The Skull Cinema

A good article this time, which entails a slightly different approach to editing than that taken for stub and start class articles. Less than 0.5% of articles are rated as Good or above on Wikipedia. As there is much more content than a random page usually throws up I may or may not edit the whole article. If I choose not to, I will often take the lead or last section and edit that before moving on (or sometimes a section at random if it looks interesting). Also, rather than making all the edits in one or two sessions, I will try to break down the edits so that reasoning can be given for each group and also so that another editor can revert something that they don't like (or is wrong) without having to trash all of the edits. Often if you are going to get feedback from another editor articles like this will be where it happens, so it is reasonable to be on your best (editing) behaviour. With all that in mind let's get to Jack Warhop's article . Warhop was an early 20 th...

Just to make things different, instead of a random article a List came up. Entitled Hoogendijk , it is a short list of people with that surname (almost all of whom are Dutch, unsurprisingly). Lists are quite common on Wikipedia ( forming 4.4% of all pages), so they will crop up now and then. Normally they do not require much editing at all, as the Page statistics for this list show with a grand total of 6 edits over 12 years. In this case there is a little preamble giving some information on the etymology of the surname. Here we can add a wiki-link to the term dyke, just in case the reader is not clear as to what the term relates to, and the single reference is not in a template so that can be expanded and reformatted into a Cite Web template reference. So at least there is something to do. The reference is mildly interesting as the page it links to is written in Dutch. So an infrequently used term is needed, |language=nl , which adds a descriptor to the citation. Also the nam...

The next topic demonstrates what is great about random editing. The 2015 ACC women's basketball tournament is not a subject I have any interest in whatsoever. But you can still help out sometimes. The article is rated as a stub and is basically a list of tables with content describing a post-season college league women's baseball tournament. It appears to be predominantly the work of a single user Lewisthjayhawk who has, let's say, a colourful history and leave it at that. Not that there is anything wrong with the content which all looks competently put together to my untutored eye. In fact, the only constitutive work was to add wiki-links to the list of players at the end of the article. A bit of minor editing to take out some white space and a wikilink for an abbreviation that would mean something to an American sports fan but not to me and it was done. Apart from adding an {{unreferenced}} template to the top of the article as it has not a single reference to...

And here we are at the Alexander Aircraft Company , a start-class rated article about a defunct aeronautical engineering company from the USA in the 1920's. As this is a subject with more interest to me I spent a little longer than usual on this article, giving it a top-to-tail polish. Starting with the lead paragraph , which consisted of a grand total of twelve words on arrival, I expanded it, if only by a bit, so at least there are now two sentences. The associated book citation was limited so this was expanded as well. Founding and Disaster subsections received a heavy dose of wiki-linking and the single reference provided across both subsections was dead, requiring a trip to The Wayback Machine to search for the given URL. The Wayback Machine is part of The Internet Archive , which is a not-for-profit set up back in the early days of the web to archive the nascent internet, as it was recognised that the content was not anywhere near as permanent as the previous forms of...

And with a single click we jump from 19 th century British poetry to 6 th century BC Chinese history. According to the random article presented, Duke Jing of Jin was the ruler of a state in ancient China. It is with a little trepidation that I approach editing this article as I know nothing about the subject and a chunk of the references are in Chinese. However the basics were still there to be done, as there were a few grammar and wikilinking alterations required. One edit that I made that doesn't show up on the displayed page is to the Short description template , changing it from " Ruler of the state of Jin " to " Ruler, state of Jin, China, c.6th BC ". Short descriptions are used for search results on Wikipedia mobile and some desktop searches and the idea is to keep then below 40 characters. If you haven't heard of Jin the current description is a bit limited so I dropped out some of the prepositions and definite articles and replaced them with...

As with most things, it's fun to have fun but you have to know how. With Wikipedia one way of making it entertaining is by using the ' Random Article ' link on the Main Menu bar located to the left of the page. The link selects an article at random from Wikipedia's 7,539,822 pages, as of the 8 th of February if you are on the English site, and offers it up. For general reading selecting random articles is not very useful. Probably because 50% of Wikipedia articles are stubs (very short articles with only a few hundred words or less) and further 30% are rated as start class (slightly longer). But it's quite a nice way to select an article for editing. Unsurprisingly most, or almost all, of the pages that are returned will be on a subject that you have no deep knowledge of or, in some cases, that you weren't even faintly aware existed. But that is part of the appeal of this strategy. Generally, then, this limits you to copy-editing for grammar/layout/ etc...

Having constructed a general model citation , I can now turn to creating a specific one for a particular word in the 1933 re-issue of the first edition of the OED . During the process of putting some of the bibliographic research for the re-issue onto the OED Wikipage the presence of existing citation templates was brought to my attention by Martin of Sheffield . The first port of call then, is to review what is currently available. There are four citation templates (see note) related to the OED listed on Category:Dictionary source templates ( Cite OED , Cite OED1 , Cite OED2 , Cite OED 1933 ) and, of these, Cite OED1 and Cite OED 1933 are for references to the first edition of the OED and therefore of interest. The outputs of the Cite OED1 and Cite OED 1933 templates are, "{{{1}}}". Oxford English Dictionary (1st ed.). Oxford University Press . 1933. and, {{{1}}} . Oxford English Dictionary (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. 1933. respectively...

Having worked through the process of creating a Wikipedia citation for the 1933 re-issue of the first edition of the OED using the Cite book template, it is now time to deploy it. The first job is to start my user page and drop the model citation onto it, with a link to the construction notes post , and ask for comments. No-one will see it, so I don't expect any feedback. The next step is to edit the table of Oxford English Dictionary Publications in the OED article to include the 1933 Supplement as an independent publication under the title, ' A New English Dictionary. ' The table isn't actually part of the main content of the OED article. For some reason it exists as an independent template (that is only used on one page), which seems a bit overcomplicated. Anyway, making the change wasn't complicated, though I'd better add the template to my Watchlist to make sure the change sticks. Now I can split the 1933 reference. First I checked all of the re...

Now I am in a position to begin assembling the citation. Finally. So let's get to it, the data used will be from the title pages below. The first terms of the Cite book template are last1 and first1 referring to the first and last names of the first author; and this is where the fun starts. The title page of the 1933 publication lists no authors, only editors (the OED was one of the earliest crowdsourced projects ). Let's make a decision to respect their published titles so these terms can be left blank. The next terms are author-link1 and author-mask1 . Author-link provides a field with which to encode a link to the Wiki page of the author, and author-mask allows an individual author's name to be replaced with em-dashes. More blanks. For books with multiple authors the subsequent last and first names are added as last n, first n , where n is the total number of authors. More blanks. The fields display-authors and last-author-amp control how ma...

Having completed the bibliographic research of the first edition (specifically the 1933 re-issue of the OED ) as part of the process of creating a model citation, I now have all the links to a full copy of the 1933 issue on the Internet Archive . Do I add them to the OED Wikipedia article? I could just go ahead and see if they get deleted or not, or I could be a bit more circumspect and ask on the talk page of the OED Wiki article first. Talk pages are used in Wikipedia to allow discussion of edits made to the accompanying article. There are guidelines for how to use them and a tutorial to get you started. Given that the vast majority (though not the entirety) of the 1933 re-issue's content is already included in the links to the 1888-1928 first edition sources given at the end of the article it is not clear whether the data for the 1933 re-issue is a worthwhile addition. Also the copyright status of the dictionary is a bit murky; at least I couldn't find a...