User talk:IR393DEME

This is my talk page. Pls contact me here.

Hello IR393DEME and welcome to Wikipedia! It appears you are participating in a class project. We encourage you to read our instructions for students. Your instructor may wish to add your class to our list of school and university projects and s/he may want to read these instructions for teachers. For more help about educational projects using Wikipedia, see our classroom coordination project.

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We hope you like it here and encourage you to stay even after your assignment is finished! --Geniac (talk) 23:44, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi IR393DEME,

Thanks for being part of the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative! I'm LiAnna Davis, the communications associate for the Initiative, and I wanted to let you know that we have a Facebook page, facebook.com/WikipediaOnCampus designed to keep students like you up to date on the latest news, events, photos, videos, and hints to help you edit. If you're on Facebook, please check it out!

Happy editing! Ldavis (Public Policy) (talk) 21:25, 23 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! Thanks for the message. I would be happy to be your mentor. Feel free to send me any and all questions. I will be away from the computer much of Sunday afternoon and evening, but during the week, I am generally at my computer during the business day and able to answer questions promptly. Looking forward to working with you. By the way, someone has left you some excellent links for newcomers above, and I encourage you to scan through them. Best regards! -- Ssilvers (talk) 05:57, 26 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I suggested, on the course page, that you all make a few little edits to Wikipedia each day to gain fluency with the software. Once you get used to it, it will become much easier! A good way to start is by copyediting existing articles. The articles listed here have all requested copyediting/proofreading assistance: Category:All articles needing copy edit. Note that Wikipedia's style guide is here: WP:MOS. Happy editing! -- Ssilvers (talk) 00:53, 27 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. Good work. I looked over your changes so far on the Indonesia article. I left you some comments on your course page. In addition to those comments, I would say that you need a few more references, as I marked in the article. Also, our readers are a general readership - that is, they have come to Wikipedia often seeking the most basic information and know absolutely nothing about the subject. I found many of your statements cryptic or difficult to parse. I suggest that you try to simplify your explanations, and perhaps give a little more context. Pretend that you are explaining it to an older relative and a teenager, together, and explain it so that they both could follow exactly what you are talking about. This may require some expansion. Best regards, -- Ssilvers (talk) 03:37, 23 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The article is looking very good now, but it still needs seven more references. The assessment has been increased to B-class. Great work! -- Ssilvers (talk) 17:43, 26 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Write some more! I came across this while on New Page patrol, and wanted to read more about them :D Pesky (talk …stalk!) 07:30, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi IR393DEME, I thought I'd drop a few notes on your talk page with some help on writing articles :o)

First of all, it may be best for you to do a bit of reading, staring with the Wikipedia manual of style, which will give you a lot of information about how Wikipedia prefers its articles to follow. It's not as hard to follow as it might look; quite a bit of the information there probably won't be vital for you at first.

Second, I recommend you make a user sandbox - which is just an area you can use to practise in, and to make notes in, and to get things ready in. If you click this red link: user:IR393DEME/Sandbox, that will let you create that page (it gives you an edit window to start work in). Anything, anywhere, on the help and information pages which gives you an example, try it out in your sandbox until you're familiar with it.

For your article, the next thing you want to do is start collecting as much information as you can about it. Google searches (particularly in Books and Scholar) will be your best friend for this! Once you've found the information, the next most important thing is to start writing up each fact in your own words (very important, this), and make a note at the same time of exactly where that information came from. Build in the references as you go along (I'm going to copy in, down below this, a whole heap of help on doing references, which was produced by one of my own hand-picked mentors (Chzz) when I came back to Wikipedia after a long break.)

Here's another place that you'll find incredibly useful - citation templates which you can copy and paste into your sandbox, between <ref></ref> tags; you just fill in the blanks from your sources into the template, and you'll end up with nicely formatted citations :o) It all helps. Remember to add a references section to your sandbox (make a new line, and put ==References== on it, and type {{reflist}} on the next line, so that you can see how your citations look as you do them. Remember to save your page often! You don't want to lose your work.

Hopefully this will give you a good start and make life easier for you.

Simple references

These require two parts;

a)

Chzz is 98 years old.<ref> "The book of Chzz", Aardvark Books, 2009. </ref>

He likes tea. <ref> [http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com Tea website] </ref>

b) A section called "References" with the special code "{{reflist}}";

== References ==
{{reflist}}

(an existing article is likely to already have one of these sections)

To see the result of that, please look at user:chzz/demo/simpleref. Edit it, and check the code; perhaps make a test page of your own, such as user:IR393DEME/reftest and try it out.

Named references

Chzz was born in 1837. <ref name=MyBook>
"The book of Chzz", Aardvark Books, 2009. 
</ref> 

Chzz lives in Footown.<ref name=MyBook/>

Note that the second usage has a / (and no closing ref tag). This needs a reference section as above; please see user:chzz/demo/namedref to see the result.

Citation templates

You can put anything you like between <ref> and </ref>, but using citation templates makes for a neat, consistent look;

Chzz has 37 Olympic medals. <ref> {{Citation
 | last = Smith
 | first = John
 | title = Olympic medal winners of the 20th century
 | publication-date = 2001
 | publisher = [[Cambridge University Press]]
 | page = 125
 | isbn = 0-521-37169-4
}}
</ref>

Please see user:chzz/demo/citeref to see the result.

For more help and tips on that subject, see user:chzz/help/refs.