User talk:Darren-M/Archives/2019/October
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Welcome
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Copyedit help
Replying on your talk page so you can keep notes for reference.
- @Darren-M: Yup, you can ask me about copy editing and it's no bother. FYI, you'll probably get a quicker response at the drive talk page or coordinators talk page which all of the coords are watching. Your copyedit looks good and I've created a section for you at the drive talk page with the wordcount of the article before you started your copy edit. When you're confident and remove the {{copy edit}} tag from the article, you can change the {{working}} line to {{completed}} and optionally update the figures at the bottom of the section.
- Sorry if that's a little complicated. It's a bit of a legacy system set up to semi-automate the time-consuming process of doing tallies at the end of the month. You're absolutely free to do copy editing outside of drives and blitzes, but we prefer that you participate and record your copy edits so that we can check your work, offer feedback, and make sure you're credited for your contributions.
- The expected thoroughness of the copy edit largely depends on the quality of the article (usually listed on the article's talk page, from stub and start-class, C, B, GA and FA). A featured article is expected to be perfect, an example of the very best writing on Wikipedia. A good article is expected to be clear with no errors and compliant with MOS for lead, layout and text formatting. Working down the list, expectations become lower. This is because featured articles are essentially "finished" or "complete", shouldn't have any other issues and aren't expected to undergo major changes, so the copy edit is the final polish. A C-class article, on the other hand, is not a thorough treatment of the subject and may need a lot of expansion and other improvements; because the article is still under construction and the content is likely to change, it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time getting the prose perfect. Instead, those copy edits tend to focus on cleaning up the rough parts of the prose, so the text is understandable and has encyclopedic tone, and so that it looks like a Wikipedia article. Copy edits of lower quality articles often turn up more issues and can be as difficult as copy editing the higher quality articles, but it's a different kind of work. One of the symbols we use for copy editing is a quill crossed with a mop: you use the quill for the high quality prose and the mop for clean up. I recommend working on lower-quality articles, especially as a new editor, while you learn your way around.
- If you haven't visited there already, please take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/How to where there are resources, help files and tutorials.
- Your copy edit of Fly Jamaica Airways Flight 256 looks good to me. I'm going to give you some notes as if it were a higher quality article, just to show you some concerns and other ways it might be improved:
- It looks like you checked the sources and added important details to the article; that's really good work and above-and-beyond the call. You also did a good job moving information from the lead into the body. This is often a problem with new short articles: they start as a single-section stub, and when sections are added the information migrates down instead of up. (What should happen is for the existing information to be divided into sections and then a new lead written to summarize it, but instead information is moved down piecemeal and not everything ends up where it should be.) The lead should be an introduction and summary, but shouldn't contain anything that isn't also in the body of the article. The body should have all the information and be understandable even if the reader skipped the lead.
- One problem I noticed is that you removed the date of the incident from the body of the article, and that's something that really has to be in there. I know it can seem repetitive with such a short article, but it's vital that the information be in the body, even if stated in the lead and/or infobox. This is a good habit to get into now for when working on longer articles where it may not be as obvious. You never know when an editor may rewrite the lead of an article and remove information, assuming it to be in the body.
- You shortened the lead, which I felt could have a bit more information. Also, it made the lead one long run-on sentence; we should aim for a simpler sentence structure so in the lead so readers can quickly absorb the information. I expanded the lead a bit after looking at some similar articles.
- Another editor changed 6 → Six in
There were approximately 118 passengers and 8 crew members on board the aircraft. Six persons were injured
This is a bit of a judgement call. Normally we express numbers zero through nine with words (particularly if they start a sentence), numbers that can be expressed in one or two words as either words or numerals, and other numbers with numerals. One exception is when numbers are compared, in which case they should be in the same format to make it easier for the reader. So the 118 and 8 are in the same format, which is correct. There's a tendency to also state the following 6 as a numeral, as it might be compared with the others, but I might try to rephrase so that doesn't start a sentence. (This is a case where there are arguments for using either style; sometimes there's more than one right answer, and sometimes the best solution is to rephrase rather than push one style over another.) - I changed plane → aircraft as I felt it set a more formal tone, was less ambiguous, and was consistent with the rest of the article.
- I removed the flag icons in the table per MOS:FLAG.
- You changed the time format from 12 to 24-hour format. I approve of this as it's usually the practise with aviation articles. Be careful not to change styles without a good reason, per MOS:RETAIN.
- I changed the formatting for no.2 to No. 2.
- There's room for improvement (there always is) but I'd give you full marks. If you reply here, please start with {{ping|Reidgreg}} to get my attention. Thanks for your interest in copy editing! – Reidgreg (talk) 17:23, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
January 2019 GOCE drive bling
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The Minor Barnstar | |
| This barnstar is awarded to Darren-M for copy edits totaling between 1 and 3,999 words (including bonus and rollover words) during the GOCE January 2019 Backlog Elimination Drive. Congratulations, and thank you for your contributions! Reidgreg (talk) 03:41, 4 February 2019 (UTC) |
May 2019 Anti-Vandalism Barnstar Award
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The Anti-Vandalism Barnstar | |
| For considerable efforts made in combating vandalism and highly improper edits. AncalagonW (talk) 17:11, 26 May 2019 (UTC) |
By pure chance investigating a few unrelated edits, I happened upon your edit history and was impressed by your activity a few months ago. This barnstar is awarded for your strong anti-vandalism efforts, though I also note that you have made many other substantive, non-vandalism-related edits to numerous other articles over the same time frame. It's clear you're an experienced Wikipedian, so I hope you'll continue to help Wikipedia whenever you see the need and have the time. It's more fact than cliche to say that Wikipedia exists in large part thanks to the efforts of editors like yourself. Thank you sincerely for your contributions. AncalagonW (talk) 17:11, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
Your draft article, Draft:HSBC UK Bank plc
Hello, Darren-M. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "HSBC UK Bank plc".
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.
If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.
Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. CASSIOPEIA(talk) 07:45, 15 July 2019 (UTC)