User talk:Hamletpride

Adoption

Hey there, I saw your note on my talk page. I'd be happy to adopt you; I don't generally run formal lessons (though I can if there's specific area's you'd like to learn about) but I'm always available to answer any questions you might have. If you can start out by telling me if there are any particular areas of Wikipedia you'd like to learn more about, I'll be happy to show you around. You can reach me via a lot of different avenues; details are on my contact page. Thanks. Shell ^babelfish 05:10, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm guessing when you're asking about categories and subcategories, you want to know how you know what categories to put on an article? Even very experienced users some times have a difficult time with that same issue and there's even still some debate on the best way to do it. Generally, you should go for the most specific category possible - for instance, John Wayne would fit in Category:Film actors, but there's a more specific one Category:American actors, so most people would put him in that one instead.

There's a lot of detail information on getting around categories at Wikipedia:FAQ/Categorization - reading that might help answer some of the questions you have, and feel free to ask any others (or let me know if I was totally off base with what you needed). Shell ^babelfish 18:32, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Yep, American actors is a subcategory of Film actors. Basically, when you put something in a category, the idea is to look for the most specific possible which usually means its a subcategory (or sometimes even a subcategory of a subcategory of a subcategory and so on). If you want to see what Categories another category is in, you can look at the bottom of the page, just like in articles. Shell ^babelfish 18:55, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Creating categories

The easiest way to get a category started is to add it to an article. Categories are added at the bottom of the article text with the format [[Category:category]] - it goes after everything in the article but before any stub templates and interlanguage links.

Once you've done that, scroll to the bottom of the article and click the red link for the category you added. This will take you to a page which you can edit to add a description to a category.

Things to remember:

• Categories follow the same general naming conventions as articles, for example do not capitalize regular nouns. For specific conventions related to categories, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories).

• Before creating a category, look to see if one already exists. One way to do this is to think of the parent category for the new category. Search for it and then look at the subcategories in the parent. You may find that a category already exists that is similar to the one you are thinking about creating.

• When writing the description for a category try to give it at least two parent categories. For example, Category:British writers should be in both Category:Writers by nationality and Category:British people.

That's really all there is to it - to have more articles show up in a category, you just add the category appropriate articles. Shell ^babelfish 16:16, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Categories actually cannot be moved like other pages. To change a category name, you actually have to go in to each article and change the name of the category - in fact, this is such a problem some times that bots often do this work.

To put a category in a parent category, you do it the same way you would put an article in a category. Edit the category description page and add [[Category:parentcategory]] after the text. Shell ^babelfish 17:14, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Yep, I'm positive only templates use {{ - categories are surrounded by [[ Shell ^babelfish 18:32, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Commendation

It's nice to see an edit of the D.C. that is actually constructive, and isn't some reference to Beef - thank you for your edits, I hope you will be able to contribute more to the article. Well done! Timmccloud (talk) 23:54, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! {¦:-)} Hamletpride (talk) 15:35, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

What's with the "beef" stuff on the article then? Did you go to Dane Court? Hamletpride (talk) 15:26, 7 May 2008 (UTC) (Retrieved from User_talk:Timmccloud)

God only knows about the beef - someone has a Beef with the school apparently ;). Personally I just put it down to sophmoric pranks by disgruntled students, of which any school has an abundance. Actually I did not attend Dane Court - I watch about 80 pages, including my home school's Eagle Rock High School (Los Angeles, California) page, and one day I was surfing using the "random article" link on the left sidebar, and I came across Dane Court while it was vandalized. I cleaned it up, and put it on my watch list to make sure it stayed that way, and since then, I've kind of adopted the page. Besides, I like a good laugh now and then, and the "beef" thing has staying power - go through the article history and you can see what I mean. Good to talk to you, it's things like this intersection of our interests that introduce me to people around the world - take care - Timmccloud (talk) 16:40, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Disputes over editing

It looks like User:Stnickvillager disagrees with you on the use of Thanet instead of Kent and believes that the term "west thanet settlements" is incorrect. It does appear that this editor has strong feelings about these articles, and calling other editors vandals is inappropriate and should never been done lightly. That said, the best way to handle these sort of things is to try to talk it out with the user. There's some ideas and explanation of how disputes are usually handled on Wikipedia at dispute resolution.

