User talk:Jack Lester

Welcome!

Hello, Jack Lester, 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:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
• Manual of Style

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! Melchoir (talk) 02:48, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

More greetings and some tips

Hi, Jack Lester! Let me add my greetings to the words above; it's nice to have you helping out. I see you're working on the KCKN (defunct) page. I don't know much about the article's subject (yet), but it looks interesting.

I'd like to point out a few things which might be helpful to you, if you haven't already figured them out for yourself.

1. You don't need to sign your edit summaries, either with your name or the four tildes (your're currently doing both). All the information that would provide is in the history (where we'd see your ~~~~JackLester~~~~) anyway. You should use the four tildes when you're adding to a Talk page, as you did at Talk:KCKN (defunct).
2. You don't need to use the Return key while typing text inside a paragraph, only at the end (to start a new graph). The users' browsers (as well as yours) will reflow the text to suit the available space.
3. When you add a reference, make sure it has both an opening (<ref>) and closing (</ref>) tag. If you don't close the reference properly, it messes up the page. (It's because of unclosed refs that I came to the KCKN page in the first place, to fix it.

Good luck, and I hope you like it here. JohnFromPinckney (talk) 06:31, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

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KCKN

(copied from KCKN Pioneers with Modern Country Music in 1957) To Whom It May Concern:

First, I love Wikipedia, but it is the hardest web site to navigate that I have ever worked on!

On 30 October 2009, between 2 and 4 p.m., CDT, USA, I spent several hours composing approximately five paragraphs on the above subtopic to continue building a story on an historic radio station.

At about the time I was ready to end my work for the day, my new text was deleted without explanation before I could formally close it out. Is there an way a "senior editor" could find that material and restore it to the existing portion of the KCKN history already posted? If so, I would appreciate it so that I do not have to re-do it.

Request for advice: Should I compose future paragraphs in the Sandbox and then seek an Editor to connect the new next to the story as I continue? Thank you.

Jack Lester

Hi, and sorry you've had some frustration with Wikipedia.

First, if you have questions like the above, your talk page (here) is a great place to ask. Just put a {{helpme}} tag with your question, and an experienced editor will be along in a while to answer it.

A great place to work on text before putting it in an article is in a subpage of your user page, such as at User:Jack Lester/Sandbox. This will give you much more time to work on it.

Looking at your contributions, I don't see any deleted articles except KCKN Pioneers with Modern Country Music in 1957, which is where you asked the above question. I do see contributions at KCKN (defunct); if that's what you're talking about having restored, you can get a copy yourself. Just go to that article and click on the "history" tab above the article. Browse down through the edit history until you see yours, and you can choose any revisions you'd like to compare. Help:Page history has a lot more information on this. HTH! --Fabrictramp | talk to me 20:41, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

WikEd

Screenshot of wikEd in action

Hi Jack,

I saw that you mentioned you were dyslexic in your post to the Help Desk. Kudos to you for sticking around – wiki markup is difficult for anyone to make sense of in the beginning.

One thing that might help you is an editing tool called wikEd. WikEd changes the look of the editing box so that it looks something like what you can see in the picture on the right (you can click it to enlarge it). If you'd like to try it, you can click "my preferences" at the top of the page, then click the tab labelled "Gadgets", and check the box for wikEd. You can then just try editing any page to see what you think. If you don't like it, you can disable it the same way you enabled it.

Hope that helps, Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 13:35, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

About references (a brief tutorial)

Hello, Jack

I saw that you are having trouble with the references in KCKN (defunct), and I hope I can find some time to help you. I want to do it here on your Talk (discussion) page because such things don't belong in the article itself, nor even on the Talk page for the topic. These tips might help you on any article you work on. However, I am going to concentrate on the KCKN (defunct) article and be very specific.

The numbered list of references at the bottom of that article is generated automatically. Here's how it works: A new article that has no references is just a bunch of paragraphs, with maybe some pictures. If it is long it will have some section headings to break up the text into logical chunks. A heading is made like this:

==Heading text==

This is what we do for the References heading as the first step. We add, at the bottom:

==References==

That gives us a section heading, but no reference list. For that, we add what's called a template. A template is just a computer-geek term to refer to the things on Wikipedia we can enter using special terms in double braces. A programmer has to create code for any special term, so you can't just add, for example {{Lester}} and make something happen. But the creation of a references list is a really useful thing on Wikipedia, so there is a template for it: {{Reflist}}.

