RSLitman

If this is your first time posting to my User talk page, please make note of the section called Editing Messages from Others.

Welcome!

Hello, RSLitman, 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
• How to edit a page
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  -- Cielomobile ^{talk / contribs} 03:08, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

helpme - How do I start my User page?

My question is - What do I do to start my User page so that my name is no longer in red, so I'll have a working user page? Please do not send me to a generalized how to start an article page. Instead, I'd like some step-by-step instructions that don't have me jumping from one hyperlink to another, and preferably something more relevant to User pages than to articles. Thanks.

I went to Amazon to see if there's a book called "Wikipedia for Dummies" or "Idiot's Guide to Wikipedia" or "Wikipedia Hacks" or "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual", but the only things I could find were books on the "Wiki" concept, not books on how to work with the actual Wikipedia web site without needing to jump from one web page to another to find answers.

Thanks for any help you can give me on this. Remember, please, step-by-step instructions, NOT a link to a page on how to start an article. Thanks.

Go to your userpage (click here if you like). That should take you to the "Editing User:RSLitman". Put some text on the page and save, then your name will no longer be red.--Commander Keane 04:10, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Re: Unnecessary Reference - Neil Diamond Page

If you're just describing something that clearly occurs in an available film, then you don't need to cite it, since anyone can see it for themselves. And if you were to make a cite of it, you'd enclose it in ref tags, i.e. <ref>blah blah</ref>, so that it would be rendered as a footnote at the bottom of the article. Wasted Time R 02:09, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

"Sam and Janet Evening" not a mondegreen

This phrase is in no way an accidental mishearing, which is the hallmark of a mondegreen. It falls into another category, which may or may not have a name (probably does, but I don't know it) of intentionally misheard/mangled phrases. Something akin to a malapropism, though I'm not sure it's the same thing (that latter category including such howlers as "What's that? I can't extinguish your voice over the telephone."). But not a Mondegreen.

Actually, after checking, it is a malapropism. Read that article and you'll see. +ILike2BeAnonymous 21:10, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Editing Messages from Others

In order to keep my page looking nice and remaining readable, I will edit messages others leave here for punctuation purposes such as missing periods at the end of sentences and balancing parentheses and quotes. Please don't take this personally. I will leave in words such as "utilize" and "Philly" that I personally don't use myself, in the interest of free speech. I will also leave spelling errors intact unless they make the item hard to decipher. Also in the interest of making messages easy to decipher, I may convert all lower-case and all upper-case messages to proper mixed case unless the single case (such as using all caps to yell at me for editing a previous message) is part of the tone of the message. RSLitman 21:18, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Hey, it's your "talk"* page; someone would have to be pretty petty, in my view, to object to this kind of editing. But you never know.

* Still bugs me that everyone round 'heah refers to them as "talk" pages even though the tabs all say "discussion". +ILike2BeAnonymous 21:29, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

helpme - Can I switch to local time instead of UTC for my time stamps?

My question is - Is there a setting I can make so that the date for me changes at 12 midnight my time (U.S. Eastern time zone) rather than Greenwich/Universal time (which is 7:00 p.m. for me)? On the evening of December 12, I left a message on a talk page in which I referred to "today", only to see an early time on December 13 show up in my date/time stamp. It changed the meaning to "yesterday".

Thanks for any help you can give me on this.

Take a look in the preferences, under date/time, and adjust the time offset. Not sure if this is what you're looking for, so let me know if it works. Bjelleklang - talk 00:50, 18 December 2006 (UTC) (Emoticon edited out of original reply - RSLitman 20:49, 25 December 2006 (UTC))

Sorry, No. WikiMan53 T/C edits 00:47, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for responding. Here's what I found in the preferences section:

This will adjust the times shown on your watchlist and recent changes,but not in signatures on talk pages, which will always be in UTC.

noinclude

I assume you mean Template:AfD in 3 steps. <noinclude> is documented at Help:Template#Noinclude and includeonly, and the reason I used it is that Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion doesn't need another explanation of AfD (there's one at the top already, and the page is cluttered enough as it is). I see that my edit removed a line break, so I just fixed it. --Derlay 12:58, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I recommend that you read Wikipedia:Transclusion (it explains the concept better than I could). After that you should be able to understand what I wrote above. --Derlay 00:05, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

helpme - What are noinclude and include?

