And welcome back! Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need any input on anything. I'm delighted to see you return to productive editing, as is everyone who commented on the noticeboard thread above. Happy editing! – bradv🍁21:53, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to be honest, I didn't expect such positive feedback for this unblock appeal considering all the actions back then. Thank you very much for the support and warm welcome back guys! MikeTheEditor104 (talk) 11:51, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A kitten for you!
Welcome back and congrats on your successful unblock request!
I saw your unblock request at WP:AN and wanted to say welcome back! I brought you this pie, though best of luck trying to eat it. I'm looking forward to your contributions, and let me know if you run into any problems! Wug·a·po·des 01:36, 22 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Your unblock appeal was very well written and (obviously) persuasive. I truly hope that you will be a productive editor going forward, and if I can be of any assistance to you, please let me know. This is your fresh beginning. I wish you well. Cullen328Let's discuss it03:54, 22 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your comments. Yes, to tell you the truth I was not even excepting the request to be considered considering the past but from time to time I'd look back at everything and realized how much I vandalised back then.. I felt the need to apologize to everyone as it was a lot of hassle for all involved. Honestly, I also missed editing here once in a while, mainly checking for any vandalism or improving articles bit by bit. MikeTheEditor104 (talk) 16:46, 22 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Welcome back
Welcome back to Wikipedia. I saw you'd been accepted for CVUA training by CASSIOPEIA, so you probably have all the help you need there—but if you've got any questions while they're not around and I am, you're also more than welcome to ping me or hop over to my talkpage. AddWittyNameHere08:36, 24 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You're welcome. :) It's always good to see former problem editors turn over a new leaf and become productive Wikipedians, and you certainly appear to have matured a great deal. AddWittyNameHere09:22, 24 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
(Another) Welcome back!
I know I am just joining the throng here, but I'm glad your unblock appeal was accepted! I hope you have to with your CVUA, I myself am a recent graduate and I had lots of fun! Good luck for the future! Yours, - Puddleglum2.0 Have a talk?03:26, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much! Personally I just love the idea of counter-vandalism as it's something you can get started with pretty easily, at some point I hope to contribute more to articles, problem with that is it's so hard to find something to begin with! MikeTheEditor104 (talk) 18:09, 27 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Firstly, thanks for your input :) To answer you, I think it's more I genuinely don't know how to contribute to articles apart from the bare basics i.e finding a citation source or editing grammar, actually adding content which is cited seems hard as you really need to make sure you're adding proper info to any article and I wouldn't know what to even add hehe. MikeTheEditor104 (talk) 20:47, 27 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
That makes sense, yeah, though I'd be happy to help, but I can imagine you might be more interested in different subjects. Certainly don't want to pressure you into doing anything, just figured I'd point out the option because it's an area that gets overlooked a lot even though it accounts for a whopping ~1.7% of all English wikipedia articles. AddWittyNameHere23:39, 27 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't mind at all, if you have any extra resources feel free to send them, I do have a tiny bit of actual contributions to articles and it's always fun seeing it remain there :) MikeTheEditor104 (talk) 07:08, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
There's too many different tasks to list them all here (seriously. This or this is more or less the state of the average moth species article) and what tasks would be good for you depend on 1. the kind of edit you'd prefer making (I'm going to guess content work over maintenance/clean-up/infrastructure?), 2. how familiar and comfortable you are with wiki markup and 3. how familiar and comfortable you are with taxonomy and species descriptions. (Even if your answer to the latter two is "I'm not familiar with even the basics of either", I've still got plenty of stuff you could do--but I'd be aiming you at a different backlog than someone who answers "good with taxonomy, not so much with markup", "good with markup but no clue how taxonomy works" or "pretty decent with both". AddWittyNameHere08:39, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
For the kind of edit, a bit of anything honestly, if I found something which I felt I could add a lot to, I would. I think I'm alright with the wiki markup at a basic level although there is more to learn, as for your 3rd point, not really sadly. :( I was wondering, this is quite unrelated and more related to CVUA, do you have an idea if there's a way to run into test edits easier? I seem to be stuck on this one as all the edits that crop up these past few days seem to just be vandal edits with the test edits going by me, I installed Huggle mainly as a reference only and I don't think there's anything. :( MikeTheEditor104 (talk) 08:46, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Test edits occur by IPs and by fresh accounts, in my experience, which means that to find them it's best to keep an eye on the contribs of real fresh accounts. There used to be a nifty New Editors Contributions special page, but that one has since ceased to exist. One option is keeping an eye on the User Creation Log, then check their contribs once that link turns blue. You'll still find more vandalism and good edits than editing tests that way, but it might help. Alternatively, open the Recent Changes feed and add the Newcomers filter. Again, no guarantee, though. Or just be patient. Sooner or later you'll come across a bunch. (It also helps to hang around during times school kids in English-speaking areas are likely to be around. Wikipedia's been around long enough, is well-known enough and has inspired enough fairly similar sites that the newness of "oh wow if I click edit and type abc at the top of the article, it shows up?!" has worn off to most folks who've been around the 'net a while)
Unfortunately, I have to log off for now, and probably would've waited to respond until I'm back (probably somewhere between 9 and 14h from now) if not for the above question. I'll get back to you with moth/butterfly things you could do once I'm back online. AddWittyNameHere09:22, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for all your advice! What I ended up doing was a bit of everything, ultimately I went onto Huggle, went through as many edits as possible and eventually found a test edit (it is still a bit unclear as we cannot be certain on the edit, but it falls into the scope of a test edit). Take your time on the reply, don't worry about it :) MikeTheEditor104 (talk) 14:24, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You're welcome. Okay, so onto the Lepidoptera (the order of moths and butterflies) work, I've dumped a couple types of work below for you. I can come up with a fair few more suggestions, but I don't want to overwhelm you:
Clean-up work (copy-editing, grammar, etc.):
Really really easy, but also utterly boring and repetitive: there's still several hundred articles (well, okay, about a thousand at time of writing, but I'll be doing some too so it'll be down a couple hundred soon) that use the rather awkward phrasing "is a genus of moth". That should instead be either "is a genus of moths" or "is a moth genus".
