User talk:Keithck

Welcome to Wikipedia!

Welcome! My name is Sadads, and I'm one of the Online Ambassadors assisting students who are contributing to WikiProject United States Public Policy. We're excited to work with you, and we hope you'll stick around. If you haven't already, take a few minutes and check out the handy links below to start sharing your knowledge with the world.

Your class is part of a pilot project for bridging the gap between Wikipedia and the academic world; as you learn how to edit Wikipedia, we'll be learning how to better help newcomers. So it will be a fun learning experience all around! You'll find links below for leaving feedback or getting help. If you need anything further, feel free to contact me at my user talk page. And don't forget: have fun! Sadads (talk) 19:34, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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Welcome!

Hi Keithck! Welcome to Wikipedia! I'm happy to have you as a mentee! I thought I'd welcome you on your user talk page as well. Chances are, this is where we'll be doing a lot of our communication. However, I'm also easily reached via email and on IRC chat at #wikipedia-en-classroom. If we ever need to chat quickly back and forth, IRC is quite useful. – GorillaWarfare ^{talk • contribs} 20:29, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Also, I noticed you added {{User:keithck/sandbox}} to your userpage to link to your sandbox. You may notice I've changed the syntax from curly brackets to square brackets. Two square brackets are used to link to another page on Wikipedia, whereas two curly brackets are used to insert a template. You may not need templates for a little while in your editing so I won't go into detail on them, but you should note the difference in markup. Cheers! – GorillaWarfare ^{talk • contribs} 21:05, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Your edits to Fiscal policy of the United States

Hi again, Keithck! I was just reviewing your edits to Fiscal policy of the United States and I thought I'd drop in to see how things are going. Your edits look great so far! Just two things I'll point out: you might consider marking edits like those minor edits. It displays a bolded letter m next to the edit to designate that. A minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. For example, your minor wording changes in that article are not something most people would argue. It makes it easier for some editors that are watching the page. Secondly, I'd like to remind you to use edit summaries to describe the edit you've made (i.e. "minor reword", "add section heading", etc.) Again, this helps other editors. It's good to provide an edit summary for every edit you make.

I hope everything is going well! Is there anything that I can help you with at this point? – GorillaWarfare ^{talk • contribs} 21:02, 21 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much!

Thanks so much for all of the help thus far. This topic is vast, so I am currently doing research to put something better together. Please bare with me but know that I truly appreciate all of the help so far!

Here you go, Chris. This is a link from WP's Manual of Style

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Quotations

I hope this help! Cindy Allen (talk) 20:09, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fiscal policy

Just looked at your edits to the article -- that's looking much improved! I'll try to take some time to go through the article and leave some thorough feedback tomorrow. – GorillaWarfare ^{talk • contribs} 06:40, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've left feedback at Talk:Fiscal policy of the United States. – GorillaWarfare ^{talk • contribs} 05:25, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Just checking in

Hello! I'm just checking in to see how things are going. Is there anything I can help you with? I'm not sure what week your class is in, assignment-wise, so I'm not really sure what you have on your plate at the moment. Hope things are well! – GorillaWarfare(Public) ^{main account • talk} 14:49, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hello!

Good to see that you're back to working on the fiscal policy article. It's definitely looking better; your edits have really started to clean up that poorly written section at the end. Just wanted to mention a few things. First of all, make sure that you're very careful about citations. Because somebody wrote that section before you, it's tempting to assume that they were very diligent about only using facts that were backed up by the sources mentioned. However, this is often not the case. Those four external links are probably supposed to support the facts, but there's no guarantee that everything in that section is mentioned. For example, the sentence "The budget went from a $236 billion surplus in fiscal year 2000 to a $413 billion deficit in fiscal year 2004." is not supported at all by anything in the second link. Furthermore, the first link has 404ed and needs to be replaced. This means that all of the information that may have originally been supported by that reference needs to be re-verified and cited. I should also mention that at some point, those sources should be changed from external links into reference format. You're already familiar with using the citation templates through RefTools, so it should only take a few minutes to change that.

I also see that in a few places, such as this edit, you've changed some of the information without citing a new source. In that edit, you changed "These numbers were up significantly from ten years ago when federal receipts averaged 3.80 percent of GNP while expenditures averaged 3.04 percent of GNP." to "These numbers were up significantly from 1930..." Please cite new sources for changes such as these.

Please also try to use edit summaries a little more effectively. They make it more clear what edits you've made, which helps others. If you look at the edit by Mwbjmu620, xe used a pretty good edit summary: "first and last paragaph grammer and edit". This at least gives others a vague idea of what edits xe made. You've used some good ones in the past, but an edit summary like "editing" is not only rather obvious, but not particularly helpful to others.

Also, the Wikipedia Manual of Style says: "Decades contain no apostrophe (the 1980s, not the 1980's); the two-digit form is used only where the century is clear (the '80s or the 80s)." I see you've been changing the dates to include apostrophes, and this should be changed back.

Anyway, best of luck with the rest of your editing! – GorillaWarfare ^{talk • contribs} 14:00, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]