AutumnEdmundson

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Hello, AutumnEdmundson, 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.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:48, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Prevention Through Deterrence moved to draftspace

An article you recently created, Prevention Through Deterrence, does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please follow the prompts on the Articles for Creation template atop the page. ... discospinster _talk 19:24, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

Notes

Here are the notes I mentioned via email:

• Avoid euphemisms and such when it comes to things like death - for example, rather than say "lost their lives" it's better to say that they died, since that's more accurate and may be less confusing to incoming editors who are either unfamiliar with the statement or are ESL who could be confused with the phrase. This is something I wasn't aware of until someone pointed it out to me for using similar phrasing, so no worries about not being familiar with this guideline.

• Be extremely careful and selective with sourcing, as not everything will be a reliable source. For example, I wouldn't use awareness websites like Border Angels to back up claims. The reason for this is that sites like this aren't really clear about who writes this or their editorial oversight or verification processes. They're also more geared towards eliciting a reaction from the reader, so they may not be very specific with the content and claims. They wouldn't necessarily deliberately falsify information, but they may not be as accurate as an academic or scholarly source would be.

You also want to be extremely careful with primary sources, particularly as this is a controversial topic area. Primary source articles are things that are written by people involved with the policy or people who are writing about their own experiences. It's not that you can't use them, just that you need to exercise caution - especially when it comes to people writing about their experiences, as they may not have experienced the same thing as the next person.

I'm also concerned about sourcing like History Central, as there's not a lot of information about their editorial oversight, the qualifications of the authors, or what type of verification policy they have in place, if any. It also doesn't help that some of the HTML is a little funky and some looked to be broken - that's not a good sign. I wouldn't really recommend it as a source to use, especially as there are very likely stronger sources out there.

• The sourcing should specifically discuss Prevention Through Deterrence in that it should be mentioned in the source material. This is because if it's not mentioned it could be seen as original research to link the source to the topic. For example, we can't automatically link a previous program to this policy even if they seem similar, as it's possible that the two could have separate purposes.

This goes for the mechanisms section as well - this needs to be discussed in relation to PTD and the sourcing needs to be about the policy or go into enough depth about the policy to where it would be more than a passing mention. For example, I'm concerned that I can't find mention of PTD in this source. I'm using Google Books, but a search doesn't bring up this term and the chapter is actually about countries other than the US. Since it doesn't bring up the actual policy as far as I can tell, it would be seen as original research to list this as a mechanism of DTP - which in turn causes problems with it coming across as an essay.

• Building on the last point, the article mentions various previous programs but doesn't show how they tie into PTD. As stated in the last point, something can predate this but not be related per se - that's why it's important to have some sourcing that mentions both together and can provide the needed context as to why a given program is important to the understanding of the topic.

This also goes for the mechanisms section.

• It's important to avoid subjective terms unless we're attributing them to the persons making the claim, such as "This Person stated that X was an important/key item to..." or it's a viewpoint that is extremely widely held. Even then it's important to phrase it so that the emphasis is on it being a majority viewpoint somehow, such as "Scholars have stated that...".

• Be careful of persuasive writing, such as "if... then..." and "therefore...". The term "however" can also fall into this territory if we're not careful.

I think that this is a good start as far as notes go, so I won't go into overload with notes - Britishfinance, do you see anything that I didn't mention that should be mentioned here? Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:42, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

A good summary Shalor (Wiki Ed). I would particularly emphasise the third bullet – E.g. for "Prevention Through Deterrence" to be a Wikipedia article, we must see independent high-quality references that specifically, and mainly, cover PTD as a core topic. If we don't, then we end up with WP:SYN or even WP:COATRACK, which is your interpretation of a term. While you may be correct in such an interpretation, people don't come to WP to read your (or my) interpritations/essays - they come to read our chronicling of what high-quality third party sources said about the term. That is the key issue with an article like this. Britishfinance (talk) 19:50, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi, and thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. It appears that you tried to give User:Mdawood1/sandbox a different title by copying its content and pasting either the same content, or an edited version of it, into Prevention Through Deterrence. This is known as a "cut-and-paste move", and it is undesirable because it splits the page history, which is legally required for attribution. Instead, the software used by Wikipedia has a feature that allows pages to be moved to a new title together with their edit history.

In most cases, once your account is four days old and has ten edits, you should be able to move an article yourself using the "Move" tab at the top of the page (the tab may be hidden in a dropdown menu for you). This both preserves the page history intact and automatically creates a redirect from the old title to the new. If you cannot perform a particular page move yourself this way (e.g. because a page already exists at the target title), please follow the instructions at requested moves to have it moved by someone else. Also, if there are any other pages that you moved by copying and pasting, even if it was a long time ago, please list them at Wikipedia:Requests for history merge. Thank you. AutumnEdmundson (talk) 21:43, 10 December 2019 (UTC)