User talk:Ian mckenzie

Caving International

Ian, where did you find this publication called "Caving International?" Do you have access to these issues? Leitmotiv (talk) 05:45, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

• CI was an excellent magazine that ran from 1978 to 1982; it is long out of print. You can try to find old issues at some of the used caving bookstores online in the US, or maybe post a request on the NSS Forum. I have a full set myself. There was also a similar publication out of the UK called International Caving, but I believe they are defunct as well. Ian mckenzie (talk) 22:50, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Canadian Caver

Have just started the page Gargantua Cave went through 2 weeks ago. Will add some picture soon. Do you know how to get online access to previous issues of The Canadian Caver. I subscribed but unable to get access to previous issues. Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:56, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Note that the cave's name is Gargantua, not Gargantua Cave. You should start a new page, Gargantua, and paste your existing text into it, then alter the Gargantua Cave page into a Redirect. You can also link Gargantua on the List of caves under the Canada section. There are no digital versions of The Canadian Caver, but you can purchase hard copies of a limited number of recent back issues - contact them through http://www.cancaver.ca/pubs2/cc/index.htm . Check their online Index for the cave references you are interested in. Ian mckenzie (talk) 18:22, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks --Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:06, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Question about cave lenght

Is this the total lenght of all passages or just the maximum lenght of the longest passage? Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:21, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Cave length typically is the surveyed length of all traversable passages that one would take to see all parts of the cave. This would even include vertical drops or ascents. Leitmotiv (talk) 21:23, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Castleguard

Am wondering if you are needing help with the Castleguard diving trip this spring? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:57, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Actun Tunkul

I saw your changes to Actun Tunichil Muknal and was going to create at least a stub for Actun Tunkul (about which I know nothing) but darned if I can find anything online about it as a reference. You seem knolwedgeable in this area - any suggestions? - DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:21, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

• OK. See Chiquibul Cave System and various redirects thereto. Needs alot of work though.

Some tips for you!

Hi Ian mckenzie, 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, starting with the Wikipedia manual of style, which will give you a lot of information about how Wikipedia prefers its articles to be written. 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:Ian mckenzie/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 our best teachers (Chzz).

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 inline 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. Pesky (talk …stalk!) 10:30, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

How references work

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:Ian mckenzie/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.

Something to make your life easier!

Hi there Ian mckenzie! I've just come across one of your articles, and noticed that you had to create titles for your url links manually, or were using bare urls as references.

You might want to consider using this tool - it makes your life a whole heap easier, by filling in complete citation templates for your links. All you do is install the script on Special:MyPage/common.js, or or Special:MyPage/vector.js, then paste the bare url (without [...] brackets) between your <ref></ref> tabs, and you'll find a clickable link called Reflinks in your toolbox section of the page (probably in the left hand column). Then click that tool. It does all the rest of the work (provided that you remember to save the page! It doesn't work for everything (particularly often not for pdf documents), but for pretty much anything ending in "htm" or "html" (and with a title) it will do really, really well. Happy editing! Pesky (talk …stalk!) 10:30, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Re: Frank Slide

I actually cited the 1,000 figure to a recent Epoch Times story. IIRC, Kerr's book also listed the 1,000 figure. But I am curious about your research. While you can't use your own paper as a source, I wonder where you found the population figure of 1,500 from? Becuase that may be a valid source. And since I am curious, according to your research, what year did Frank reach 1,500 people? As far as sourcing goes, I'd like to try and bring this to featured status, so the general rule is "cite everything". So please feel free to note or add anything important to the article. It seems you would be in a position to know things that I and the books I had may have overlooked. In a lot of cases, we should be able to cite additions to newspaper accounts of the time, so long as we have reasonable date ranges to search through. Cheers! Resolute 14:45, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

I appreciate the offer. I'll definitely look over your research. Being unpublished, I could not use it as a source here, but it might give me a lead on where to search in published sources. Thanks! Resolute 20:44, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

You certainly can help! From an image perspective, I was hoping to get a shot of the Interpretive Centre for the legacy section, and a better panaorama. The current one is poorly stitched together and has that ugly whitespace. Cheers! Resolute 00:05, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

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