User:Deltopia

Deltopia is a Wikipedia user and, sometimes, an editor. He has a wife, a daughter, a nice apartment, a job, and a dog.

What am I doing and why am I screwing up your pages?!?! Sorry about that. I'm actually still kind of a newb, and I'm trying to get the hang of this bold editing thing. Forgive me if I screwed up your article/discussion/forum/whatever. And thank God for reverts, huh?

Lately, I'm doing copyediting on Random articles (which is fun -- click random article, click edit, and go through and clear up any punctuation or spelling errors; quick and easy, because if you get too big an article, you click the random button again) and occasionally throwing in $.02 into the debates on articles for deletion. And learning other stuff. There's a lot of other stuff to learn.

( Some links:

Special:Random )

Also? Working on a novel that genre-mixes between military/war novels and fantasy/D&D novels. Wikipedia is a really good really bad distraction from that. But progress continues. A few words every day.

What do I know? A very few useful things:

No one can run a marathon. You can only run a few steps at a time. When a project or task isn't getting started, it often helps to break it into a thousand pieces and do one piece, then repeat.
If a person has broken up with you, three steps (repeated liberally) will fix it: Throw out all his stuff (including e-mails, addresses, phone numbers, gifts, and memories), tell all your friends what a bitch he was (mutual friends who won't listen aren't mutual friends; they're his and you should ditch them), and go out with someone better as soon as possible (better = prettier, richer, taller, bustier, skinner, musclier, athleticer, mellower, funnier, or easier to get past first base on the first date). Those are the three steps to get over. If I ever write a Wikipedia Essay on this, the shortcut will be 3stepsover or 3SO. So don't take those. (NOTE: This paragraph is gender-neutral; "he" is the only third-person neuter personal subject pronoun in English. Replace it with "she" or "he/she" or (God forbid) "they" if it makes your personal world happier, just don't tell me about it; it's your problem.)
All problems are complicated. If it's not complex, it may be unpleasant or unfortunate, but it's not really a problem; it's just an obstacle that you have to work through. Problems can often be attenuated by making them less complicated, so tackle a fragment of the situation and simplify as much as you can.
People have a hard time believing people can change. Think of the biggest asshole you know. Imagine that he started doing wonderful, nice, admirable, charitable things. Consider how hard it would be for you to treat him as though he weren't still a big asshole. It's no easier for anyone else. This is why your parents still treat you as though you were a quarter your age. It's hard for them, too.
Wisdom is infinitely easier to grasp intellectually than it is to live. Emotional separation helps, which is why telling someone else about your problems leads to them telling you the obvious solutions that you could have seen, if it hadn't been happening to you. It's easier to give advice than to take it. This is why your friends act like morons, even though you tell them better, and why they think you're a moron, and sometimes even tell you. Be forgiving.
I overuse compound-complex sentences. Sorry.

This page is sparsely edited, rarely updated, and not bursting with links. If this unsettles you, I'll bet you can figure out how to change it. :) Have fun with it.

Tip of the moment...

Redirects

A redirect is a page that has the sole purpose to automatically redirect readers to a differently named page; to take the reader where they really wanted to go. Redirects allow a topic to have more than one title. Redirects are used for synonyms, abbreviations (initialisms), acronyms, accented terms (diacritics), misspellings, typos, nicknames (pseudonyms), scientific names, etc.

To create a redirect for the term "Oof":

Type Oof in the search box, press ↵ Enter
Click on the redlink for Oof that it presents
In the edit window that appears, type #REDIRECT [[Foo]] on the first line to make it lead to the article Foo
Redirects should be organized in to categories too. Each redirect can have up to seven redirect categories. Categories go on the third line of the redirect. (Note: Plant has a subcategory within the category of scientific name; enter plant after a pipe).

Here are two examples of a redirect category using a category template:

{{R from birth name}}
{{R from scientific name|plant}}

Preview your new redirect before saving it. Make sure:

There is a big right-facing arrow to the left of the bolded name of your target page name.
That your target page is bolded in blue (if it is red, go back and double check your target name in the edit window).
That your redirect category has rendered properly and that the boilerplate it presents makes sense.

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