User talk:Adrian de Physics

Hi! I'm not formally offering to adopt you because I just made an offer to adopt someone else and I don't want to make commitments I might not be able to fulfill. However, you're welcome at any time to ask me for help whether you're adopted or not. I just created a page for you here: User:Adrian de Physics/Acoustics draft. The page is in your userspace. You can use it to play around with and to put your draft article. I suggest clicking edit and then using the mouse to copy and paste your draft article in. If you ever want to delete that page, you can put {{db-owner}} on it for deleting a page in your userspace. If you load in your draft article, I can help you fix it up and then move or copy it to the encyclopedia mainspace. (Mainspace means regular articles, pages that don't have "User:" or "Talk:" or something in front of the name, and that show up in search engines.) You can reply here or at my talk page. --Coppertwig (talk) 16:46, 26 December 2007 (UTC) Thanks Coppertwig ! Your help much appreciated. You have given me some good pointers to be working on. Meanwhile I looked up some of the other topics adjacent to those of the article I am fixing to write, have in mind, found that some were excellent and best left alone, some were marked as stubs, some had spots I would be tempted to improve, etc. so there's lots to do. I just need to work up to it bit by bit. I will plan some crosslinks offline and have them ready before trying to get my article up. My general web experience is very limited and I want to strengthen it, that's part of my motivation for doing this. I took a look at your site but had better get practice at editing this one before I make an appearance on yours. I can see you are very active / not to say prolific / in this world so thanks again for your offer ! Adrian

Hi! Nice to hear from you. For detailed help on how to do links, see Help:Link, but it's really very easy. To link to a page, just put two sets of square brackets around the page name, like this: [[Acoustics]] which looks like this: Acoustics. So you can just put double square brackets around some words or phrases in a sentence, and if there's a Wikipedia page with that name, it will link to it. If there isn't, it will look red. There are more complicated ways to do it, but start there. It doesn't matter whether the first letter of the first word in the title is uppercase or lowercase.

Here's some introductory information to help you:

Welcome!

Hello, Adrian de Physics, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome!

If you load your draft into that userpage I made for you, let me know whether you'd like me to help edit it right away, or not. (Once you put it into the main article space, anyone's free to edit it.)

On a talk page such as this one, when you start your message, hit the "return" (or "enter") key once or twice so you're starting at the beginning of a new line, rather than adding to the end of the previous person's message. At the end of your message, put four tildss, like this: ~~~~ and when you save your edit, the server will replace the tildes with your signature and the date. On an article page, (or on that draft page,) don't sign. And don't worry. You're allowed to make mistakes. --Coppertwig (talk) 03:19, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

By the way, I encourage you to experiment: type a few words with double square brackets around them, for example. You can experiment here on your talk page, or on the draft page, or in the sandbox. You can also experiment by just clicking "show preview" rather than "save page", so you can see just what your edit will look like, without actually changing anything on Wikipedia. Actually, it's a good idea to get in the habit of clicking "show preview" before saving. --Coppertwig (talk) 03:39, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I see you've uploaded your draft. Lots of good material there! Would you like me to make suggestions for edits, (or even edit it directly), or would you prefer to work on it yourself for a while first?

At first I was baffled why the square brackets on "elastic waves" weren't working, but I guess you can't use square brackets inside other square brackets.

OK, now that you know how to do simple links to other pages, the next step is: how to link when the way the words appear in your sentence are different from the name of the page you want to link to. It's not that much harder. You just put the real name of the page first, then a pipe character | then the words you want to see in your sentence. For example, if you want the word "ellipticity" to link to the page "ellipse", you can write [[Ellipse|ellipticity]] and it will display as ellipticity.

For elastic waves: if you want to link to both pages, the elastic wave page and the wave page, you could have the word "elastic" link to one page and the word "wave" to the other, like this: [[Elastic wave|Elastic]] [[wave]]s which looks like Elastic waves. But that may be confusing to the reader, because it looks like just one link. Another way is to make "Elastic waves" link to one page, and then the next time the word "wave" or "waves" appears in the article, make it a link to the other page. --Coppertwig (talk) 19:32, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Just saw that you have been watching over this like a guardian angel ! Thanks ! Working on the references has helped me to tweak the text so as to refer to the best stuff and not to wikis that are questionable or embryonic or under debate. That's why in the most recent I am not trying to reference "elastic waves" any longer. One day maybe when that area itself is stabilized. I gotta read your other tips now, just wanted you to know I have seen you and am catching up. Adrian Pollock (talk) 19:44, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

It can actually be good to link to embryonic pages, in my opinion, if they're on topics that deserve to be expanded. It helps people find those pages, and likely some of those people will add to them, bringing them out of their embryonic state. It's even fine to (occasionally) have (a small number of) red links, that is, links to articles that don't exist yet. But for now that's up to you. --Coppertwig (talk) 20:07, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

OK, I will bear that in mind. There are other people currently discussing whether "elastic waves" should be merged into "elasticity". I might have something to say about that but want to focus on getting this article published first. The hierarchy is waves > (mechanical waves) > elastic waves > Lamb waves and ideally that'd be clean and clear for the readers of all the articles. But I suppose you will respond that it's a web as well as a hierarchy . . . :)

These are the things I still want to do / question on the article -
1. Fix one of the references
2.

