for ages, time to stop for the moment... JarrahTree 11:33, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
- @JarrahTree: I stumbled on Wikipedia:Essay directory, which seems to have a fair few interesting links, and Wikipedia:Essays in a nutshell/Article writing appears to address the specific questions I had. VerneDurand (talk) 08:12, 5 January 2024 (UTC)