Has97060820

Welcome!

Hello, Has97060820, 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) 14:06, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Notes

Hi! Here are my notes:

• With the article on pesticide drift, keep in mind that the topic is meant to have a global outlook. This doesn't mean that you can't include information about California, just that it shouldn't be the main focus of the article because this topic will differ depending on the country or even state within the US.

• I saw that you used studies as sources. Studies are seen as primary sources because they are written by the person(s) who conducted the research. They're also fairly limited in scope out of necessity, as it's often impossible to survey the entirety of a given study topic - there's either not enough money, manpower, or both. As such, the study is only applicable for the specific cases that were covered in the study and findings may not be applicable on a wider scale. (IE, if the cases studied only dealt with a specific area, type of pesticide, and/or farmer, then the study would only be true for that specific group.) What this means is that you need a secondary source in order to help verify the claims and put them into greater context. It's not that you can't use studies, just that they must be backed up with secondary sources.

So for example, one study only examined cases of pesticide poisoning from agricultural workers that were between the ages of 15 and 64 years and reported the poisoning between the years of 1998-2005. The cases were provided by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation and the SENSOR-Pesticides program. This means that any findings are really only accurate for those specific workers and even then, only those workers in California. Results may differ if they were to compare this to cases from other states or time periods. There's also a question about who reported these cases - there may be others who were poisoned that didn't report it for various reasons. Finally, another concern with using studies as sourcing is notability. Essentially we need to show where these specific studies and findings are notable enough to highlight in the article as opposed to other studies that may report similar findings or contradict the findings entirely.

You use this study to back up the claim "The California Department of Pesticide Regulation estimates that between 37-68% of pesticide illness among U.S. agricultural workers come as a result of pesticide drift." However the problem here is that without the secondary source this is only a claim made by the people who made the study. There's also a question of whether or not the CDoPR made the claim or if this is something that was concluded by the researchers creating the data. You've got to be extremely, extremely careful about this.

You used a lot of studies in the article, so I'm concerned that this still needs more work.

• Since this does brush up against the world of medicine and health, I would like you to review this training module, which covers the above topic of studies as sources as well. The reason I'm making such a large point of this is that since this can be seen as health related, it falls under the banner of medical topics and as such, the content is at a higher risk of being removed if there's no secondary source. It's generally better to use secondary or tertiary independent sources, like a literature review or a book that covers the studies. Not only does this help resolve the issues I mentioned above, but it also helps ensure that we're not cherry picking sourcing in order to back up a specific point of view or argument.

I hope that this helps! --Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:00, 27 November 2018 (UTC)