Siciliano99

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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 on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! -- The Red Pen of Doom 23:27, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

User Identifiers

Hiya. Welcome to Wikipedia. Just one thing to let you know - it's good to use ~~~~ to auto-sign your edits. However, this is only to be done in Talk pages. Additions or alterations to main articles are not signed, as this clutters up the article text. Therefor, I've removed your userid from the article Sicilian Vespers. Please see WP:MOS for Wikipedia's Manual Of Style. Thanks, Trafford09 (talk) 07:45, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

HELP ME! How do I create footnotes. And how can I stop constant recital of an author's name....do I use "ibid".06:17, 16 August 2009 (UTC)Siciliano99

Your recent edits

Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 05:15, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Referencing

Hello - I wandered across your talk page after seeing your request on the Editor help page. I saw your question above about footnotes (and repeated referencing). There is WP:Referencing for beginners, but I'll give you an immediate example. It requires using "wikitext" (code) - here are some examples to show you what it is.

The easiest way to create footnotes that you can re-use is to write

<ref name="(nickname for reference)">CITATION</ref>

in the text where you want. Then, when you want to refer to the same source later on, you just type

<ref name="nickname for reference"/>.

where you want it in the text. This will put the same reference number, and the reference at the bottom will automatically reflect that it is used as a source in more than one place (there are links to move back to the text where the source was referenced). The nickname is whatever you choose. It's a unique name in that article for that particular reference (i.e. no two refs in one article can have the same nickname).

To do a citation, you need to use a citation template - a way of entering bibliographic data so that the refs are all in the same format. For a book, if you type this:

{{cite book|title=The Da Vinci Code|first=Dan|last=Brown|publisher=Anchor books|year=2006|ISBN=978-1400079179}}.

you get this:

Brown, Dan (2006). The Da Vinci Code. Anchor books. ISBN 978-1400079179.

So, to reference the Da Vinci code, should you wish to do so, type

<ref name="danbrown">{{cite book|title=The Da Vinci Code|first=Dan|last=Brown|publisher=Anchor books|year=2006|ISBN=978-1400079179}}</ref>

That gets you a footnote such as here. To cite the same reference again, just type

<ref name="danbrown"/>

And you get this. Note that the nickname doesn't appear anywhere in the article text - it's part of wikitext. Make sure all the code words like "title" and "year" are in lower case. The nickname is also case sensitive.

You also need to make sure that at the bottom of the article is the code {{reflist}}, which is where the references will end up. I have put it below where stated.

If it's a specific page or set of pages in a book, there is a page code as well. For example:

<ref name="oxling">{{cite book|title=The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics|first=Dirk|last=Geeraerts|first2=Hubert|last2=Cuyckens|publisher= [[Oxford University Press US]]|year=2007|ISBN=9780195143782|page=514-518}}</ref>

gets you this reference which you can check below. As you can see, I decided to add a wikilink to Oxford University Press US. The numbering of references is automatic, so if I cite Dan Brown again like this the reference number is still "1".

There is further help in WP:Citation_templates#Examples which shows all the different styles and information you can put in (newspapers, books, websites etc.).

As a note - if you open this page to edit it, you'll see lots of "nowiki" code around the examples I give. This is to show you what the code looks like without it working. Ignore it - you don't need it.

I hope this helps. It is a bit fiddly at first, but it soon gets easy - but I recommend using the preview button to check there isn't a small slip in the coding. You can cut and paste the example I gave of book citing, inserting your own information. You can always practice in your sandbox (a practice page you create in your user space), for example user:Siciliano99/referencing - click on the page to start editing.

Beneath this line I've put the reflist code to bring up the reference list

VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 07:45, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Magnum opus magnum

(Remember the Latin "sandwich structure"?)

Well, that's a fair question. I took 4 ½ years of Latin myself, but this was during the Carter administration.

Nostalgia: The ½ year was in university, the most ridiculous class I ever had. The class size was 7, in a seminar room seated at a single table. The prof was nearly at retirement age. I had to cut a couple of classes in a row during our engineering midterms. Once I'd come back again, he had evidently crossed my name off his class list in the interim. So when he had us recite our translations, he would skip over me because I wasn't there. I was sitting six feet away almost directly in front of him. He was not being rude or vindicative; his mind was somewhere in Latium or Gaul.
My buddy in that class, who would fill me in on what I would miss, is now a famous TV personality here with a WP page.

Magnus. Adjectives follow in general, but I think it's like the Romance languages. Some common ones precede. Possibly some change meaning depending on whether they precede or follow? I can't remember this subtlety exactly right now either. But for sure you say "Magna Graecia", not the reverse.

I was annoyed later, well after the 4 ½ years, to discover we'd always gotten some dumbed-down intro version of Latin grammar. Like ab/cum/de/ex/..., the 8 prepositions with ablative. Well, that's the list For Dummies. The actual list is longer, with words like "coram".

Anyway, maybe we should both try to look that magnum business up? I'm curious anyway.

I did encounter one or two occurrences of "opus magnum" in my retrofit. Obviously that's valid, so I left those in peace. A matter of personal taste.

I did not check for weird attempts at creating the plural, which is "magna opera", right? It's opus, operis, n. But obviously trying to use "opera" in English creates issues we would prefer to avoid.

Varlaam (talk) 16:24, 22 September 2009 (UTC)