User talk:DavidB4

Feel free to post any questions or comments here. If you don't hear back from me, try e-mailing me instead.

block quote

To make a nice quote with huge quote marks, do

{{cquote|blah blah}}

which comes out looking like

“

blah blah

”

I have a small collection of useful stuff like this at the bottom of my user page. SamHB (talk) 12:11, 24 December 2015 (EST)

Thanks! I knew I'd seen it somewhere! DavidB4 (talk) 14:31, 24 December 2015 (EST)

elements!

I see you are working in this area. It needs it. Someone who was working on this in the past got banned on a false socking charge (this sort of thing doesn't happen any more), and the topic has been largely a ghost town ever since.

But I'd like to suggest that you try to make the "vital statistics" material either in the template or out of it, but not duplicated or semi-duplicated. You've been adding some information in the text, about such things as uses and discoverer, that are also in the template, and sometimes inconsistently.

I'm not saying one place is right and the other is wrong, or that your approach is wrong. You are obviously putting a lot of work into this. But I'd like you to consider how this issue should be addressed. Is the template a bad idea? Does the template need to be expanded. Does putting stuff in the template rather than in the text mess up the flow of the article? What's the right way to do this? It would be really good if you could put together a vision of how element articles should be handled in general. And then make that vision a reality. If you think the template:element should be changed, say so. Templates are normally protected (because a vandal could mess up a huge number of pages if he could get his hands on one), but I'm sure that, if you request a change, you would be accommodated.

Keep up the good work.

SamHB (talk) 20:47, 26 December 2015 (EST)

Yeah, I noticed this area is lacking. I don't have any specific ideas for changing the template, I just need to say inside it better. I didn't want to undo the work already put into them, but some of what I'm finding is different than what they wrote, or ever worse (for me), I sometimes find they said something I can't find info about, either for or against. Sometimes, too, I have a problem where the info isn't as clear-cut. In Ruthenium, for example, there where three different people who worked on discovering it. In another, two different people discovered it independently.

I was thinking I could expand upon the template info in the article, but you're right, it does get repetitive. I don't exactly know what else to put down, though, other than this and a few other scraps of info. I can't even include a picture of the molecule, since only admins can do that, it seems.

It is a bad idea to restate but expand upon the info in the template? If so, what should I be doing instead?

DavidB4 (talk) 9:31, 28 December 2015 (EST)

OK, I thought about this some more. I think the guideline should be that the infobox has extremely concise material. In many cases we don't have anything more to add to things in the infobox—"X was discovered by Y in year Z". In many other cases there are interesting things to say about it, and that should go in the main body. For example, the discovery of Radium is a fascinating topic, given that this discovery was the gateway to atomic physics. (I just looked; the Radium article just has the infobox. It needs a lot more.) What we say in the infobox of course has to be consistent with the expanded material in the main article. SamHB (talk) 17:10, 28 December 2015 (EST)

That makes some sense, but here's my problem with that: Perhaps I should not compare this site to wikipedia, but it's hard not to. Take Xenon for example. It's perhaps a minor element, right? Therefore you're thinking I shouldn't write any article about it. But if you look at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon) You see a huge article--much larger that the side table, which is also much larger that ours. If I write something, even if it does restate some info, at least it's a foundation for others to add to. Maybe they never will, so I shouldn't though--I don't know.

Citations

I have a general question to anyone looking at this. I don't know who to ask, so I'm asking you. What format should I enter citations? On Wikipedia, people seem to use APA, or perhaps Terabian. Here, however, the official rules say that a citation is "generally a web address or book title." That doesn't seem very professional, but is that what I should be doing (as I have been lately) or is ALPA/MLA better? Thanks!

DavidB4 (talk) 9:39, 28 December 2015 (EST)

Interest to user

Maybe this article will be of interest to you. U.U (talk) 21:52, 28 December 2015 (EST)

Thanks for pointing it out. I've added some info, and tried to make a bit of structure. If I find more info, I'll try to come back and add it. Of course, feel free to add to it as well, or reorganize. Do you suppose we should try to get an admin to include a screenshot of the program? DavidB4 (talk) 9:16, 29 December 2015 (EST)

Sure. Although I do not have plenty of time, I will try to help if I can. You can tell men on my talk page if you need help. Thanks for your efforts. U.U (talk) 19:06, 30 December 2015 (EST)

Thanks and some input/feedback

Thanks for all your contributions. We very much appreciate having fellow conservatives involved in our project.

Second, make sure you add category tags to all your articles plus have another page or pages link to your new article. Otherwise, the articles will never be found or added to. For example, add a category tag or tags to the bullet article. Have the gun article link to your bullet article.

Next, as far as length of new articles, you want the articles to be like an encyclopedia in length as far as your new articles and not like a dictionary. A basic rule of thumb is to avoid stub articles. You don't want to disappoint an encyclopedia reader with a stub article. It is better to create one encyclopedia length article than create many stub articles. And as as added bonus, you will get more people to read your content as non-stub articles are often listed by the major search engines.

I hope these suggestions help.

And again, thanks for all your efforts. Conservative (talk) 18:51, 30 December 2015 (EST)