User talk:Nicholas Sharp

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! D. Matt Innis 17:22, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Created a personal "sandbox" for you.

I have taken the liberty of creating a personal sandbox page for you. To access your sandbox, just click on the link labeled My sandbox in the upper, left-hand corner of your User page. Once you get there, you can click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the page and you can:

• Practice writing articles in the Wiki markup language.
• If you already know the Wiki markup language, you can draft any articles you want to write and keep changing them until you are completely satisfied with them ... and then you can create a new article by cutting and pasting the sandbox article into the new one.
• You can invite other Citizens to visit your sandbox, review a prospective article that you wrote in sandbox, and ask for their comments/critique before you proceed to cut and paste it into a new article.

Don't know what the Wiki markup language is? Click ==>CZ:How to edit an article    Another excellent way to learn the Wiki markup coding is to click on the "Edit" tab at the top of any article and see how the markup coding was used there.

Enjoy! Milton Beychok 22:28, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Some ideas for contributions

Hi Nicholas, welcome aboard CZ. Matt has already given you some hints as to how things work here in general, and Milton added a sandbox. I wish to add some more practical hints on what possibilities you have to contribute. For a start, I just took some of the keywords from the information you supplied upon registration, and display below the current state of related CZ articles (for icon documentation, see Template:Rpl/Doc):

•  Physics: The study of forces and energies in space and time. ^[e]
• Mechanics: Please do not use this term in your topic list, because there is no single article for it. Please substitute a more precise term. See Mechanics (disambiguation) for a list of available, more precise, topics. Please add a new usage if needed.
• Electromagnetics: Add brief definition or description
• Optics: A field of scientific, technological, and engineering study and application concerned with understanding light, — typically in the visible, ultraviolet, and infrared ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum — and harnessing it for useful tasks. ^[e]
•  Thermodynamics: The statistical description of the properties of molecular systems ^[e]
•  Calculus: The elementary study of real (or complex) functions involving derivatives and integration. ^[e]
• PhD: A common abbreviation for Doctor of Philosophy. ^[e]
•  Astrophysics: Hybrid of Physics and Astronomy that attempts to explain the physical workings of the celestial objects and phenomena. ^[e]
•  Particle physics: The branch of physics that deals with subatomic particles. ^[e]
• Autodidact: Add brief definition or description
•  Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change over time, and linguistic patterns within that change. ^[e]
•  Comparative linguistics: (also known as comparative philology) A branch of historical linguistics that uses a number of methods of comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. ^[e]
•  Etymology: The study of word origins and how their forms and meanings change over time. ^[e]
•  Memetics: A science of memes, that aims, in part, to explain the mechanisms of the process of continuous cultural change by viewing the process through an evolutionary lens, seeing patterns of information in minds and other repositories as replicators, analogs of genes, subject to universal evolutionary forces, such as natural selection, the replicators subject to random variation, and to non-random selection for reproductive fitness as manifested by their success in disseminating through the culture and taking root in the medium of the culture, human minds. ^[e]
•  Astrobiology: The study of life in the universe. ^[e]
•  Music: The art of structuring time by combining sound and silence into rhythm, harmonies and melodies. ^[e]
•  Science fiction: A story-telling genre that presents alternatives to what is currently considered scientifically possible or that extrapolates from present-day knowledge. ^[e]

In order to find articles dealing with similar topics, it's also worth looking at the Related Article subpages of such an article.

Finally, in case you are involved in homework assignments, please consider doing so via Eduzendium articles.

Looking forward to fruitful collaborative editing, Daniel Mietchen 11:08, 24 October 2008 (UTC)