(Some of them also don't have moth linked, even though it should be. Best to write moths as [[moth]]s not [[moths]] to avoid needlessly sending folks through a redirect. Exceptions: If "genus of moth" occurs as part of a phrase like "genus of moth [family/subfamily/tribe] [...]", it's correct and should be left alone. "genus of moth [in/of] the family [...]" is fair game, though.)
Infrastructural work (categories, redirects, short descriptions and kin):
Short descriptions: Can either be done by gadget (Preferences -> Gadgets -> scroll down to Editing -> Shortdesc helper or manually by adding {{Short description|Description here}} at the top of an article, with 'Description here' of course replaced with, well, an actual description. Most folks appear to prefer the gadget. Probably easier to do if you've got some subject knowledge, but I'd gladly write up a bunch of short descriptions for you and point you at the relevant set of articles if you decide you'd like to work on Lepidoptera short descriptions. (Not that it's all that hard to write something more precise than WikiData's eternal "species of insect"/"species of moth" (or 'genus of', tribe, subfamily, etc. depending on the rank of the taxon involved), which is what gets served otherwise.)
Content/referencing work:
AfroMoths (www.afromoths.net) is a pretty great source for basic taxonomic info on moths in Africa, but many of the articles in Category:Moths of Africa don't use it as reference, or have it only as a bareurl and/or not inlined. Now, some of the things there require more subject knowledge than you probably have, but one thing you can do is verify taxon author and year, and reference it if not referenced. Similarly, add countries AfroMoths lists for distribution if they're not present in the wiki article, or reference them if they're present but not referenced. I am uncertain how familiar and comfortable you are with cite templates, but here's the format I personally use for those references:
<ref name="AfroMoths">{{cite web |last1=De Prins |first1=J. |last2=De Prins |first2=W. |title= |url= |website=Afromoths, online database of Afrotropical moth species (Lepidoptera) World Wide Web electronic publication (www.afromoths.net) |accessdate= |date=2019}}</ref>
You'd just have to fill in the relevant title=, url= and accessdate= fields. An example of a fully filled-in AfroMoths reference:
<ref name="AfroMoths">{{cite web |last1=De Prins |first1=J. |last2=De Prins |first2=W. |title=''Abachausia'' Balinsky, 1994 |url=http://www.afromoths.net/genus/show/496010 |website=Afromoths, online database of Afrotropical moth species (Lepidoptera) World Wide Web electronic publication (www.afromoths.net) |accessdate=29 November 2019 |date=2019}}</ref>
How familiar are you with the way Wikipedia referencing works? You might run into articles with things like list-defined references, for example. Would you appreciate an explanation on how that works, or do you already know?
Two important things of note, one technical and the other content-related:
Genus pages from AfroMoths can just be taken straight from the URLbar, but for species pages, please make sure to copy the Permalink those pages have just above the info table.
Parentheses and square brackets around the author/year have specific meanings in taxonomy. If you see a case where our article and AfroMoths give the same name/year but with a difference in presence/absence of parentheses/brackets, lemme know and I'll explain more (as well how to figure out what's correct). I could do so now, but who knows if you'll even run into such a case, and this reply is definitely long enough without me slapping another 2-3 paragraphs on.
