User talk:Otter2000

Welcome!

Hello, Otter2000, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

Handouts
Editing Wikipedia, a guide for student editors Choosing an article to edit Add images to articles Citing sources on Wikipedia
Additional Resources
You can find answers to many student questions in our FAQ.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:33, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Errors

Hi, in this edit Special:Diff/1182659146/1183215690 you added content to the section "White Rhinoceros" that contains many errors in the citation formatting. This is not your fault, it is a bug in Visual Editor caused when copy-pasting content from somewhere else. You can see all the "nowiki" statements etc.. this is very difficult to repair because it's unclear what content you were actually trying to add, the nature of the bug is to send the text through a blender. Can you please take a look at this edit and maybe try again and start over? Otherwise the entire section may need to be deleted. Update: also see a problem at the end of the section "Pyrenean ibex". -- GreenC 02:09, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

I restored the article to the last known good version, October 30. There are too many errors in the article. You really need to start over from scratch. It was not your fault this bug happened, now your trying to fix the bug, and actually making it worse because you don't understand what the correct method is. -- GreenC 04:38, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ian (Wiki Ed):, this editor needs help. Note the many syntax errors in the above diff related to "nowiki". This is caused by a bug in VisualEditor when copy-pasting wikitext within VE. Otter2000 tried to fix it, in this edit Special:Diff/1183216956/1183244556, but as you can see it made things worse. So I completed reverted them. Can you help Otter2000? Recommend *never* use VisualEditor as a start. -- GreenC 04:52, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

@GreenC: These aren't Visual Editor errors, these are cut-and-paste errors. And I strongly disagree with your advice never to use VE. I've been using it more than the source editor for my volunteer editing for years. The problem here is that they drafted their work off-wiki. Any cut and paste from a WYSIWYG editor into Wikipedia is going to be a total mess.

In my experience, new editors produce a lot fewer errors using VE.

Otter2000 - you can't draft your work on an external editor like Google Docs and copy it into Wikipedia. The formatting is messed up. Please use the cite tool (as explained in this training slide) to add inline citations to your work. Otherwise you will just get these errors and make a mess of the article you're trying to edit. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:33, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

They are cut and paste yes, but the underlying error is caused by VE. Are you saying pasting from Google Doc into the source editor produces the same result? I've never seen that, only when VE is involved. You can ignore my advice not to use VE, I understand my advice on that topic is not for everyone :) -- GreenC 16:32, 3 November 2023 (UTC)