User talk:Dnpatton

Mentoring[edit]

Sure, I'll be happy to help. I'll post more this evening; at work right now so can't post much. I look forward to working with you. Mike Christie (talk – library) 17:19, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again; I hope I can be helpful to you. If you'd like to let me know what articles you plan to work on and what your assignments are, I will try to find a way to help. You can reach me fairly quickly at my talk page, or feel free to email me through the link ("E-Mail this user") at my talk page. Please let me know if you have any questions about Wikipedia at all -- I'm looking forward to working with you. Mike Christie (talk – library) 01:50, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I have a group that I am working with and the assignment is to create an article. Ours is Brownfield regulation and development, which none of us know a lot about. So, hopefully you will be able to help with getting the article in Wikipedia format, since this is new to my group. Thanks again. Dnpatton (talk) 14:38, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've tweaked your post to fix a couple of formatting issues, and I've changed the name of the article so it's now a link to the Wikipedia article on "Brownfield regulation and development". If you look, you'll see it's red now; if you go ahead and click on it it'll ask if you want to create the article. When you're ready to create it you can just click that link and start typing. I also changed the capitalization to match Wikipedia standards.

I wouldn't worry too much about formatting and layout and so on; the main thing is to have good sourced information, and say what the source is when you enter the information. I will be glad to help you get the format and technical details sorted out as needed. Mike Christie (talk – library) 00:18, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Article Review[edit]

hello, I have posted proposed changes for the article "Brownfield Land" for the project and I would like to receive feedback regarding these. Dnpatton (talk) 15:30, 2 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Deena, I've left a few thoughts at Talk:Brownfield land in response to your note there. Mike Christie (talk – library) 01:12, 3 March 2011 (

Hi, Mike I've posted the outline on my sandbox page and started working on it. I would love some feedback on it. ThanksDnpatton (talk) 18:33, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Deena -- I had a quick look at your article, and here are some thoughts.

I think it would be sensible to decide what belongs in your article, and what would more naturally be in Brownfield land -- of course there will be a small amount of overlap, but for example you have an "issues" section. If your article covers issues, as well as regulation, would there be much left for the other article? So long as you have a clear definition of what goes where, and the division gives both articles a reasonable amount of material, I think you're OK. It might be worth you sketching a one or two sentence definition of the contents of each article on the talk page of the current article to get other opinions; up to you.
The EPA quote you have leading off the article is just what is needed in terms of content, but it's best to use direct quotes only when you need the exact original phrasing. One good way to do this is to not look at the quote, and just say it again in your own words. You have to be careful to paraphrase enough that it is clearly different, of course.
"There are some important acts issued by the federal government to consider when dealing with brownfields": how about: "The main laws that relate to brownfields are" and then list them? Makes it a bit more directly declarative. And I don't doubt that these are important, but are these the main ones, as my version says, or are there others? If they're the main ones, do you have a source that says so? If not, what are the others? If you don't know, then I'd leave it as "Laws relating to brownfields include" and if possible research if that's an exhaustive list.
The following structure looks good -- just listing the laws, and giving the most important details about each law and how it relates to brownfields, would make this a very useful article without any further work. If you're feeling ambitious you could research what has actually been done under each law, but that might be significantly harder to research.

Looks like a great start! Let me know if/when you want me to take another look.

By the way, I noticed that you asked me to do this since I have your talk page on my watchlist, but usually the best way to get someone's attention on Wikipedia is to post on their talk page. It makes an orange bar pop up to tell them a message is waiting for them -- you should have seen one notifying you of this message. If there's an active conversation going on at a page, you can assume that people are watching out for new comments by using their watchlist, but if it's been a while then it's worth posting at their talk page if you need to get a specific person's attention. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:17, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Picture on the sandbox page[edit]

I've just added a picture to the sandbox page -- to change it to another picture, just change the bit that gives the filename to the filename you want. The "300px" bit says how big to make it; the "right" means put it on the right hand side of the screen.

Do you have a picture you want to use that's already on Wikipedia? If you need help uploading one, let me know. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:02, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]