User talk:Mikeblas/Archives/2019/July

Central Park jogger case

Thanks for catching that error on my cite; I lost track of using the short form for the same source.Parkwells (talk) 18:48, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

No problem! Happy to help. -- Mikeblas (talk) 21:16, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Woohoo

Hey, Mikeblas. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Mjs1991 (talk) 00:10, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for Catching the Duplicate Refdef Problem with the Census Updates

I'm going to work on fixing it now (so I can continue to keep the population/geography stuff up to date). DemocraticLuntz (talk) 18:37, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Happy to help! Let me know if you get stuck--referencing can get tricky. -- Mikeblas (talk) 21:50, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

A Barnstar For You

		The Admin's Barnstar
		You are a kind and brilliant Wikipedia administrator. Thank you for your vision. I agree that Wikipedia has to be verifiable with an emphasis on quality, sources, and academic merit. Thank you for all your hard work and kindness. LearnMore (talk) 18:11, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you! :) -- Mikeblas (talk) 19:12, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Jccosta2020

Hi there! Wondering if you could explain what a refdef is. I'm new to all this and trying to learn all that I can. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jccosta2020 (talk • contribs) 05:53, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Jccosta!

A refdef is short for "reference definition", which you can read about at WP:REFNAME. The idea is that a reference might be used more than once at various points in an article, so we can name the reference the first time and then use it again just by invoking the reference name.

Maybe we write this: <ref name="someName">content</ref>, where of course, content is the actual reference. Later, if we wanted to use that same reference, we could just code <ref name="someName" /> and it would reuse the content without having to re-code that in the article.

Sometimes, articles will end up having multiple definitions for the same reference name, and that doesn't make sense. What if one article had <ref name="someName">content</ref>, then later had <ref name="someName">SlightlyDifferentContent</ref> ? When that article is displayed, a big red error is added to the references list at the bottom of the page, and one (or more) of the references are obscured and no longer visible in the article. That makes sense, because Wikipedia doesn't know if it should display content or SlightlyDifferentContent whenever the someName reference is invoked.

A special category named Category:Pages with duplicate reference names lists all the pages with this kind of error. I think that referencing is important, and I know that this error means that at least one reference isn't correctly being displayed. So I try to fix them.

Referencing on Wikipedia is both terribly important and shamefully complicated. There are many subtle ways to generate this kind of error, and it can be complicated to untangle the problem. Whenever I make a fix, I try to link the author who seemed to have coded the problem in my edit comment so they can double-check that I did the right thing for the article.

I Hope that helps. Let me know if you've got more questions! :) -- Mikeblas (talk) 12:48, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Journal Citation Reports

Hi, the JCR is not a scientific journal, so it does not contain a single academic article. It's a book that appears yearly (nowadays in the form of an online database, I don't think they still have a print version) that reports citation data on academic journals. For each included journal, there's a page with loads of statistics, including the IF. The JCR is, in fact, the only authoritative source for IFs. Hope this explains. --Randykitty (talk) 17:03, 29 July 2019 (UTC)