New question - "Anything between and will be processed and displayed only when the page is being viewed directly; it will not be included or substituted." What does this mean? Thanks in advance. Please respect my preference to not see smiley faces, other emoticons, and common Internet abbreviations (such as TIA for the phrase I used in the last sentence) in responses left for me. (Yes, I know someone did this the last time I did a "helpme". I was grateful for the response but really could have done without the smiley face.) Thanks.

(Response was posted under above category.)

Reporting A User Who Is Vandalizing a Page Repeatedly

Please let me know how, or please direct me to a page that lets me know how, to report a user who has vandalized a particular page multiple times, if such a mechanism exists. Thanks.

Yes, the page you're looking for is Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism. Follow the instructions there to report a persistent vandal. Cheers, Tangotango (talk) 03:13, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to Tangotango for answering my original question. As sometimes happens, an answer brings on the need to ask another question before I can use the original answer. So, here is my new question:

On the page Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism, there's a template with instructions for Editors and Administrators. I guess I'm considered to be an Editor. One of the things I'm supposed to do is to ensure that the vandal has "received a proper set of warnings". The word "warnings" is highlighted in a way to make me think it leads to a page explaining how to figure whether or not someone has gotten a warning. But it just leads to a page called Template:TestTemplates. So, here's my question:

How do I find out if the vandal has received any warnings, and a proper set in particular?

Hi RSLitman. In order to find out if a user has received warnings, you would go to their user talk page and simply scan for the text of warnings. However, it is also possible that the user had received warnings in the past but removed them. To check for that, go to the history tab at the top of the page and search the history. First look at the displayed edit summaries. Many users who warn will indicate that they are placing a warning in the edsit summary. Second, by clicking on any date in that history page, you are taken to the page as it appeared on that past date so that you can see what was there in the past.

For particular warnings, it takes a while before you know them well, and they are all listed on that test templates page. You need to explore the tags on that page a bit. But let me provide a few of the more common warnings, and how they can be used. Probably the most common is {{test}} for a first vandalism warning. Like most templates, there are later tags in the same "series" for escalating the warning, which simply take the first template and add higher numbers. So a second level warning in that series would be {{test2}}, which graduates to {{test3}} and {{test4}}. Just click on each of those to see how they increase. Some other common warning tags (each of which escalate as you add higher numbers to the ends) are: {{spam}}, {{verror}}, {{blank}}, {{Test1article}} {{attack}} and many others. There really is no shortcut but to click on them to see the language of each so you know where each one would be appropriate.

One note on usage: most warning templates should be substituted. This means that you add "subst:" after the beginning of the template. So, for example, If I was warning you for vandalism, with a first level template, I would add to your page {{subst:test}}. One more complication. Most of these templates have a parameter which allows tailoring the template to refer to the article that was vandalized. In order to access it you add a pipe (|) followed by the name of the referred article. So, say you vandalized the article Foo. What I would do to warn you is add to your talk page: {{subst:test|foo}} Hope this helps.--Fuhghettaboutit 00:15, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

If they're vandalizing after one warning, they should be blocked. —Centrx→talk • 00:16, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Sweet Caroline

The no:Sweet Caroline is the interwiki link to the Norwegian Wikipedia-page about the song Sweet Caroline (that I wrote). It shows on the article page on the left hand, saying in Norwegian Norsk (bokmål). If you click it, you go to the Norwegian articcle about this song. I put it in the English page, instead of waiting that a robot might chatch it up. On both the Norwegian page and the English page, one can now read that it is in these languages that have an article om this subject. Nice that you are writing about Neil Diamond-related topics! --PaulVIF 12:09, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Template talk:Montgomery County, Pennsylvania

All CDPs and incorporated places should already be in the template, but feel free to add other "communities" if there are articles for them (these are unincorporated, of course). Sorry not to have seen this until now. Ruhrfisch 20:53, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

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