Now perhaps you have seen in the KCKN (defunct) article, when you are in edit mode, that the bottom of the article has this:

==References==
{{Reflist}}

You recently added some stuff after that, but I am ignoring that for now. Are you with me so far?

The {{Reflist}} template only gives us a list of the references we have added to the article. If we just type a bunch of text, and never include any reference citations (with <ref></ref>), the references list will be empty.

Fortunately, you have been doing a lot of research on the history of KCKN. I imagine you spending a lot of time in the library, making a lot of notes. And as you worked on the Wikipedia article, you added mentions of the place you got the information. That's why, when we look at the KCKN (defunct) article, outside of edit mode, we see a list of books and publications.

The first publication in that list is 'Trade Publication, "Broadcasting Yearbook"', which is numbered automatically as number 1. It is first in the list because it was the first reference you mentioned in the article. This book was referred to five different times, so there are little letters (^{a b c d e}) after the number 1.

Now, unfortunately, 'Trade Publication, "Broadcasting Yearbook"' is not enough information for people to look up and verify the information you cited. In the case of such a yearbook, I'd want to know what year it was published, who published it, who wrote or compiled it, and exactly what page or pages the information was on. Basically, I need to see the information I'd need to find that book in a library or bookstore, and also to find that exact page, so I can be sure you're not making something up or misinterpreting what was written.

What we (mostly, you) need to do is go through the text of the article and, everywhere you now point to "Broadcasting Yearbook" or "Microfilm of the Kansas City Star", expand the citation to include the missing, necessary information.

Here is a page for Wikipedia editors like you to see what information we need: Big, long article. And here's a summary inside that page: List of citation details.

This will be a lot of work, and will depend on you being able to find the information again. Unless you happened to write down all of the information, like page numbers, and just haven't added it to the article, you will need to head back to the library!

Now, currently, since so many of your references were identicle, the citations are also duplicated inside the article. I am sure this will be confusing to you. I can help you here, and I am willing to, but I need to ask you to wait. I have no more time tonight, but tomorrow (late Sunday) I will try to make time for this.

What I will do is make unique references inside the article for you to fill in with publisher name and city, page numbers, dates, etc. I will make each reference you currently have different. Then you can fill in the info you have. You don't have to worry about citations which are the same; we can clean those up later.

Okay? I hope this is clear enough for you. Don't worry if you still have questions. (And if you do, ask here or at the bottom of my Talk page.)

It can take some time to learn these things, but don't give up! We'll get your article fixed up eventually.

— JohnFromPinckney (talk) 15:32, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

KCKN references from "Clipping file"

Hello, Jack

I noted your additions to the KCKN (defunct)‎ article. It is great to see that you did the </ref> tags correctly. Nice! THANK YOU!

Now we can concentrate on the content. When you refer to the "Clipping file", I am left to imagine (since I have never been to the Kansas Public Library) a big manila folder stuffed full of news article sliced out of newspapers and magazines. Is this about right?

       You are correct! Most big-city libraries kept clipping files because (in the
       pre-microfilm era) old newspapers were too random and balky to keep in perpetuity.
       So a trained librarian had the job of deciding what story(ies) in each day's local
       paper might be of future historic interest. His/her choices were then filed in the
       manila folders you described and filed either alphabetically or by topic in four
       drawer vertical files.

Do not such clippings have some note attached indicating (as a minimum) what newspaper, what date, and what page they came from? That's the information we still need in addition to the details "Clipping file, "Kansas Room", Kansas Public Library, Kansas City." Can you get that info?

       Unfortunately, often the entire page of a publication was not retained. I am a Historian
       for a county museum and a local history club and find the "chancy" way materials were
       saved to be frustrating. Older researchers tell me I should be pleased that anything
       was saved before modern technology -- I AM!

       I included the zip code for those interested in following up. Should the street 
       address (625 Minnesota Avenue) and the phone number (913-551-3200) be added, too?
       A Ms. Georgia Slaughter manages the Kansas Room. This repository has material as
       far back as 1889.  She is friendly and helpful to inquiries.

       NOTE: Concerning the last section I must re-do, person wanted more information about
       Ted Cramer's 09-17-07 presentation may contact the A. W. Miller School of Journalism, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. Email: dmac@ksu.edu.

Good luck (and a happy new year)! — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 18:03, 1 January 2010 (UTC)