Hi Leah. I like your user profile. Matumeru ( talk) 01:59, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
Hello. You have
a new message at Rjanag's talk page.
Hi Lmissik, I have a couple quick questions, a comment, and also a suggestion for something you can work on.
There are some things in your course assignment ( here) that are a little confusing to me. Unless I'm misunderstanding, the assignment for February 10-4 says to edit an article directly, whereas the assignment for March 5-31 appears to say to work on that article in your sandbox and then move it to the article space when it's ready. So I'm not sure if the instructor expects you to start editing that article directly first, or to first rewrite it in your sandbox and then copy the sandbox version into the real article. (This might depend on whether you're writing a new article from scratch or editing an existing article; some people don't like to make one giant change to an existing article and therefore prefer to edit it directly in a piecemeal fashion, especially if there are other editors who want to review those edits; for a new article, on the other hand, there's nothing wrong with writing the whole thing in your sandbox and them importing it to mainspace in one big chunk.)
The reason this matters is because the time you start editing an article will make a difference if you decide to edit the article for WP:Did you know later. (Did you know, or "DYK", is a project that identifies brand-new or recently-expanded articles and features 1 fact about them on the main page for a few hours.) DYK only accepts articles that were created or expanded in the past 5 days, which means if you start editing the article on February 10-4 and keep working on it throughout March, when you nominate it for DYK someone will say "this article is not new enough" and that will be it. If your instructor expects you to get the article onto DYK as part of the assignment (or if you just want to), then it might be better to prepare your material in a sandbox first and then copy it into the real article all at once when it's ready.
Another thing about DYK: if you are working on an article that already existed (rather than writing a brand-new article), you need to expand it fivefold to be eligible for DYK; they don't care how much you improved the text that was already there, they only care about the character count. For instance,
Municipal solid waste was 3437 characters long when you started working on it (you can calculate this by going to
Special:Mypage/monobook.js and editing the page and adding {{subst:js|User:Dr_pda/prosesizebytes.js}}
; after you save your page and
bypass your cache by clicking Shift+Refresh, it will add a "Page size" button in the toolbox on the left-hand side of the page). Therefore, if you wanted to nominate it for DYK, you would need to expand it to about 17,000 characters, which is quite a lot (although probably doable, since there's still a lot missing from that article). On the other hand, if you can't write that much text (there is an upper limit to how long an article needs to be to express all the relevant encyclopedic information, beyond that it's just too wordy; see
WP:Article size) but you can significantly improve what's already there (by copyediting, adding references, etc.), it may not be eligible for DYK but it may be eligible to be reviewed for
WP:Good article status (GA), which is a more involved review and takes a bit longer (but generally carries more "prestige").
Ok, that was supposed to be my "question" (sorry it got so wordy!). Now for the comment. I see you and your classmate had some trouble working on an article Solid Waste. By now maybe you've already figured out what went wrong (and if you have, you can ignore this), but if not I can try to explain it a little. As you've noticed now, Wikipedia already has an article Municipal solid waste, which seems to be about the same topic, and we don't like having multiple articles on the same topic. In cases like this, where there are multiple names for the same topic (or multiple ways people might search for it), we usually use WP:redirects: in other words, if someone types "Solid waste" into the search bar at the top of the page, they will automatically get taken to Municipal solid waste; you can try it and you will see a small message at the top that says (Redirected from Solid waste). What you guys were editing was Solid Waste with a capital letter; capitalization matters on article titles, so "Solid Waste" is considered a different page than "Solid waste", and no one had made a redirect at "Solid Waste" (I made one this morning, see here). Generally Wikipedia uses lowercase titles; see Wikipedia:Article titles#Article title format for guidelines. Anyway, it looks like now you and your classmate have both found the right article, so that's good.
Last thing: I noticed in your course outline that none of the assignments specifically ask you to practice adding footnotes in articles. The formatting for adding footnotes is sometimes confusing for editors who don't have experience in HTML or some other markup language, and it's important to be able to add footnotes (DYK nominations won't be accepted, for example, if they don't have footnotes), so if you feel like you need to learn that we can practice it. Or you may have already come across it when you went through the WP:tutorial.
Best, rʨanaɢ ( talk) 14:34, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi Lmissik, the stuff you have collected in your sandbox looks great. I agree that the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act is not in good shape; it seems to just parrot the various sections of the policy, and not actually talk about the policy in an encyclopedic manner. The article structure you have outlined in your sandbox is much better, it's lain out very clearly and in an encyclopedic manner. A discussion of "effectiveness" might be more appropriate as part of a "Criticism" section rather than its own stand-alone section (if there is extensive commentary on whether or not the policy is effective), but I guess it will be easier to make that decision once you have the content written and have a better idea what you are working with.
One other small comment, I think Solid waste policy in the United States might be a slightly better title than United States solid waste policy; I don't know why, it just sounds to me more like a typical Wikipedia article title.
Everything looks great so far! Let me know if any problems arise or if you need feedback anywhere. rʨanaɢ ( talk) 01:55, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
[[Category:Waste management]]
at the bottom of the article), and
Wikipedia:Categorization for guidelines about how to choose which categories the article should go in.
Hello. You have
a new message at Rjanag's talk page.
