User talk:Benjchristensen

Please follow guidelines

Your contributions to the Gospel Library for iOS area certainly seem to have potential. But it would be very helpful if you could please review the Guidelines for wiki contributions. You are working on many pages in a rather non-standard way, so it would be helpful to bring your contributions in line with the guidelines to reduce the work that you or others will have to do in order to make it fit in the wiki properly.

Also, it looks like you are working on a contact page, but you have turned of email notification in your user preferences and provided no contact information for yourself, which led me to try this route of your user talk page. It would be helpful if you could make it a bit easier to contact you.

Thanks! You can reply on this page. -- Aebrown 14:53, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Hello Aebrown,

My apologies for not meeting the guidelines. I have reviewed them, and other than the apparent mistakes on title capitalization which you have fixed I do not know what the non-standard way is that you are referring to. Thus, if you could please instruct me on what I am specifically doing that is causing the pages to not "fit in the wiki properly" I would appreciate it. --Ben Christensen 04:29, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I have broken your response into separate sections so that I can respond to individual points. Here are some ways to improve how your pages fit in the wiki:

• When you respond on a Talk page, indent your replies (noted in TechWiki:Guidelines#Discussion_pages); this creates a conversation that is easier to follow.
• Articles should have an introduction; this helps people who happen upon a page to know what it deals with by looking at the first paragraph.
• The "Return to Gospel Library for iOS main page" text you have at the top of each of your subpages is not standard wiki practice. An introduction for any of those pages would almost certainly have a link to that page, which is an easy way for a user to navigate to that page.
• If you are going to have multiple related pages, a nav box template would facilitate navigation for your readers. If you need help creating one, I'd be happy to help.
• Your first version of Category:Gospel Library for iOS contained a collection of links to articles; since a category page automatically creates a collection of links to articles within that category, I removed those redundant links.
• The guidelines for capitalization of article titles applies to "wanted links" (links to pages that have not yet been created), since the natural thing is to create articles with the wanted title. This is a problem, for example, on the QA page.
• The guidelines for headings cover capitalization (no title case). In some cases you have repeated the article title as a heading within the article; there is no need for that redundancy.
• You can examine existing pages and try to follow what they have done. Note, however, that particularly in the project area, many pages do not follow the standards. I can't keep up with fixing all the nonstandard pages myself. But I try to give extra attention to new endeavors such as yours so that we can hopefully create new content that fits in.

-- Aebrown 12:00, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

I have written hundreds of Wiki pages in non-LDS wikis following this pattern when working on a set of new pages for software development project specifications and plans. I am purposefully not linking up the entry page to any existing reference point until they are all completed and ready to be "consumed". I am aware that the pages show up in the "recent edits" and can be searched on - that's fine. I just don't want to replace the existing Gospel Library for iPhone pages until I am complete with these ones and the Gospel Library for iOS team is happy with it. Therefore I am creating the outline of the documents and filling them in as I have time each day while interacting with others to review the contents of the pages. --Ben Christensen 04:29, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

If pages are obviously incomplete (and will be so for some time), you should use the {{Under construction}} template to let people know of your intentions. -- Aebrown 12:00, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

As for my contact information, I did not think about creating a "user" page for myself with my email address and have corrected that issue. Thank you for directing me to do so - it will simplify my communication with others on future occasions when people need to contact me. On one of your first edits to the pages I am working on I looked at your user page as well and could not find any way to send you an email. Now that my user page has my email address you can go ahead and contact me via email so that we can more easily correspond. --Ben Christensen 04:29, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

There is a standard MediaWiki link in the Toolbox (located at the bottom of each page) that appears for a User page if a user has an email address set up in "my preferences" and has selected "Enable email from other users". If you go to my user page you'll see that this option is enabled. It allows other wiki users to send email to a user. That option doesn't seem to be enabled for you. -- Aebrown 12:00, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

If this wiki is not intended to be used for project plans such as I am creating please let me know and I will remove the pages and use other tools. --Ben Christensen 04:29, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

This wiki is certainly intended to be used for project plans, as you can see by reviewing the Category:Projects or examining the Community Projects page. -- Aebrown 12:00, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

I look forward to hearing back from you and apologize for any undue burden I have placed upon you or others in my misguided use of this wiki. --Ben Christensen 04:29, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

One more item I've noticed: headings are not supposed to contain wiki text (including links). -- Aebrown 20:47, 1 November 2010 (UTC)