User:BDD/Mentorship/Cellequilit

With few formal definitions of what the Guild's mentorship program is about, I think the logical conclusion is that it's about whatever you want it to be. You could pick up a book to learn about copy editing in general, but I'm guessing you want to know more about the practice in the context of Wikipedia and the Guild. So first give me a brief rundown of your copy editing experience so far and what you hope to take away from this mentorship. And this probably goes without saying, but the Manual of Style will be the "textbook" for this course. You don't have to read every word of it, but make sure you're familiar with it and can refer to it when necessary. --BDD (talk) 18:18, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Experience

For 8 years I worked on the verbal section of the Educational Testing Service's Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General test, writing and reviewing test questions, building tests, responding to edits, proofreading, and seeing test books through final production. For a further 3 years I had primary responsibility for all aspects of that test section. And for 5 years after I left the Educational Testing Service, I freelanced, writing and reviewing various tests, including some in French and Latin. I always had the regular support of editors who made suggestions, which I was free to accept or reject. (Perhaps not relevant to Wikipedia, all the foregoing...) I have never edited electronic text in HTML or Wiki, or an encylopedia entry. In the last few days, I have tackled one or two random WP articles listed as "needing copy editing," with rather mixed results. I still can't understand the View history entries and screens. I have fixed a few things, and written prolix talk page comments about what I couldn't fix, none of which elicited replies from anyone, and all of which I now regret writing. :)

Familiarization with Wikipedia context

Some of what I want is indeed a familiarity with Wikipedia best practice. For example, what types of communication are most annoying, most pleasing, most considerate, most expected? What is the ideal flowchart for editing? (Many "welcome to the community" pages encourage one to jump in and start fixing things in ways that seem quite random. This violates my sense that standard developmental questions should be asked and answered before the fine grooming of text is undertaken.) How do you "hand off" an article when you know it has problems you can't address? Or do you? What does the ideal edit history look like? What is overkill in terms of documentation?

Personal improvement

I want to learn to edit online text. (In my first efforts at fixing some random thing, I managed to create at least one broken link, I fear. Or perhaps not.) And I want to learn to function more independently. In the past I had a safety net of good editors advising me, and could mentally delegate some of my conformity-to-house-style and obscure-points-of-grammar concerns to them. I fear I may have became lax.

(I hope this has not been too long-winded.)Cellequilit

I guess all this boils down to advice and feedback. But perhaps you are tied up right now with other work? If you want to end or postpone the mentorship, please let me know.Cellequilit (talk) 18:01, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Pardon my delayed response—I had forgotten to watch this page. It sounds like you'll need little to no mentoring on how to copy edit in general, that you just need to learn the ins and outs of Wikipedia and online text. I'll start sections for those specific areas; general discussion can continue up here (we could utilize the talk page, but as long as it's just us, that seems unnecessary). --BDD (talk) 18:22, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia conventions

I'll start by addressing the questions you've already raised.

Obviously, different Wikipedians have very different ways of communicating, so how communicative you want to be is largely up to you. But there are definitely best practices in this area. A few examples:

If you're reverting a substantial change to an article, it's courteous to discuss the issue with the editor or to leave an extended rationale on the article's talk page. Sometimes you may want to discuss a reversion first, while others you may want to be bold and then give an explanation of why you reverted. This is a judgment call. If you're reverting an edit that, say, violated our biographies of living persons policy or could be a copyright violation, it's a good idea to be more proactive. If someone adds legitimate information to an article that just seems irrelevant, maybe discuss first. But in general, if you're going to revert others' edits, you should familiarize yourself with the three-revert rule. If you don't, you risk being blocked for edit-warring.
WikiLove is how you show appreciation for a job well done. It's appropriate for editors who help you with a problem, who do good work on an article, and are generally nice Wikipedians. It doesn't hurt to be selective in giving it out, however. If you watch How I Met Your Mother, you may have seen the recent episode "The Stamp Tramp," where one of the characters gives his personal seal of approval so freely that it loses meaning. I don't think I've specifically seen anything like that here, but it's definitely conceivable. A barnstar is a stronger form of recognition, more like an award. There are a ton of them, for all sorts of situations. Most of them are given from one editor to another, but you can give yourself service awards. You can give yourself the {{Registered Editor}} badge immediately if you'd like.
The flip side of WikiLove is essentially warning messages, which you can apply to offending users' talk pages. As long as you're sure someone has engaged in vandalism, harassment, etc., don't feel bad about giving these. But again, it's a judgment call. Some editors would say "Don't template the regulars," but others disagree.
Otherwise, it might be a good idea to look at experienced users' talk pages to see how they interact with others. The administrator Dennis Brown, for example, gets a lot of traffic on his talk page. Look through it a bit and you're bound to see examples of good and bad communication.

