User:Istobe/sandbox

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Learning about the Wikipedia way of doing references

I'm currently trying out different ways of doing links, references and footnotes. So keep this sandbox for my own reference till stuff become familiar.

Let's try a section with an internal Wikipedia link in it

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, and here's the Lorum Ipsum page on Wikipedia

Now let try an external link

Sometimes designers want a chunk of typesetter's greek (sic) of a specific size. Various sites can provide it - for example A Lorem Ipsum generator.

Now let try a reference done as a footnote

Here I've used cite by pasting and modifying some wiki HTML which produces the effect I want. This is a tedious way of doing it, and prone to error. But I can't find a neat button or function to do it more effectively.

Example:

The 2012 Farnborough Airshow ran from 9 to 15 July 2012.^[1] The next airshow is planned for 14-20 July 2014.

The 2012 airshow did a lot of business.^[2]

Though the example above uses the cite tag, I don't really understand it - epecially the access date, which seems to give different results each time I use it.

Whilst editing it is convenient to put a temporary reflist tag in the same section you are editing, since the wikipedia preview function otherwise won't show you what the footnotes will look like. So add close to your body text Reflist between curly braces thus:

^ "Welcome to Farnborough International Airshow 2012". Retrieved 21 June 2012.
^ "US$72 billion of confirmed orders at Farnborough International Airshow 9-15 Jul 2012". Retrieved 18 March 2013.

A more practical way of putting references in the article

First put in a link using the anchor menu item. This allows for both the link itself and a title, which go into two separate boxes.

Once this is done you can select the whole link in your edit window, and then hit the cite tag. This will turn it into a footnote that will show up neatly in the reference list as just the title, with an external link symbol rather than the full unsightly raw URL.

To put in the date retrieved, you can simply write it at the end of the title, rather than using the tricky accessed tag.

So here's a reference to the Argos toy swap scheme, which raised a lot of money for Barnado's around Christmas 2012. ^[1]

^ Argos Toy Exchange, retrieved 29 March 2012

Here an example list of references again

Testing ways of getting Google data into Wikipedia

I'm interested in the explore trends keyword tool, and the the various charting tools. So it's not about getting search data in so much as using some of Google's helpful research and authoring tools.

These generally work by giving you a javascript snippet to insert in your website or blog page code. This isn't supported by wikipedia, but it is possible to embed a file. So you could embed the code in an html file and then try and embed that through the wikipedia official mechanism. But you'd need to host the file somewhere, which mean the link could disappear from the wikpedia article any time the hosting failed.

Some google services work another way, providing you with code in the form of a long URL, These might work simply.

Here's an example to click on

The code that generated it looks like this HTML snippet, which would work fine in an ordinary blog and display a chart right there on the page:

Some ways of getting an image into an article or talk page:

1. Just link to the original image API query string generated to the Google tool, which goes to a Google server. There will be no image on the wikipedia article or talk page, but the reader can click through off site. This will probably stand up to Wiki bot scrutiny, but there's no guarantee. Linking through to that other Google property YouTube gets blocked by a spambot.

2. Save the image generated by the Google tool as a png or jpeg file to some hosting web site. Though that needs to be a valid location in its own right in wikipedia terms. So I couldn't just link to my own site, Pinterest, Tumblr or some free image hosting service.

3. Save the image to disk, then upload it properly to english wikipedia or wikimedia commons. I can them embed it using the approved wikipedia syntax. This gives the best result, and is less likely to be deleted by a rampaging wiki bot. But you have to go through the tedious wikipedi image upload process, which is all about copyright clearance. This seems overkill for self-created charts and diagrams.

I'll try an example at Talk:Quadrotor