User talk:Borderglider

The call of the wild (poem)

This is an automated message from CorenSearchBot. I have performed a web search with the contents of The call of the wild (poem), and it appears to include a substantial copy of http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/service_r_w/call_wild.html. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; such additions will be deleted. You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. See our copyright policy for further details.

This message was placed automatically, and it is possible that the bot is confused and found similarity where none actually exists. If that is the case, you can remove the tag from the article and it would be appreciated if you could drop a note on the maintainer's talk page. CorenSearchBot (talk) 20:48, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Gliders

Thank for the fine set of glider images of the Slingsby Eagle, Swallow and Skylark 4. Images without copyright restrictions are surprising hard to find, and they really enhance articles. I've moved one image in each case to the infobox, with its caption, as this is standard practice in the aviation project.

I noticed that you altered one spec and added another for the Skylark 4. No problem, but could you add a reference, as otherwise all numbers in the specs section appear to come from the ref at at the top (Ellison is this case) and the the two new ones do not. If you do that, feel free to remove the citation needed tag. Cheers, and happy snapping - any chance of gliders in flight ;)?TSRL (talk) 17:12, 15 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Borderglider, and thanks for your contribution on the Scheibe SF 27. Unfortunately, it seems like you cut-and-pasted text directly from the Scheibe entry on sailplanedirectory.com. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously, so we can't use that material. However, please don't be discouraged! We still need this glider to be covered, so please feel free to re-create the article in your own words. If I can help at all, please leave me a note on my talk page. Cheers --Rlandmann (talk) 09:21, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Image help

Hi again! :) -- actually, if you look above, you'll see that it's User:TSRL who asked for a citation, not me, but I'll leave a note for him to tell him to look at the note on my talk page.

As far as image help goes, the tutorial is here -- Wikipedia:Picture_tutorial

However, the simplest and easiest way to learn is to copy the format from another article for whatever it is you're trying to do. Also, if another editor has cleaned up an image you've placed somewhere, then you can review that editor's changes to see what they had to do. Did you notice that every page has a "history" link at the top? By looking at the page history, you can click the "buttons" to the left of specific revisions to compare them. For example, this is what I did when I moved the image in the Scheibe SF 34 article: [1]

If I had to sum up image placement in a nutshell, it would be:

Never do this: [[image:picture_of_a_kitten.jpg]] -- the result will almost always be a gigantic image that overwhelms the entire page. Instead:
99% of the time, this is what you're looking for: [[image:picture_of_a_kitten.jpg |thumb |right |What a cute kitten!!! ]]

In the second example above, the code "|thumb" tells the software to display a "thumbnail" -- a reduced-size version of the original image. Readers can click on the thumbnail to see the image full size. The code "|right" tells the software to "float" the image to the right-hand side of the page so that the text of the article can flow properly. Finally, when used in conjunction with the "|thumb" code, you can use another "|" to produce a caption for the image, in this case, "What a cute kitten!!!"

If you just rely on that second example, it will serve you well until and unless you start feeling more adventurous :)

Finally, always feel free to ask for help! There's quite an active community here, ready to rush to your assistance. The aircraft community (including gliders) congregate around WikiProject Aircraft -- just leave a note there and you're sure to get help with any aircraft-related problem. Beyond that, please feel free to drop a note on my talk page at any time. If I can't steer you right, I'll point you to someone who can! :)

Thanks for perservering with us! Cheers --Rlandmann (talk) 11:45, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(PS -- when you leave a message on a talk page, you can "sign" the message by typing '~~~~' at the end of your message. This makes it easy for other people to see who left the message and when)

Inserting a citation

One of the problems is that at present, there is little agreement throughout Wikipedia as to what constitutes "best practice" when inserting a citation. As a result, there's a mass of confusion and (as you will quickly notice) you can look at 10 different pages and find 15 different ways of citing a source :) What follows is the basics of how I do it.

1. In the body of the article, at the point where you want the citation to appear, insert the "short form" citation that you would normally include in a Harvard-style footnote or in parentheses in MLA or similar styles. Enclose this citation in pair of "tags" as follows:

<ref>Smith 2007, p.346</ref>

2. Hopefully, the article will already have a "Notes" section that contains either of the following codes:

<references/> (the old style) or
{{reflist}} (the new style)

If you can see footnotes already present in the article before you hit the "edit this page" link, you can be sure that one of these codes is already on the page. If so, great! -- you don't need to do anything in this step. On the other hand, if this code is not already on the page and you go ahead and save the page, you'll see a big, red error message telling you that you've forgotten something! :)

If for whatever reason, the page does not contain either of the codes above, insert these two lines of code near the end of the article:

==Notes==
{{reflist}}

3. Hopefully, the article will already have a "References" section at the end. This is sometimes combined with the "Notes" section; see comments above about 15 different ways of doing things. In any case, this is the section where you record the full bibliographic details of the source. You can either type these "freehand" like this:

* Smith, Fred. ''Interesting Kinds of Bricks''. London: Big Publishing House, 1989.