The only thing like a standardized editing flowchart that I know of is the bold, revert, discuss cycle. For better or worse, there's no getting around the fact that Wikipedia editing is very open and informal. I think you may get used to that, but if you prefer more formal structures, WikiProjects may suit you. You've probably seen the Guild of Copy Editors Backlog Elimination Drive already. Content-based WikiProjects (like WikiProject France, which I see you've joined) provide categories of articles that need improvement. Some WikiProjects, such as WikiProject Oregon, have regular efforts to improve a certain article (WPO focuses on a specific article every week). Personally, I'm very intellectually curious and read Wikipedia as much or more than I edit, so when I come across errors, I just dive in and fix them.
If you want to "hand off" an article, consider notifying relevant WikiProjects. Most articles have one or more affiliated WikiProjects tagged on their talk pages. There are also a bevy of cleanup templates you can put at the top of articles indicating what's wrong with them. Will anyone ever respond to those? It depends. :)
What do you mean by an ideal edit history—for an article or for a user?
Wikipedia:Citation overkill is the best answer I can give to how much documentation is overkill.
Given your background, you may want to read Wikipedia:There is no deadline.

Online text

Fortunately, Wikipedia is designed for everyone to edit. I personally know very little HTML and very rarely have problems "coding" what I want to do on Wikipedia. So what level are you at now? Could you write something in bold in HTML? On Wikipedia? Do you know how to make a wikilink?

Thank you!

God, this is all so helpful and so rich at the links. Thank you, thank you.

As far as what level I'm at now, I can make something bold in HTML (text) and probably here too, but I'd use the ready functions at the top of the edit window for that. I can make a Wikipedia link to another Wikipedia article with simple brackets, but I'm not sure how to link to other things on the internet--I've done it, but sometimes using the | thingy doesn't work the way I think it will for reasons that are obscure to me.

"edit history-->edit summary," I think, for an article edit. Don't know how to do anything for a user.

I wonder, would it make sense to pick an article to edit and just have you look in on it every so often to get a sense of what I'm doing? Anyway, even if that isn't a good use of your time, I can spend a lot of time on the links you have already provided.

One other thing, I'm not sure about encyclopedia style, really, so please please comment on that when you see me err--I'm the opposite of a competent independent widely experienced editor. ETS is its own little world; tests are pretty esoteric, when you come right down to it.

What kind of rhythm do you expect on communication between us? I can do a little every day but I am going to need a while to work through what you have here. Please let me know what works best for you (I know people are sometimes online or available only a few times per week.)

Again, thank you, thank you.Cellequilit (talk) 01:05, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

First of all, I can plan on replying at least once a day on weekdays. I'm inconsistent on weekends—occasionally I edit vigorously, but it's not uncommon for me to register few or no edits on a weekend.

Like so many things, you'll gain familiarity with markup language with practice. Style formatting is one of the more basic types, and it looks like you have a grasp on that. You probably noticed that both HTML markup and Wikipedia's internal system (the 's) work here. Help:Wiki markup and Help:HTML in wikitext are good resources for more information. The toolbar that appears before an editing window by default is very helpful; poke around their and familiarize yourself with its time-saving options.

Help:Edit summary is your guide to edit summaries. Several of the ones you've used already are probably a bit too long. You haven't done this, but always try to avoid argumentative, snarky, or disparaging edits, which are usually considered breaches of wikiquette. It's perfectly fine to use abbreviations in edit summaries. For content-based edits, I usually use something like formatting, punctuation, etc. If someone's interested in the particulars of what you've done, they can check the diff. In discussions such as AfD and RM, many editors will just use one-letter edit summaries based on the most common votes there: k for keep, d for delete, s for support, and o for oppose. Talk pages more generally may have c for comment and r for reply. These aren't universal, though I adhere to them for the most part. Some people get more specific, such as "r to BDD." I'd encourage you to develop a personal system that works for you and to stick with it.

I like your idea about picking sample articles to practice your skills going forward. What did you have in mind? Would you prefer I check some of the work you do on your own, or should I pick out example articles to work on? --BDD (talk) 20:33, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I prefer that you pick articles, if you would. In the meantime I'll try to learn things from the links you've provided.

What do we do when this page gets too long?

Also, thanks for the tip about my too lengthy edit summaries. I got that sense but wasn't sure.

P.S. You know, the most useful tip right now would be an answer to my most burning question: Where is the UNDO button in the edit window? :) The cursor misbehaves for me, is never where I leave it, deletes text seemingly randomly, inserts text in bizarre locations. I am going nuts with it...Cellequilit (talk) 05:31, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Ok, why don't you work on Grupo Bimbo? I recently tagged it for copy editing, so see if you can fix it to the point where we can remove that tag. I would suggest starting by looking through the list of featured articles, which represent the best of Wikipedia, for an article to use as a model, preferably for a business. Personally, I learn best by referring to examples. If this is too broad a task or if you'd like further guidance, just let me know.

What is too long? I know what you're getting at, though. Why don't you do some practice here by introducing some section headings and otherwise improving the organization of this page. FYI, Wikipedia:Article size discusses when articles should be split, although here, the only constraints on size are what we create. If it starts to get too long, we can move content elsewhere, but let's keep it here for now.

As for an undo button, there isn't a built-in undo button that I'm aware of, but your computer's usual shortcut should do the trick. That's Ctrl+F on a PC, ⌘+F on a Mac. As in programs like Word, Ctrl+Y will "re-do," or undo an undo. I haven't used a Mac in a while, so I don't know if ⌘+Y does the same thing or not. --BDD (talk) 00:21, 5 December 2012 (UTC)