Ajbyale2019

Welcome!

Hello, Ajbyale2019, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

Handouts
Choosing an article to edit Editing an article • Add images to articles Citing sources on Wikipedia
Additional Resources
You can find answers to many student questions on our Q&A site, ask.wikiedu.org

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:31, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Economy of the Maya civilization

Hi, I wanted to drop you a note about your recent edits to this article. I noticed that you posted a very, very large quote from an external source. This is seen as a copyright issue on Wikipedia, as we can really only justify the use of short quotes under fair use. In general content should be written in your own words, with quotes only used very, very sparingly. It's harder to justify larger quotes and in most cases they shouldn't be used at all, as the larger the quote is, the more likely it is that it can be re-written. I would like for you to review this module. It's marked as covering plagiarism, but it also covers copyright.

I also noticed that several portions of the article weren't sourced, which poses an issue of verification and original research. We can only summarize what has already been stated by authorities in reliable sources - drawing conclusions and theories that isn't explicitly stated in the material would be considered original research, which shouldn't be in articles. An example of this would be the sentence "This fact is borne out today by independent prospectors operating in the valley.", as this would be seen as original research unless you specifically attribute it to someone in a format like "According to...". The contributions also occasionally came across as a persuasive essay at points, like you're trying to argue a specific point to the reader - avoid things like "we can see", "therefore", "it is obvious", and the words 'we' and 'you'.

I do think that overall the information is good and it's not that any of the information is wrong - it's just that there's a very specific format and style on Wikipedia. I think that some tweaks to the writing style and additional sourcing is all that is really needed here. I've marked some of the specific sections for you on the article. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:25, 23 April 2018 (UTC)