Woah! Thanks for all of this information first off all, like all this information should be available in the form you've written way more often, so thank you. :)
The clean up work seems fairly straightforward as a start, so that's something I'll be looking into in the coming days for sure. As for the Infrastructure work, yes I'd highly appreciate some examples before starting with that, moths interest me don't get me wrong but any specific subject knowledge on it I'll need help with. The Content/referencing work is something I'd probably enjoy the most out of all these tasks, mostly because you actually learn new information and end up contributing quite a fair amount of information to the article itself.
In terms of Wikipedia referencing, I recently learnt how to actually fill up a full citation for some information so I think that might count, mostly just using the automatic form in the editor itself. I recently made this edit with a citation and it seems to have stayed!
Hope I'm not asking too much with regards to the CVUA, I recently got a task to find pages and request semi-protection or full-protection on them, I'm mostly confused on when I'm going to run into this situation to tell you the truth, in an effort to make it easier, I requested permission to use STiki which might help.
CVUA first: Oh, you'll sooner or later run into cases where a page must be protected. (There's times when there's not a lot going on requiring (semi-)protection, and then there's cloudbursts where it seems like by the time you've finished writing one request, you've already found several more that also need protection.) Some of that is pretty random: it's not really predictable when things like raids from other parts of the internet, rapidly-IP-hopping vandals or one of our Long-Term Abuse cases will strike. However, with time and observation, you'll learn to recognize patterns in many of the rest of the cases.
One good way to get a head-start on that is take a look at the page history of WP:Requests for page protection and see what patterns you spot.
Another is by thinking things through logically, especially when it comes to semi-protection: if there's a sudden influx of multiple different IPs and/or new users vandalizing a page or otherwise causing serious disruption, they must have come from somewhere. What happened to bring several of them to the same page or set of pages at the same time? Unless it's a raid or a group of friends messing around, it's generally because the subject of that page is currently relevant and provokes emotions in people. A couple of examples: a massive scandal that just broke in the news. A sports team that just won (or lost) a match against their biggest rival. A band that just split up. A popular series that got cancelled. Those are all pretty common targets. Doesn't mean it ends up needing protection every time, but it's sure more common there than, say, on the article of a random species of lizard.
Additionally, sudden large-scale death (plane crashes, school shootings, terrorist attacks, lethal natural disasters, etc.) tends to also bring out folks who don't normally edit Wikipedia. While some are willing to learn how we do things, others just want to make the page say what they feel it should say, and if the rules say "nope", surely that just means the rules are wrong.
Regarding the sourcing: looks like you've got a good grasp on the basics. Nice work! There's some useful stuff I could teach you (e.g. the list-defined references I mentioned earlier), but that brings me to the next point:
It might be easier if we create a subpage in your userspace (or mine, if you'd prefer) for all the moth/butterfly things. That way I could separate things between a talk page and the actual subpage, so you can have a nice overview of the various things I show you/explain without having to scan through several hundred lines of conversation to find them back. (And we will hit several hundred lines: prior to this reply of mine, our current convo already clocks in at well over a hundred).
Got it, so it's basically just noticing a pattern, if the same page crops up in the recent changes or something similar it's probably being targetted by a group and protection should be requested, I'll need to find some time to go through some recent change's patrolling.
Yup. Patterns matter a fair lot not just to when a page needs protection, but also in spotting more subtle vandalism, spotting systematic block evaders/sock puppeteers, and a variety of similar matters. Sometimes the pattern itself is sufficient proof, sometimes it's just enough to show you where to look or what to look into. (And sometimes something seems to be a pattern but ends up being coincidence anyway)
I'll be creating that subpage some point in the next few hours, or tomorrow at latest, depending on when my current headache subsides. (It's not too terrible a headache: I am still perfectly capable of doing basic and repetitive jobs that I'm well-used to. However, it's causing me some frustration in trying to write up explanations in such a way they'd also actually be useful to you. Figure it's more useful to both of us if you get them a little later but they make actual sense than if you get a whole heap of unintelligible rambling now. AddWittyNameHere22:29, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much AddWittyNameHere, sorry for not replying as I have been very busy. Seriously though, the pages you created are fantastic, I will be checking them further once I'm more free schedule wise, thanks again :) MikeTheEditor104 (talk) 18:03, 13 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hm...guess you want another welcome back?[FBDB] Nah, seriously, no worries. I had noticed you hadn't replied, but I also saw you hadn't been around on Wikipedia at all, so I figured you probably were either busy or not in the mood for Wikipedia. Which, fair enough—we're volunteers, no one's required to be around seven days a week, every week. Besides which, it'd make me one hell of a hypocrite if I went whining about it, as I'm prone to disappearing for much longer myself. (I tend to be around for a couple weeks to months, then not around at all for several months. Around maybe a quarter of the time at most. Oh well, as I tend to make ridiculous numbers of edits in those few months a year I am around, it all balances out) Glad to hear you appreciate the pages. :) AddWittyNameHere18:51, 13 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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