User talk:Thehawk

Welcome

Welcome, Thehawk, to BattleTechWiki!

We look forward to your contributions and want to help you get off to a good strong start. Hopefully you will soon join the army of BattleTech Editors! If you need help formatting the pages, visit the manual of style. For general questions go to the Help section or the FAQ. If you can't find your answer there, please ask an Admin.

---

Additional tips
Here's some extra tips to help you get around in the wiki:

• For policies and guidelines, see The Five Core Policies of BattleTechWiki and the BTW Policies. Another good place to check out is our market of Projects, to see how the smaller communities within BTW do things in their particular niche areas.
• Each and every page (articles, policies, projects, images, etc.) has its very own discussion/talk page, found on the tab line at the top of the page. This is a great place to find out what the community is discussing along that subject and what previous issues have already been solved.
• If you want to play around with your new wiki skills, the Sandbox is for you. Don't worry: you won't break anything. A great resource for printing out is the Wiki Cheat Sheet.
• If you're not registered, then please consider doing so. At the very least, you'll have a UserPage that you own, rather than sharing one with the community.
• Also consider writing something about yourself on your UserPage (marked as "Thehawk" at the top of the page, though only do this if you're registered). You'll go from being a 'redshirt' to a 'blueshirt,' with the respect of a more permanent member.
  • This is really helpful for the admins, as it gives your account that touch of "humanity" that assists us in our never-ending battle with spambots.
• For your first few edits on the wiki, please do not add any URLs (which can be an indicator of SPAM).
• Consider introducing yourself on our Discord server.
• In your Preferences, under the edit tab, consider checking Add pages I create to my watchlist and Add pages I edit to my watchlist, so that you can see how your efforts have affected the community. Check back on following visits by clicking on watchlist.
• If you're bored and want to find something to do, try the Random button in the sidebar, or check out the List of Wanted Pages. Or even go to Special Pages to see what weird stuff is actually tracked by this wiki.
• Please sign your name on Talk pages using four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking on the circled button in this image; this will automatically produce your name (or IP address, if you are editing anonymously) and the date.

Again, welcome to Sarna's BattleTechWiki!

*******Be Bold*******

References

Hi Thehawk,

I noticed that you seem to be having a few problems with formatting reference tags here on Sarna. I'm a big fan of reference tags myself - the more here, the better, as far as I'm concerned - so I thought I'd give you a couple of tips, in the hope that they might prove useful.

Generally, there are two kinds of references here - the ones only used once in an article, and the ones that get used repeatedly. Something like a single 'Mech variant from a record sheet on the BattleMech page will probably only have a single-use reference tag because it's just a single paragraph, where something like a unit article on a major unit will use the multiple-use tags much more, because often there'll be lots of information going in from the same source.

The text part of a reference tag should normally contain three parameters - the name of the source, the page(s) from which the information is drawn, and the title of the specific section on those pages from which the information comes, if appropriate.

So, if I wanted to quote a 'Mech variant from a particular section within the "Variants" section of the Phoenix Hawk 'Mech entry in Technical Readout: 3025, the three parameters of my reference would be:

''Technical Readout: 3025'', p. 50, "Variants"

That tells someone that if they want to check the source I've quoted, they want the paragraphs under the subtitle "Variants" on page 50 of Technical Readout: 3025.

Where the single use and multiple use parts of a reference come in is how the wiki code around those parameters is written. If a reference is only going to be used once, then it can just go inside basic ref tags:

<ref>''Technical Readout: 3025'', p. 50, "Variants"</ref>

If I wanted to use that reference more than once, it's more efficient to make it a multiple use tag, like a variable in computer programming terms. I need to create a name for that reference, so that Sarna picks up that I'm repeating the same reference tag. What format that name takes is up to you, but I generally try and make my references fairly intuitive, so that it's clearly linked to the source I'm quoting - that way, if I'm doing an edit that involves quoting several different sources repeatedly, I can keep track of all the tags. For something like the reference above, I'd use this kind of tag:

<ref name="TRO:3025p50">''Technical Readout: 3025'', p. 50, "Variants"</ref>

Then, when I want to reuse that tag, all I need to do is insert the following shorthand tag to repeat the entire reference at the appropriate points in the article:

<ref name="TRO:3025p50"/>

The shorthand inside the tag - the "TRO:3025p50" bit tells me that it's Technical Readout: 3025 page 50; the fact that I put it inside quotation marks is an old computer programming hangup of mine - quote marks inside a tag typically mean "the bit inside the quotes is all one string".

Does that help at all? BrokenMnemonic (talk) 00:05, 25 January 2013 (PST)