...which will look ("render") like this:

Smith, Fred. Interesting Kinds of Bricks. London: Big Publishing House, 1989.

(If doing this freehand, just choose whichever bibliographic style you know or like best. Everybody else seems to :)

Or type it in computer code and let the machine format the references for you:

* {{cite book |last=Smith |first=Fred |title=Interesting Kinds of Bricks |year=1989 |location=London |publisher=Big Publishing House }}

...which renders like this:

Smith, Fred (1989). Interesting Kinds of Bricks. London: Big Publishing House.

I know that there's a steeper "learning curve" in using these "citation templates", but I strongly recommend them over the freehand approach. Since the software itself handles how the references appear, I think this is our single greatest hope of one day achieving something like a unified citation style throughout the encyclopedia...

The most commonly used templates are (slightly simplifed):

* {{cite book |last= |first= |title= |year= |location= |publisher= }}
* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |date= |journal= |volume= |issue= |pages= |location= |publisher= }} (use this one for newspapers and magazines too, not just academic journals)
* {{cite web |last= |first= |title= |date= |work= |url= |accessdate= }}

Most of those fields should be self-explanatory; probably the only non-intuitive one is "work" in the "cite web" template -- this means the title of the website as a whole (or at least, a major subsection), where "title" refers to the particular page within the site.

In all cases, simply leave any fields blank if you don't have the information or it doesn't apply. In the case of the Slingsby site you mentioned, the template might look like:

* {{cite web |last=Cawsey |first=Richard |title=Slingsby Type 50, Skylark 4 production list |date=14 October 2009 |work=Slingsby page |url=http://rcawsey.co.uk/skylark4.htm |accessdate=2010-02-27 }}

...and would render like this:

Cawsey, Richard (14 October 2009). "Slingsby Type 50, Skylark 4 production list". Slingsby page. Retrieved 2010-02-27.

If for whatever reason, the page doesn't contain a references section of any kind, introduce the bibliographic entries with the following code on a separate line:

==References==

4. Don't be afraid of making a mistake or asking for help :)

That's a heck of a lot of theory there -- to see what it looks like in practice, I've put together a very short demo for you here. Click the "edit this page" tab to get the "behind the scenes view"; also, feel free to experiment on that page. Cheers --Rlandmann (talk) 12:39, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

By way of illustration I've gone back to your refs in the two Skylark articles. Thanks for digging these out; formatting is less important than citation. In Skylark 4 I've put your [url] ref into the slightly lazy form I mostly use at the moment, that is <ref>[url name]</ref>. The stuff in <> is available from an editor button if you wish. This puts a name link into notes and adds a numbered inline ref. In Skylark 4 I've used the form <ref>name</ref> in the text, again giving a inline ref number, but put a cite web template (stuff in {{}}) in the bibliography. This makes the text easier to read in the editor, but one has to follow the notes entry by eye (as far as I know; my Greek is far from complete) to the live link in bibliography. By the way, when you want to refer to a Wikipedia article, just put the name in double square brackets, e.g [[Stravinsky]]. In your case, as the article is called Nicholas Goodhart but you wanted the form everyone uses so we write [[article name|text name]], hence [[Nicholas Goodhart|Nick Goodhart]].

What Greek I know I mostly picked up from other people's articles. How did they do that? Look at the text in edit mode. It wasn't (and isn't) a very structured learning process, but you soon find you can do useful things. I played about improving existing articles for several months before starting any new ones. Even then, at first there were several features of templates and categories that were a mystery for a while; but they worked. After a while I went back over the first several articles I had kicked off and reworked the refs, using what I had learned meanwhile.

Wiki referencing is very different from referencing in other fields. I think the key reason is that in the Wiki one is trying to ensure that any facts etc are right in the sense of having been approved by some reliable, secondary source, not original research. So much elsewhere on the web is repeated, unsourced hearsay at best and often wrong, so if we say the Mk 29's span was 0.25 m greater than that of the Mk 25, we have an inline ref to show where we got this from, which our doubting reader can either look at and say that's a convincing source, or dig it out and make sure we've understood exactly what our source said. I've published a lot in physics, original research and the role of refs is really different: why do I care about this issue, what's been done, how do my results compare and contrast with others. etc. Different purpose, not encyclopaedic.

I hope you stay with it and persist with the Greek, for many of us find it fun and surprising rewarding. I've learned a lot about aircraft, even though I thought I was quite well informed when I started. When baffled, there are as User:Rlandmann says plenty of folk willing to share knowledge. We remember our own struggles!TSRL (talk) 21:09, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]