User talk:Diggins

Welcome to Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core! We hope you will contribute much and well. You will probably want to read the [Help:Contents help pages]. Again, welcome and have fun! Renegade (talk) 13:11, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

Maybe the stub template will help

Nope, someone has to create the template first.

-- Crew (talk) 17:42, 15 October 2016 (UTC)

I need some time to just play around with the machinery. Wikipedia provides users with their own personal sandboxes, and that verbiage is carried through into the InfoGalatic page on sandboxes: "If you are logged in, you can access your personal sandbox ("Sandbox" link at the very top of the page, next to your user name)." Does this feature exist yet? No problem if it isn't, but I'd love to use it if it does. Thanks! --Diggins (talk) 21:52, 15 October 2016 (UTC)

Author Template

I deleted the contents of the J. Random Author page because it was in the info (fact) namespace, but did not seem to discuss an actual author (even if pseudonymous). Can you move the page to a better location, and clearly label the contents as being fictitious?

Also, this pseudonym is confusingly similar to a pseudonym used by MIT's Random Hall.

-- Viking (talk) 05:16, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

-- Ok. I was practicing formatting in what I thought was a page no one else could see without going through my page. I'm new at this, and what I'd really like is the personal sandbox they mention over on Wikipedia, as I spoke about earlier on this talk page. I certainly accept the objection. I'm not sure where else I can practice without running the risk of someone seeing what I'm fooling with and thinking it's real data. If you can explain how to do that (maybe it's something other than a sandbox; permissions? Settings? I don't know) I'll gladly limit my experiments to where people can't find them. Any guidance would be appreciated. Diggins (talk) 18:18, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

I know what you are saying, but - and I'm happy to be corrected - but my opinion is that it is better to "break" a few edits in public instead of trying to "play around" or "practice" in a sandbox. Wikipedia has tons of public mess and crosstalk on their pages, even with the Sandboxes. I don't think that's bad. Sandboxes - again, just my opinion here - are too much like safe spaces. Serendipity and and discovery are not encouraged there.

-- User:NeitherNor 5:23 19 October 2016

Thank you for explaining what you were trying to do. I have moved the draft template to https://infogalactic.com/info/User:Diggins/J._Random_Author I restored the text, and added a big disclaimer at the top.

The sandbox page is visible to the world, but the URL is clearly part of your sandbox. The trick to making more sandbox pages is to make sure that you start with the URL of your User page, and do not accidentally delete the User:Diggins part of the URL.

-- Viking (talk) 02:09, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

--Excellent. Thanks for that. I'll make that page more generic and less humorous since people can actually see it. My other fear was that if I create a page that takes significant time to complete, users might see an incomplete version. The answer there may be to write it top-down. This may be less like writing a document and more like writing a program: You create a skeleton that compiles even if there's nothing useful in it yet, and then add features so that it always "compiles;" i.e., is comprehensible and doesn't end halfway through. I've made changes on Wikipedia but have never created a new page from scratch. This has definitely been an education. Once more, thanks for your help! Diggins (talk) 02:32, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

Lua errors on one of the pages I wrote

Hi guys: I haven't been up here much recently, but today when I brought up the page I wrote on author Jeff Duntemann, all the footnote references are throwing some kind of Lua error. I don't know Lua and even if I did I'm not sure it would help me deal with IG's internal machinery. I'll be glad to leave that to the experts.

Assuming that this isn't an error in MediaWiki itself, are there any hints about how to fix those references so they won't throw Lua errors?

Many thanks in advance for any advice anybody might have!

--Diggins