User talk:Wayzgoose

Welcome to Wikipedia!

Welcome to Wikipedia, Wayzgoose! That's a very impressive name! It makes me tremble! ;) I'm supposed to say something meaningful here to a new editor, so please read the very brief Wikipedia Golden Rule, and have fun! P.S. Notice that I used a pipe | to create that link, because that makes me feel important! :) Dontreader (talk) 03:05, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

No need to tremble Dontreader if you look up the meaning of Wayzgoose you will see it is quite benign but relevant. I have much reading and study to do in order to be close to the wiki ninja that you are :) Wayzgoose (talk) 03:11, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Ah, your name is indeed very interesting and pertinent! Anyway, your last sentence is nonsense! I have fewer than 2,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, so the guys with 50,000 edits (or more) never take me seriously in talk page discussions! Dontreader (talk) 03:28, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

This article is fun to read. Notice that on my own tacky user page I show my progress on Wikipedia. Currently I'm a Novato, which means rookie! It's an informal system just for fun. You qualify already for "Signator" (well, in a few hours, technically, but no one cares). At this point your user page shows up in red letters. That's not a crime, but it's better to write something there, just to give the impression that "you've been around". Please go to your user page and - for example - just add {{Signator}} You can add/change it later. Please use the Show preview option before saving since it's not something I do often, but it should create a cool drawing. Dontreader (talk) 03:46, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

That's pretty cool, I will visit your user page later, as I have much work to toil over here :) Wayzgoose (talk) 04:02, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

That's absolutely amazing! You can delete the part that says "Creating User page" if you wish to, or just leave it, of course. I'll let you work without distractions. I have plenty of work to do myself, such as making progress on Candy Crush Saga! Dontreader (talk) 04:13, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

A pie for you!

For joining the Wikipedia community in such excellent fashion! :) Dontreader (talk) 04:18, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Some more advice

Hello Wayzgoose,

It's good to have some pages that you are working on added to your watchlist, such as the Harp Twins page. I don't know if that's the case already. There's a star next to "View history", which when clicked on, is one way to "watch" (or to stop watching) an article. That way you can catch vandalism or any other changes. At the top of any page, next to your user name, Talk, and Sandbox, you will find Preferences. At the end of the Preferences page you can choose to be emailed when a page is changed. However, if an edit is marked as "minor", you won't be notified. Edits should only be marked as minor if the change cannot possibly be disputed, such as when you added a comma to a date, but not all Wikipedians obey this rule. Unregistered users (as you were initially) cannot mark edits as minor, so that's a relief. I hope this helps! Dontreader (talk) 05:14, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

P.S. Your own talk page is on your watchlist by default, so that's why you always see my messages. Dontreader (talk) 05:19, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice Dontreader. Yes I found the watchlist and added the Harp Twins page to it. I will also try editing some other pages if I see something that needs attention, just to get some experience.

I see that you are having problems with pages you created being flagged for destruction again :(

I will probably take small steps for now, just wanted to get the Harp Twins page up to date so kind of dived in the deep end with very little preparation, now that's done I will take time to learn the correct protocols :) Wayzgoose (talk) 06:20, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, great! It's definitely very important for you to have the Harp Twins page on your watchlist; I have kept it on my own watchlist just in case of vandalism, but you are awake when I am not.

It will definitely be excellent experience for you to edit other pages occasionally. Many people come here to create a Wikipedia article without any prior experience, and the results are typically disastrous. At least the Harp Twins article has already been created, but it's very important to learn Wikipedia style, code and rules. I happen to have a list of some useful pages on my user page, which is always growing. Also, now that you have a registered account, you can practice edits in your own sandbox; I have used mine many times, for different purposes, including for making sure that what I want to add to an article will look fine if there's special code involved. I also spot cool tricks on talk pages of articles, and on personal talk pages, so I experiment with them in my sandbox. For example, that's how I learned to write in other colors.

The speedy deletion notice was a joke! At first it scared the heck out of me when I saw that message on my talk page, but when I went to the actual Redhead Express article to add a tag, the speedy deletion notice was not there! Nothing in the recent edit history either. You can see what prompted Bgwhite to have some fun at my expense right here. One day I'll get some revenge, hopefully! Dontreader (talk) 18:02, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

It's good to know what constitutes Wikihumor lol. I guess it's like emergency rescue humor, when you tell a patient in a stretcher half way down a cliff that you just ran out of rope ;) Anyhow, once I get used to the formatting syntax it shouldn't be too difficult, it's quite similar to html which I dabbled in many years ago but have become a little rusty and I still have a full set of coloured pencils for writing in other colours. Good luck with the Redhead Express article, although I think they really should be paying you a minimum of 100k ;) Wayzgoose (talk) 01:02, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Bgwhite is a great administrator because he's genuinely humble, unlike many seasoned Wikipedians who are unwilling to admit mistakes if a rookie points them out to them, plus he has the ability to solve disputes and calm people down using an excellent sense of humor, but this time he made me a nervous wreck! Anyway, I see that you are making progress at the speed of light! Regarding colors, you will encounter editors with complex colors, graphics and other tricks created for their user names, just for fun. I haven't really analyzed how they do it, but clearly you can write in tons of colors by selecting numbers assigned to colors (that might be the case with HTML). Let me try, although this is probably not too useful... no, it's not working for me with numbers, but I have no experience. Nevertheless, this page does give you many more options using the same format. I must confess I'm quite pleased after all, and perhaps you'll figure out how to use numbers for even more options on this other page at some point.

For the Redhead Express article, I used a really neat system for the references. You will see that the references are really in the references section, instead of where the numbers are (where you would expect to find the references). This way when you read the article in edit mode there are no bothersome strings of code that making editing more difficult. Rather, there are just ref names in the body of the article that correspond with the ref names provided in the references section. I do use the user-friendly Templates option in edit mode to create the references, but I put them straight into the references section. I deliberately used newspapers as much as possible since those are considered very "reliable sources", and I made sure that each newspaper had its own Wikipedia article, and I linked each newspaper to its article. It just strengthens the perception of notability of the sources. For newspapers, always use the Cite news option from the Templates menu (I used to use Cite web for basically everything since the newspapers are websites, but that was wrong). However, believe it or not, if there's one thing that even the best Wikipedians disagree on occasionally, it's when to use which template, but don't worry about that. The important thing is to use the user-friendly templates and not do things manually since that often causes huge red letters to appear in the references section! Dontreader (talk) 03:34, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

I LOVE Candy Crush Saga! I shouldn't have written that! Dontreader (talk) 03:36, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips, I may only be online sporadically over the next few days, as my SES unit have made me duty officer for this month and we've had 3 land searches already this week, unfortunately that means I have no time to think of witty responses. I'll come back and look at the links you so kindly sent me sometime in the next few days. Wayzgoose (talk) 04:19, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

I just wanted to add that if you want to share a link that is not a Wikipedia page (this happens often on talk pages), you use a pair of brackets instead of double brackets. For example, here's your all-time favorite video. ;) Good luck with your searches. Dontreader (talk) 06:21, 12 March 2015 (UTC)