I've added a welcome for User:Stnickvillager with links to policies, so hopefully they can read up a bit and resolve their concerns properly in the future. I'll try to keep an eye out and see how this editor reacts.

In the meantime, it wouldn't be a bad idea to either speak directly with this editor or leave a note on the talk page of the articles that are being questioned. If you leave the note on talk, other editors involved in those pages can comment on the issue too. Shell ^babelfish 18:05, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Reply

I've no problem with valid edits, in fact they are most welcome - I've added a lot of information about the area we live in. The St. Nick page had a lot of vandalism done to it - adding of unsavoury terms and minor profanity. Whether this was you or someone else did this I unfortunately can't be sure. The page as it was is best for now unless more facts can be added. What I object to regarding your edits is the following:

1) Using local-authority-style terms for Thanet which do not exist. Lets keep Wikipedia factual without colloquialisms - it is in all of our interests. Try Googling "West thanet settlements" - the term does not exist. Readers of Wikipedia may well believe this is an accepted term - thus creating misinformation. A parliamentary and local council term does already exist - Thanet Villages. This is acceptable for the area around St. Nick's and Minster - perhaps use this term or research to find a correct one.
2) Please use capital letters and correct punctuation before saving edits.
3) Basic factual errors that belie an attempt to sabotage Wikipedia. Stating that St. Nicholas, Monkton and Minster were one settlement is surely fantasy. I have copies of medieval maps and documents which distinctly show the area used to lie much as it still does now. Again, if you have valid information it is most welcome, but please check and correllate data, and provide links and sources. Was it yourself who made edits to rename St. Nicholas as a hamlet and alter the population? I don't know if it was as a lot of vandalism was done. These two edits were again incorrect and it all leads to a lot of work needing to be done on the local pages for no real reason at all.
4) The moving of pages from Kent to Thanet is unnecessary. Thanet is not a county, and not applicable as any part of a postal address. Like it or not (I do agree we are still in many ways an island community) we are Kent. There are two villages in Kent called Minster, one is in Sheppey. For this reason the village goes by the name Minster-in-Thanet. There are not two villages called Monkton in Kent, so the page should really stay as Monkton, Kent. I would like to repeat I do sympathise your reasons for doing this, but it will confuse a reader trying to find out more about Kent and Thanet. We need to stick to the facts.

Notes on the St. Nicholas page vandalism. The Court Farm sentence - 'chapel' was changed to 'torcher chamber' (sic), another sentence was amended to 'the channel in Roman times was naughty'. Various words were altered to give a schoolboy-humour element. You may not have been the vandal (that term acceptable in this case I think) as I've not been able to trawl through comparing all the many edits done on the page, but I think when your edits were made on this page you made no attempt to correct these serious problems. This might show a less than methodical approach to editing an encyclopedia page visible to the world.

I will not revert any more of your edits or report your username if you can address these points which I hope are in the spirit of this website - surely we should be serious about what we're doing here. I have only the best interests of East Kent and Wikipedia to heart - I'm not here to start a 'revert war' with anyone. Stnickvillager (talk) 20:05, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Edit - I've gone through the edits and the vandalism was done by 88.108.49.200. So basically we don't know. A lot of edits were done by all sorts of users and they all missed it too - so I'm perfectly willing to accept you are free of any wrongdoing on this point of vandalism. It would be nice if people could check the whole article (when they are this small anyway) so I'll leave the point above as an idea of what happens on this site and the responsibility we all have to remove errors. I'd still like to engage in a conversation with you about my other points though. Stnickvillager (talk) 20:19, 12 May 2008 (UTC)