MAprill

Joseph Pitts

I have selected you to write to on the highly tenuous grounds that you have been on Wikipedia longer than Haleykwilson (talk · contribs), Hmmuench (talk · contribs) or JacksonEflin (talk · contribs) - even if it was just to do a bit of vandalism.

Firstly, I am assuming that this article is a co-operative project and not just written by your sock puppets. If so, please declare yourselves.

I have moved the article Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Joseph Pitts (slave) because it definitely needs to be seen by an AfC reviewer before it is published. My view is: I strongly suspect a copyvio. It is too long and is essentially source material rather than the tertiary material that Wikipedia demands.

By all means work on the text but do not move it from its present location or create copies in mainspace. If it is approved, the AfC reviewer will move it for you. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 18:51, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to respond to this message. Is this how you do it? I'm sorry if we have upset you. We are simply students in a university class and our professor wanted us to collaborate on a Wikipedia page as a learning experience. None of us have ever published content on Wikipedia before so we apologize if we broke some highly important rule. The article is a group effort, but the introduction and section on the hajj is my own personal work and for that I know there shouldn't be copyright issues as I cited my sources. We are figuring out how to properly cite our sources via Wikipedia's rules/regulations but as you can see it's still a work in process. Our professor encouraged us to publish it even though it was not finished.

Again, apologies for the raw work but it seems our professor had a different idea of how article publication works on this website. Did you take it off from being live? Is it simply in a review/work-phase now? I'm sorry for our ignorance. — MAprill (talk) 19:46, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Hi, it's still live (it's still in Wikipedia) but it's not in the main article space -- AFC is a drafting area. So even though it looks like it's been deleted, you can definitely continue working on the article there and the For your professor: you can take a look at WP:SUP for some best practices, but I do encouraging drafting in your own personal sandbox (e.g. User:MAprill/sandbox) as a place to work on articles before making them 'live', to avoid this kind of issue. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 02:28, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

The depressing thing is that none of you including your professor seem to have looked at any Wikipedia articles. It still looks like a copyvio or a student essay. It should also be cut down to a fifth of its present length. I repeat: by all means work on the text but do not move it from its present location or create copies in mainspace. If it is approved, the AfC reviewer will move it for you. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 19:42, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, that would be because we wrote essays on our topics first...that would be why it looks like a student essay...it's a compilation of student essays. We were planning on cutting it down and making our citations actually make sense and following Wikipedia's format. Again, I'm sorry we misunderstood the process. Not sure what else I can say. MAprill (talk) 23:05, 21 April 2013 (UTC)MAprill

Hi all. Opinions differ on the right way to start an article, but you can (and should) continue to work on the text; student essays aren't really the same style as Wikipedia articles. I started formatting the references into footnotes -- you can follow that model; and continue to cut it down. You can work on the article here, and those edits will transfer to the article when it is moved. Please let me know if any of you have any questions. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 02:28, 22 April 2013 (UTC)