User talk:Editor Lara

Welcome!

Hello, Editor Lara, 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! Rich Farmbrough, 02:42, 11 October 2009 (UTC).[reply]

Defaultsort[edit]

When an article is in a category it is sorted by the article name. Thus Cat comes before Dog - moreover the category has sections for different starting letters so Cat will be under "C". Sometimes this isn't what we want for example "John Smith" is usually wanted to fall under the "S" section. The mechanism for this is called a sort key: For example we write [[Category:Living people|Smith, John]] - the comma is what we would have used in the days of paper - to indicate that the name was reversed, in fact since the article John Smith still shows up as "John Smith" albeit under the S section the comma is a little ill advised, but we have it on many thousands of articles.

Now this is all well and good but often we have eight or ten categories, if they are all keyed on "Smith, John" it is crazy to type that, or cut and paste it every time, so "DEFAULTSORT" was invented. Any category that isn't given a sort key will use the DEFAULTSORT or failing that the pagename.

Rich Farmbrough, 02:42, 11 October 2009 (UTC).[reply]

The short answer is yes. Rich Farmbrough, 19:15, 12 October 2009 (UTC).[reply]

Diffs[edit]

Sometimes it helps to look at an editor's session as a single diff rather than successive ones.
Look out for very thin blank lines on either side of the diff.
Sometimes removal of spaces doesn't seem to show up.
Edit summaries are helpful, "minor" (m) edits usually are, and bot edits are marked with a b.

Rich Farmbrough, 02:42, 11 October 2009 (UTC).[reply]

Neither, it means that I was wrong. Bot edits are marked in recent changes [1],adn on your watchlist [2]. but not in page history. Rich Farmbrough, 19:40, 12 October 2009 (UTC).[reply]

Time zones[edit]

{{help me}} Is there a way to tell which time zone Wikipedia is using? I notice when I don't log in, it shows a completely different time than when I do. When I log in, does it automatically use my time zone? Or is it Greenwich standard time? Is there a way to choose which time zone I want? Editor Lara (talk) 01:06, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It uses UTC, I believe. You can, in your user preferences found Here.-- fetchcomms☛ 01:13, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)Wikipedia uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is pretty much the same as Greenwich standard (GMT). You can change the time zone your account uses in your preferences. Intelligentsium 01:14, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Murder of Annie Le[edit]

Hi, the edit by 64.252.72.160 simply changed the text written in the lead paragraph. That did not change the title of the article. I subsequently changed the title as the article was about the murder of a person, rather than a biography of that person. Regards, WWGB (talk) 23:11, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Stubs[edit]

{{help me}} What are the criteria for stubs, and what does it take for an article to stop being a stub? Some articles were never stubs, and some, i.e. 2009 Northwestern Wildcats football team are still stubs even though they have been substantially filled in.

Wikipedia:Stub explains this in great detail. In a nutshell, "stub" is an assessment by any editor for an article that lacks anything but the most rudimentary information about a subject. Articles that are created with more information are never classified as stubs for the same reason. On the other hand, articles with much content (like the team article you mention) can still be stubs if they only consist of bare facts and tables and lack sufficient prose text to describe the subject - for example, the article [[2009 Northwestern Wildcats football team] might look large but it only has 4 sentences of prose at the beginning and the rest is game statistics. Regards So Why 21:41, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Hi! Well Wikipedia:Stub defines a stub as A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information, and it should be capable of expansion. There is no fixed size, just "a few sentences".

To stop being a stub, an article just needs to have been expanded. If an expanded article is still showing as a stub, this just means that the stub notice hasn't been removed (see Wikipedia:Stub#Removing_stub_status) - if you come across an article like this, just remove the stub tag (which should be near the bottom of the article when you click on edit this page, and will look like {{xxxx-stub}} (e.g. {{18thC-novel-stub}}). Just delete the stub tag, and then save the page! Be bold! -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 21:45, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]