Hi Leah. I like your user profile. Matumeru ( talk) 01:59, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
Hello. You have
a new message at Rjanag's talk page.
Hi Lmissik, I have a couple quick questions, a comment, and also a suggestion for something you can work on.
There are some things in your course assignment ( here) that are a little confusing to me. Unless I'm misunderstanding, the assignment for February 10-4 says to edit an article directly, whereas the assignment for March 5-31 appears to say to work on that article in your sandbox and then move it to the article space when it's ready. So I'm not sure if the instructor expects you to start editing that article directly first, or to first rewrite it in your sandbox and then copy the sandbox version into the real article. (This might depend on whether you're writing a new article from scratch or editing an existing article; some people don't like to make one giant change to an existing article and therefore prefer to edit it directly in a piecemeal fashion, especially if there are other editors who want to review those edits; for a new article, on the other hand, there's nothing wrong with writing the whole thing in your sandbox and them importing it to mainspace in one big chunk.)
The reason this matters is because the time you start editing an article will make a difference if you decide to edit the article for WP:Did you know later. (Did you know, or "DYK", is a project that identifies brand-new or recently-expanded articles and features 1 fact about them on the main page for a few hours.) DYK only accepts articles that were created or expanded in the past 5 days, which means if you start editing the article on February 10-4 and keep working on it throughout March, when you nominate it for DYK someone will say "this article is not new enough" and that will be it. If your instructor expects you to get the article onto DYK as part of the assignment (or if you just want to), then it might be better to prepare your material in a sandbox first and then copy it into the real article all at once when it's ready.
Another thing about DYK: if you are working on an article that already existed (rather than writing a brand-new article), you need to expand it fivefold to be eligible for DYK; they don't care how much you improved the text that was already there, they only care about the character count. For instance,
Municipal solid waste was 3437 characters long when you started working on it (you can calculate this by going to
Special:Mypage/monobook.js and editing the page and adding {{subst:js|User:Dr_pda/prosesizebytes.js}}
; after you save your page and
bypass your cache by clicking Shift+Refresh, it will add a "Page size" button in the toolbox on the left-hand side of the page). Therefore, if you wanted to nominate it for DYK, you would need to expand it to about 17,000 characters, which is quite a lot (although probably doable, since there's still a lot missing from that article). On the other hand, if you can't write that much text (there is an upper limit to how long an article needs to be to express all the relevant encyclopedic information, beyond that it's just too wordy; see
WP:Article size) but you can significantly improve what's already there (by copyediting, adding references, etc.), it may not be eligible for DYK but it may be eligible to be reviewed for
WP:Good article status (GA), which is a more involved review and takes a bit longer (but generally carries more "prestige").
Ok, that was supposed to be my "question" (sorry it got so wordy!). Now for the comment. I see you and your classmate had some trouble working on an article Solid Waste. By now maybe you've already figured out what went wrong (and if you have, you can ignore this), but if not I can try to explain it a little. As you've noticed now, Wikipedia already has an article Municipal solid waste, which seems to be about the same topic, and we don't like having multiple articles on the same topic. In cases like this, where there are multiple names for the same topic (or multiple ways people might search for it), we usually use WP:redirects: in other words, if someone types "Solid waste" into the search bar at the top of the page, they will automatically get taken to Municipal solid waste; you can try it and you will see a small message at the top that says (Redirected from Solid waste). What you guys were editing was Solid Waste with a capital letter; capitalization matters on article titles, so "Solid Waste" is considered a different page than "Solid waste", and no one had made a redirect at "Solid Waste" (I made one this morning, see here). Generally Wikipedia uses lowercase titles; see Wikipedia:Article titles#Article title format for guidelines. Anyway, it looks like now you and your classmate have both found the right article, so that's good.
Last thing: I noticed in your course outline that none of the assignments specifically ask you to practice adding footnotes in articles. The formatting for adding footnotes is sometimes confusing for editors who don't have experience in HTML or some other markup language, and it's important to be able to add footnotes (DYK nominations won't be accepted, for example, if they don't have footnotes), so if you feel like you need to learn that we can practice it. Or you may have already come across it when you went through the WP:tutorial.
Best, rʨanaɢ ( talk) 14:34, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi Lmissik, the stuff you have collected in your sandbox looks great. I agree that the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act is not in good shape; it seems to just parrot the various sections of the policy, and not actually talk about the policy in an encyclopedic manner. The article structure you have outlined in your sandbox is much better, it's lain out very clearly and in an encyclopedic manner. A discussion of "effectiveness" might be more appropriate as part of a "Criticism" section rather than its own stand-alone section (if there is extensive commentary on whether or not the policy is effective), but I guess it will be easier to make that decision once you have the content written and have a better idea what you are working with.
One other small comment, I think Solid waste policy in the United States might be a slightly better title than United States solid waste policy; I don't know why, it just sounds to me more like a typical Wikipedia article title.
Everything looks great so far! Let me know if any problems arise or if you need feedback anywhere. rʨanaɢ ( talk) 01:55, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
[[Category:Waste management]]
at the bottom of the article), and
Wikipedia:Categorization for guidelines about how to choose which categories the article should go in.
Hello. You have
a new message at Rjanag's talk page.