User talk:Dbrett

Welcome

Hi Dbrett. Welcome to English Wikiquote.

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Enjoy! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:15, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Curious about edit summaries

I see that you recently made two changes to Albert Einstein in which the edit summaries take an odd form. As I understand it, the MediaWiki software usually inserts an old C-style comment with section headings when one edits only a section, and the user-written explanation is typically added after that. This format allows the page histories to provide a convenient link to the section that was edited, showing the heading in light grey, while the user comment is in black. But those two edits show non-existent section headings with the names:

• Added passage on religion of fear developing into moral religion (taken from direct photocopy of the NYT Magazine article
• Passage from letter quoted in Dukas & Hoffman which concludes the book (perhaps owing to its remarkable content)

(You can see this by examining the Einstein article's page history.) This makes me suspect that you either manually added /* */ around your edit summary for some reason, or did a section-edit, but replaced the section heading (between the C markup) with your comments. Did I deduce correctly? If so, please note that you do not need to do this. In fact, it's confusing, as the page history then provides a link to a non-existent section heading. You should simply add your comments after the automatically generated heading comment, or if doing a full-page edit, just type your comments without markup. It's not a major problem, though; I'm mostly just curious if I reasoned correctly.

Whatever the case may be, thank you for your contributions thus far to Wikiquote! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:37, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Response to Jeff Q

Thanks, Jeff, for the advice! I am new at this, and just learning the ropes. As soon as time permits, I'll go back and try to get those comments in the standard form. Always happy to receive helpful tips! Cheers... Brett R

No problem; we're all new at some point. Three more observations:

1. When adding to an existing topic on a talk page (like above), instead of using the "+" tab to start a new topic, you should just click on the [edit] link to the far right of the topic heading and add your comments below the existing ones. One usually uses indentation (starting each line with 1 colon (:) per indentation) to set new postings off from old ones. (Edit this topic to see how I did this, or take a look at a long discussion page like Wikiquote:Village pump to see not only how it's done but why we need to keep topics and indented responses straight.)
2. Don't worry about fixing edit summaries — you can't. They become a part of the database that only developers can change. (Many's the time I've wanted to correct mine, especially when I make an embarrassing tpyo… er, typo.) The main thing to remember is always to make some brief comment on what you edited, to help folks reviewing the edit history to learn what happened without having to page through each change.
3. Use four tildes (~~~~) as a signature for talk-page postings (not article edits, though). This is automatically converted when you save your edit into both your user ID and a UTC timestamp that makes it clear to all when your made your post. This can be very important in long discussions, and is sometimes required to be taken seriously (e.g., when nominating or voting for articles to be deleted). Best just to get into the habit.

You're off to a great start. Explore some of the links provided in the welcome message above, experiment with the sandbox, and feel free to ask me questions on my talk page. Have fun! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:24, 13 May 2006 (UTC)