  Does the list of references get a different formatting ? Is the list of references a footnote ?? Need to find out how to refer to a reference from the text.

3. Additional line spaces between the paragraphs.
4. One diagram (it's too dry without any). It will be pictures of the two modes (curvy lines). Will it take an Excel chart ? Or a .jpg file, not sure how I'd get from an Excel chart to a .jpg file ? Then there's the layout and captioning of the diagram in the article. This is where perhaps you could help me directly and save a bunch of time.
5. With the above done, plus any other tweaks I might notice, it would be basically ready to publish as far as I'm concerned so Coppertwig, your edits and suggestions would be very welcome prior to putting it into the main article area.

It'll take me a while to work on the diagram. I'll check back here in a while, not sure what's going to happen with the rest of today. I know I could probably find answers to some of the above in the references but the wheels tend to spin and it's sure helpful having you looking over the shoulder !
Adrian Pollock (talk) 20:47, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

replying

Images: Here's an example of how to display an image. (Thumbnail size. Reader can click on it to see larger version. There are other ways to do it.)

Iapetus as seen from the Cassini probe. This image is at Wikimedia Commons. You can write whatever you want in the image caption.

[[Image:PIA08384.jpg | thumb | Iapetus as seen from the Cassini probe. This image is at Wikimedia Commons. You can write whatever you want in the image caption.]]

Well, that image has a filename ending in .jpg, so I guess .jpg are fine! Normally, at least for images you produce yourself, you upload the image to Wikimedia Commons. You need to create an account there. You can use the same username if it isn't already taken. I haven't uploaded any images so you may need to ask for help from someone else. When you upload the image, you have to include a statement that you own the copyright and that you release it under such-and-such free license -- you probably need to read instructions on what licenses are OK and what exactly you need to say. Commons:First steps should help you get started at Commons. Once you have an account, have read some instructions and want to upload a file, try Commons:Upload. Once your file is uploaded to Commons, you can easily display it on your Wikipedia page the way I just displayed Iapetus. I probably ought to start uploading images myself.

Whether they take Excel files I don't know, but Commons:Software at Commons mentions a program to convert excel to jpg. (On many browsers, use control-f to search for a word on a page. Search for "excel" on that page to find it.)

Ah, you found out about <ref> tags. Good. Wikipedia:Footnote has instructions. At the bottom of the page, just put

== References ==
<references/>

and it will generate a whole list of references based on your <ref> tags.

There are different ways to arrange things. Some articles have a "bibliography" etc. I suggest that the simplest way is to cite each of the books using <ref> tags somewhere in the article. You can cite the same book more than once like this. (First one uses <ref name=Book33> Here, assume I list info for Book 33. </ref> ; second or subsequent one merely needs <ref name=Book33/> . Note that there is a slash at the end of <ref name=Book33/> and it doesn't need a separate closing </ref> tag.

Optionally, you can use Template:Cite book to format your citations. I usually do that. I go to the template page and copy-and-paste the following: {{cite book |title= |last= |first= |authorlink= |coauthors= |year= |publisher= |location= |isbn= }} . Normally I also put that whole thing inside <ref> tags. Then I fill in the various fields such as title of the book etc. Just paste the information immediately after each equals sign. I don't think it matters where spaces go. You can leave some fields unfilled and it will still display fine. There are also other optional fields you can add in, such as |pages= and |quote=. See the template page for complete instructions.

If you want more spaces between the paragraphs, just hit "enter" a couple of times to insert blank lines. There's probably a standard amount of space usually used in Wikipedia articles between paragraphs, but I get a little confused about whether it's zero or one blank line (or possibly two).

Dividing a page into sections with section headings

It would be a good idea to divide the article into sections. The first section is (Wikipedia:lead) introductory with no section heading and should tell what Lamb waves are and set them in context. For other sections, you can create headings by putting a heading on a line by itself with two equals signs before and after it.

Sorry, you already knew how to put headings. But, no heading is needed at the very beginning of the article. The first sentence should include the phrase Lamb waves in bold type which you get by using three apostrophes '''like this'''.

Are you making this assumption: "The fundamental "linearizing" assumptions of linear elasticity are: "small" deformations (or strains) and linear relationships between the components of stress and strain." (quoted from the Linear elasticity page). If so, maybe that has to be made clearer (than it was in your first draft -- I haven't studied your most recent changes in detail.) --Coppertwig (talk) 21:54, 27 December 2007 (UTC)