User talk:Kaibab

Welcome!

Hello Kaibab, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! BlankVerse 08:14, 30 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Old English

From Wikipedia:Babel: Are {{user ang}} templates (for Old English/Anglo-Saxon (Englisc)) what you were looking for? (note: if you tried to use the {{user ang-4}} — near native template, that one hasn't been created yet.) BlankVerse 08:22, 30 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

When they set up the Babel templates, they really should have made it five levels, with the first level being a very basic level that would cover things like your Old English knowledge, and my Spanish knowledge (very ancient high school Spanish mixed with more recent Spanglish—I understand the Spanish that I read much better than I can write it or understand the Spanish that I hear). Before I put up my "Black page" I had a parody of the Babel templates that I then copied to a subpage in case I ever decide to restore it (see User:BlankVerse/Tower of Babel).

The XX-0 templates are for anyone with basically zero knowledge of a language. I used the Ja-0 template when I created a user page on the Japanese Wikipedia. I created that page only because I had created an interlanguage link from the Japanese Wiki to the English Wiki (for the List of kigo article) because I figured that I might create a few more links and wanted there to be some way to contact me if I messed up. I can read a little transliterated Japanese, but can recognize only two kanji symbols, so the Ja-0 template accurately described my abilities.

My personal opinion is that you could go ahead and add the {{user ang-1}} template. Or you can add it using the substitute parameter ({{subst:user ang-1}}), which will copy the template to your user page, and then after you save your user page, you can then go ahead and modify the template to say that you have a very basic knowledge of Old English.

The Wikipedia IS NOT based on the idea of open discussion, but on the idea of creating the best Neutral point of view encyclopedia, while the discussions on an article's talk page are supposed to be primarily related to that goal (although you will see that in some cases, such as talk:Evolution, too much of the discussion is trying to bring people up to speed who have no clue as to what the consensus is in the modern biological sciences community). The Wikipedia could probably add separate discussion threads like you see on many news websites, but that would just burden the servers even more than they are currently.

In my opinion, Wikipedia:Civility should just be applying the Golden Rule and using common sense, although as Voltaire said, "Common sense is not so common." Case in point: the user who called another editor a "WikiNazi", and absolutely could not see that it was a very strong personal attack.

If you want to see what my "Black box" message is all about, visit the Missing Wikipedians page, and then follow through to see some of the goodbye messages that users have left. Or look at some of the dispute resolution pages, such as Requests for comments and Requests for arbitration.

Suggestions for editing: Check the talk pages before editing to see if there have been any major conflicts on the page (you'd be surprised at some of the pages where edit wars have erupted), and then start by doing small edits. You can also get plenty of practice editing Wikipedia articles by helping out with any of the Wikipedia:Cleanup processes, such as adding the Wikipedia markup codes to pages marked with the {{wikify}} template (listed at Category:Articles that need to be wikified—note that besides the wikifying of the articles, they often need to be checked to see if they are copyright violations, or recommended to Articles for deletion). (Also see: Wikipedia:Cleanup and Wikipedia:Cleanup resources.)

If you have any questions, just leave a message on my talk page. In general, new messages are started at the bottom of a page so that they are easier to be found. BlankVerse 05:59, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

note: You can also have your German user page show up as an interlanguage link by adding [[de:Benutzer:Kaibab|Kaibab]] to the bottom of your user page. For an extreme example of that, see User:Paul Klenk, where Paul added a user page to the top 15 Wikis, and got people to translate his talk page into the "native" language. BlankVerse 06:05, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What you will find on the Wikipedia is that for most articles there will be civil and rational discussions of changes in the article. On the other hand, for some controversial topics (e.g. Terri Schiavo), there will be revert wars, name calling, page protections, etc. Also, you will find that for some obscure topics you may run into one or more editors with some idiosyncratic ideas and who will be very persistent in trying to keep the article to their preferred version.

What you find when exploring the Wikipedia, especially when clicking the "random article" link, is that there is a huge range in the quality of articles, ranging from nonsense to the rare Featured article. The average for articles on the Wikipedia is, I think, in the pretty good range, but there is a huge variance in the quality.

For talk page etiquette: New topics should start at the bottom of the page with a new section (using a pair of doubled equal signs like this, ==New Section==, on a new line. If you click the plus sign (+) next to the "edit this page" tab, it will automatically start a new section, with the section title being the field above the larger edit box. You can edit just an existing section by clicking the edit link to the right of the section title. That is the quickest way to edit, and also automatically puts the section title into the edit summary. It is also the best way to avoid edit conflicts on heavily edited pages (where someone saves a new version of the page in between the time that you started you edit and when you clicked the "Save page" button).

You can cut-and-paste comments to better organize your talk page, but there are a couple of things that you should avoid. Moving other people's comments on article talk pages is usually a no-no. Removing comments from your user talk page, especially if they are comments on or criticisms of any of your edits, except when you are archiving the discussions on your talk page when it has gotten too long, is a no-no.

I don't mind answering questions, especially since I know that the documentation on some things on the Wikipedia can be hard to find, and some Wikipedia "traditions" are not documented at all (for example, I've never seen anything that says you should bottom post your messages on talk pages, but only Wikipedia newbies top post their replies). You can also post questions and comments at the Wikipedia:Help desk or Wikipedia:Village pump depending upon the nature of your question. For more specific questions, it may be best to ask your questions on an article's talk page, or the talk page for one of the Wikipedia:WikiProjects.

For editing Wikipedia articles you can start with the links in your welcome message, as well as look at the Manual of Style. The biggest gotcha for many editors in the MOS is the preference for the serial comma and the use of logical quotation marks (following H.W. Fowler rather than Strunk and White). BlankVerse 09:00, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. Maybe you can writte an article in germany wikipedia about Židikai Tadas12 17:42, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]