User talk:Mitchell McGill

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! Thomas Simmons 02:44, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Some ideas for contributions

Hi Mitchell, welcome aboard CZ. Thomas has already given you some hints as to how things work here in general, and 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):

•  Bioinformatics: The study of (usually molecular) biological systems by computational means. ^[e]
•  Biochemistry: The chemistry of living things; a field of both biology and chemistry. ^[e]
•  Protein: A polymer of amino acids; basic building block of living systems. ^[e]
•  Protein folding: The physical process by which a polypeptide folds into its characteristic and functional three-dimensional structure from random coil. ^[e]
•  Protein structure: The structure of a protein, consisting of primary, secondary and tertiary structures. ^[e]
• Protein structure prediction: Add brief definition or description
•  Computer program: A set of instructions to be executed by a computer. ^[e]
•  Evolution: A change over time in the proportions of individual organisms differing genetically. ^[e]
•  Evolutionary biology: The study of the origin and descent of species, as well as their change, multiplication, and diversity over time. ^[e]
•  Biology: The science of life — of complex, self-organizing, information-processing systems living in the past, present or future. ^[e]
•  Theology: Discipline that engages in dialogue and reflection about God and religion. ^[e]
• PhD: A common abbreviation for Doctor of Philosophy. ^[e]
•  Missouri (U.S. state): 24th state of the USA ^[e]
• Kansas City: 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 Kansas City (disambiguation) for a list of available, more precise, topics. Please add a new usage if needed.

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

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

Finally, you can help future newcomers by giving your feedback on the above suggestions. To do so, please leave a note on my talk page.

Looking forward to fruitful collaborative editing, Daniel Mietchen 17:41, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Back atcha

Mitchell, you got the forum right. How are things in KC? Thomas Simmons 19:43, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Sandbox notice

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 16:33, 24 September 2008 (CDT)

Incremental writing...

...is the normal way to do things here. So just go ahead as your time permits, and hopefully, someone will join you in time. Note that CZ articles use {{subpages}} which won't work in your sandbox, as the latter is in the user namespace. --Daniel Mietchen 09:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)