Bellsonherfingers

Welcome!

Hello, Bellsonherfingers, and Welcome to Wikipedia! Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Also, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! GiantSnowman 15:04, 12 October 2009 (UTC) Getting started Introduction The five pillars of Wikipedia How to edit a page Intuitive guide to Wikipedia Finding your way around Table of contents Department directory Editing articles How to develop an article Manual of Style Getting help Frequently asked questions Cheatsheet Where to ask a question Help pages New contributors' help page Article Wizard - a Wizard to help you create articles How you can help Contributing to Wikipedia Community Portal Follow Wikipedia etiquette Practice civility

Welcome!!

Hi, Bells!! It's great to have you on board - hopefully you can help clear up the antique doll articles. Don't hesitate to ask me if you need help sourcing or Wikifying your edits, as sometimes things need to be done just so to be accepted as edits - as I see you've found out on Dresden doll already! Mabalu (talk) 01:01, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Citing sources

Hello, and welcome! It's great that you are knowledgeable about dolls, but you can't just change already referenced information without updating the references. Every existing <ref> tag indicates where the text preceding it is referenced to. It should be possible to verify the information by looking up the reference. Since you seem to have access to some good books to use for references, I'd recommend you add books and page numbers as references. I'm no expert on source formatting, but just plain text inside <ref></ref> tags should work fine, ie something like <ref>"Identifying German Chinas 1840s-1930s" by Mary Krombholz (2004) pp102-103</ref> For an example of an article with better formatted book references, see The Tale of Peter Rabbit. For more information see Wikipedia:Citing sources. I have to leave now but hopefully Mabalu can help you further, or feel free to ask me here or on my talk page if you have any questions. I should be back tomorrow. (By the way, I was considering moving the Dresden doll article to Parian doll, but never got around to it. That would be a better way to make it more accurate than to just delete all links to Dresden doll.) Again, welcome! Siawase (talk) 01:21, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi again

Hiya, I saw Mabalu kindly helped with sorting out some references for China doll. I really hope you're not discouraged from editing. Wikipedia is sorely lacking in editors with an interest in doll articles, so I do hope you decide to stick around. It can be a bit of a steep learning curve at first but I'd be happy to help out in any way I can, please just ask me anything. All the Wikipedia rules can be bewildering, but most of them can safely be ignored most of the time, except for the policy of verifiability. Basically, as long as you add a source for everything you add or change, you'll be fine.

Improving on an already decently sourced article is one of the most difficult tasks you can find on Wikipedia, so you inadvertently jumped in the deep end, so to speak, with china doll. If you want to get your feet wet on something a little easier you may want to expand on the Parian doll article. I looked up the one reference used and it's doubtful it would pass Wikipedia's reliable sources guideline, so you can just ignore that source and go wild. Since that article is of such low quality already, any additions and corrections (even unsourced) will be an improvement.

And apologies for piling on, but it would really help when you make a change to an article, if you provide an edit summary for your edits. Doing so helps everyone to understand the intention of your edit. It is also helpful to users reading the edit history of the page. Again thanks for your contributions and welcome, and I'm sorry if I get a bit longwinded. :) Siawase (talk) 12:47, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Re: doll page editing

Hiya, nice to hear from you! It's great that you jumped right in. Wikipedia encourages editors to be bold. You've done a great job with Parian doll so far. And I'm really happy to see the excellent images you've uploaded. It's really hard to find freely licensed images of some of these specific doll types. I totally understand that time is a factor in picking up the reference style here. It took me a long time to wrap my head around it. But don't worry too much about getting all the formatting right. I can help fix any formatting glitches, and I'm sure Mabalu would be happy to help too. And again, feel free to ask me any questions. Happy editing! Siawase (talk) 15:45, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

All the references you added to china doll look great. Hehe, your proper formatting puts my sloppy about.com references to shame. I converted one of the book references to Harvard style citations, see the diff here[1]. It makes it very easy to cite several different pages from the same book. I also made the image thumbnails a bit smaller and rearranged them a bit, feel free to just revert if you prefer your earlier layout. Cheers, Siawase (talk) 15:47, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

All good changes. I was trying to figure out how to re-size and rearrange photos but hadn't quite gotten the hang of it yet. Ditto that on Harvard style reference citations. I had read mention of that but hadn't yet figured out how to do it. Bellsonherfingers (talk) 20:35, 19 February 2010 (UTC)