Talk:Raynald Desjardins

This article should be published now

This might be ready to be published. It's not a very long article, and never will be, but it is certainly interesting and fits nicely with other articles (wiki linked). Peter K Burian (talk) 02:48, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

Definitely ready now, thanks to the expert assistance! Peter K Burian (talk) 03:27, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

Yes, a very good article with all the collaboration. If InformationvsInjustice wants to do the honours of publishing since he started it, it should be good to go. When publishing just make sure to add the similar categories seen at other mobsters like Vito's. Regards, Vaselineeeeeeee^★★★ 03:29, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

Agreed; definitely ready now, thanks to the expert assistance of User:Vaselineeeeeeee! Amazing how quickly an article can come together. Of course, Informata ob Iniquitatum did a ton of work on it before we got involved, and that may have taken much longer. It's great to see this type of collaboration. Peter K Burian (talk) 03:33, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

Needs a histsplit

Here's what should be the first entry in the history of the article. I'd use {{histsplit}} if it were better documented. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 05:35, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

@Jmcgnh: Do you know the proper people to contact for this? Vaselineeeeeeee^★★★ 15:45, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

@Vaselineeeeeeee: Well, I have the impression that only some admins are happy to deal with this sort of thing. I put this section in as a placeholder so I wouldn't forget to pursue it, but I should record that DragonflySixtyseven was the one who originally brought up the concern. What I don't understand is what's supposed to happen to the previous history. For my part, I'd be satisfied if it were assigned back to the original sandbox and deleted -- or, for that matter, simply deleted and forgotten. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 19:18, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

It would've been better to just make Raynald Desjardins from scratch copied from the sandbox. I don't know how to handle this now, but maybe an admin later will. Regards, Vaselineeeeeeee^★★★ 21:42, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

Vaselineeeeeeee, not really better. Copypaste from sandbox would have produced a need for a histmerge instead. The damage is done at the point a well-used sandbox is re-used. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 04:50, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

I think I figured out how {{histsplit}} is supposed to work and adapted the documentation from {{history merge}} to supply the missing documentation. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 07:05, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

• @Vaselineeeeeeee and Jmcgnh:  Done; I moved the old pre-Raynald-Desjardins edits back to User:InformationvsInjustice/sandbox where they came from. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:59, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

@Vaselineeeeeeee, Jmcgnh, and Anthony Appleyard: Thanks all for your efforts, and thanks Anthony for fixing the history mess.

Now, What did I do wrong? and What can I do to prevent a repeat of this problem in the future?

I'm afraid I am still unclear what happened here. Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 05:37, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Ah, I finally figured out the connection. Your sig is related to your username if one knows some Latin.

It's hard to say you did anything at all wrong when you did what lots of people do and what many Wiki training materials say to do: use a sandbox. I think that advice needs to be supplemented with "Use a sandbox for testing things. When you want to start an article, use a userspace draft." The next best solution is to ask for your sandbox to be deleted before you start writing a new topic. But I think the userspace draft is a better solution.

So "what happened?" When you start writing a new article in a sandbox, all of the old history of the sandbox remains attached. Attribution (who contributed what) is important to Wikipedia, both for giving credit where credit is due as well as in tracking who may have made a mistake. But when a sandbox moves from user space to article space, there's some concern to cut down on excess clutter in the history that's not relevant to the main space article. Admins can fix this. The opposite problem is when someone writes up a fine article in a sandbox and then copy-pastes that article into mainspace. The copy-paste operation does not preserve the history. When the sandbox only had one contributor, this is not so much of a problem, but your sandboxes have had substantial contributions from others. Admins can fix this, too.

But ideally, you start a new article in a new userspace draft and, when it's ready, move that on to article space, preserving the history. No extra work for admins. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 06:13, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Just one more thing. You had blanked your sandbox to get rid of the redirect. By some interpretations, this might have been a sign that you wanted the sandbox to be deleted. But instead it was restored to the state it was in just before the work on Desjardins was started. Wikipedia is reluctant to delete history, so when it was removed from the Desjardins article, it needed to go someplace and that someplace was back to your sandbox. I hope this hasn't been too confusing. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 06:50, 24 December 2018 (UTC)