User talk:Robert Bowdidge

Greetings!

Thanks for the note. I followed a link from one of your tweets, saw a syntax error, and logged in to correct it. Then I got carried away.

The formatting is easy for me because:

1. I have experience as a copy editor
2. I've racked up 68,000 edits on Wikipedia, which uses the same wiki software (MediaWiki)

If you'll be getting more editors -- and people from various Santa Clara County historical societies seem like a good bet -- you might want to think about setting a "backstage" area for discussions, suggestions, sources, bibliographies, problem-solving, etc. On Wikipedia, it's a separate namespace (with the prefix "Wikipedia:", as in [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard]] (see here for the actual link).

On this wiki, the namespace is [[Packing Houses of Santa Clara County:xxx]], but if that's too long you can easily create shortcuts (called "redirects" in Wiki parlance).

I'll create one as a demonstration, which, of course, you can easily delete if you don't want it or Move to a better title. I'll try Packing Houses of Santa Clara County:Sources.

--Calton (talk) 05:40, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Cal!

I don't know how many other editors I'll get, but I've been happy to get all my notes some place easy to edit and polish. You're welcome to edit and kibitz; I hadn't done any Wikipedia editing before setting this up, and so I've been experimenting to figure out the correct style. You'll see some of my older pages with "Details" sections containing raw notes; I'm slowly cleaning these up and replacing the raw notes with more polished text.

Robert Bowdidge (talk) 06:33, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. If you want to store random bits-n'-bobs related to individual articles/pages that you don't want to (yet) show up in the article, the "Talk" page associated with each article/page might be good. It's the tab labelled "Discussion" on each page, though the namespace is actually ([[Talk:ARTICLENAME]], as in Talk:A. F. Tenney Canning Company, go figure). On Wikipedia, the "Talk" namespaces are supposed to be used only for discussion of editing the specific article, but since it's your own wiki there's nothing preventing you from using the space any way you like: editor discussion, random notes, bibliographies, reminders, etc: anything Not Ready for Primetime or not intended to be in the main text.

Also, if you want to leave a direct messages which lights up the notification doohickey for individual editors, click the "talk" link next to their sigs, which goes to the User Talk namespace (User talk:Calton, in my case. --Calton (talk) 07:52, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Example of redirect

Here's a shortcut and the syntax. I (more or less randomly) chose "PHSC:" as the short version of the prefix (on Wikipedia, it's "WP"), just to demonstrate.

PHSC:Sources

#REDIRECT [[Packing Houses of Santa Clara County:Sources]]

--Calton (talk) 05:47, 24 October 2013 (UTC)