User talk:Ancient Gardener

Welcome!

Hello, Ancient Gardener, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Everard Proudfoot (talk) 21:32, 30 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Recipes

Please don't add recipes to Wikipedia articles, especially if they come from copyrighted books. If the recipe is not copyrighted, Wikibooks would be a more useful location. Everard Proudfoot (talk) 21:32, 30 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Plant article conventions

Hi Ancient Gardener, It's nice to see some new plant articles being created, with references yet! I've formatted a few of the recent Thymus articles you've written, using some of the standard Wikipedia guidelines for references, and for putting taxoboxes in plant articles. You can see Thymus capitatus as an example, which also includes a photo in the taxobox. The taxoboxes can be burdensome to create by hand, so I usually copy and paste one from another closely related species, of course replacing the species name with the new one. The References are also a standard Wikipedia formatting, with many variations on how to write out the reference. You can see a good explanation at Wikipedia:REF#How_to_format_citations. You can also ask questions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants, where there are many veteran plant editors willing to help out. First Light (talk) 04:08, 28 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Editing Instructions

I am ashamed to admit that, despite having spent hours poring over the instructions for adding footnotes and references to a Wiki article/article edit, I still keep getting it wrong. <sob> Ancient Gardener (talk) 19:21, 13 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Adding references to an article has two main steps. The first is adding the reference after the sourced statement. It always includes the tags (without the quotes) "<ref></ref>" which enclose the reference. There are some fancy ways of doing references, but the most simple is in the format "<ref>Smith, Jane. ''Name of Book''. Cambridge University Press, 2010. p. 1.</ref>". An ISBN number is also handy, but not absolutely required.

Then, you need to add a section at the end of the article that looks like this:

==Notes==

That 'reflist' template automatically places the reference in the article under the "Notes" section, and adds a footnote number where you placed the reference in the article. You can see all of this explained simply at Wikipedia:Citations#A quick how-to.

If you want to use the same reference later in the article, then in the first instance of the reference you make the first half of the 'ref' tag read <ref name="Smith">name of book, etc.</ref>. Then later in the article you simply have to add "<ref name="Smith" />" and it will duplicate the footnote # of the first instance. Also, with references, you only need to add the reference at the end of a sentence of even the entire paragraph if it's all supported by the reference.

By the way, HTML tags can be very unhelpful, because it makes it hard to edit someone else's work. For example, typical HTML italic tags are <i></i>. They work on wikipedia, but nobody uses them. Instead they use two apostrophes before and after the word, so that ''italic'' is changed to italic by the wiki software. Three apostrophes before and after a word or phrase make it bold. Five apostrophes before and after a phrase make it bold italics.

In future, if you have a question, it's better to ask at someone else's talk page, since not many people would be watching your page. I am, because I left that previous note, and if you have more questions about this, you can also leave them here and I'll try and answer. Also, pointing out a specific problem you're having with an article might be a better way of answering a question. Those links in the Welcome message above explain a great deal, and Help:Wiki markup explains wiki markup at more length. Good luck! First Light (talk) 02:30, 14 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]