User talk:Devindad

November 2010

Thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and it has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you may want to do. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia.   Will Beback  talk  23:19, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Great work on Santee, California!

Hi Devindad,

You've really made a lot of improvements on the Santee article and I want to congratulate you. There's just a couple thinks I've noticed that you may not be familiar with as a relatively new Wikipedia editor. I hope you'll take this in the helpful spirit it's intended; I really don't mean to criticize, and you've been a really positive influence on this article.

One thing is website addresses. When you're putting a url in as a reference, it's better not to just put the bare address. The generally preferred way to format it is to put single brackets around it and then, still inside the brackets but after a space, put the title of the website. As such: [http://knittingknightscomic.wordpress.com Knitting Knights], which produces this link: Knitting Knights. For more informations, the applicable part of the Manual of Style is here: MOS:LINK. If you haven't checked out the Manual of Style, I promise it's not as threatening as it may sound, and it has lots of good information.

Another thing is edit summaries. Since multiple editors keep an eye on what's being done to a page, it's nice for us to be able to know what kind of edit was made. For instance, if I see a change that's only a couple bytes that says "fixed typos", I know I probably don't need to double-check, but if it's a large change that says "added new section", I might want to go in there and help copyedit it. Also, having edit summaries can help you if you're trying to look back through your edits and remember which one was the one where you added a certain sentence or something. It really doesn't take too long, and I think you'll find that using edit summaries is a good thing. For more information, there's an article here: Help:Edit summary.

One last thing—the minor checkbox. Maybe you've figured this out by now, as you don't seem to do it as much recently, but the minor-edit checkbox should only be used if you aren't changing the meaning of text in the article at all, no matter if it's really small. About the only thing you'd want to mark as minor is a tiny formatting change or a spelling fix. You can find more information here: Help:Minor edit. The problem with marking edits as minor when they aren't is it makes it harder for other editors to take you seriously. (Speaking generally, not specifically.) If someone sees a "minor" edit on their watchlist that involved a 100-byte change and had no edit summary, they're going to be really suspicious when they go look at it, even if it was actually a well-researched well-intentioned edit.

I hope this was at least a little bit helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions. You can contact me either here or on your talk page. Also, I wouldn't mind helping out on the Santee article, so if there's ever any copyediting or anything else that you'd like a second pair of eyes on, feel free to call on me. Princess Lirin (talk) 01:56, 2 February 2011 (UTC)