Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

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Hi Ryancc0nrad! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.

-- 05:33, Wednesday, July 4, 2018 (UTC)

Welcome!

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Hello, Ryancc0nrad, 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
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) 14:20, 31 July 2018 (UTC)Reply


Notes

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Hi! I wanted to give you a few notes:

  • When writing about medical topics, make sure that you're using the best possible sources. Wikipedia's guidelines for sourcing on medical and psychology topics are much more strict than it is for other topics - I'd like for you to take this training that explains it a bit more. Basically, academic and scholarly sources should be used for medical related topics - popular press sources are typically not used because they tend to sensationalize topics and don't really take into consideration important factors like evidence quality. You can read about this some here, but the gist is that a journal article about say, a potential cure for an illness would go into the cost, how easy it would be to produce, and so on, while a popular press source would focus on the idea "cure for X illness found, say scientists". The issue with a situation like this is that the actual journal article may only hypothesize that something could be used as a cure but that it's near impossible to produce in the needed quantities, while the popular press would ignore this in favor of a focus that would be more likely to bring in readers, even if they must be more vague to make it seem better.
  • Make sure that you are writing in a neutral, encyclopedic tone and that the style isn't too casual. Avoid original research and make sure that any claims are backed up with a reliable source and are attributed. So for example this sentence needs to be attributed:
Because a clean environment typically looks better and more organized than a "cluttered" one, people can start to get into the habit of decluttering, which can lead to the extreme of compulsive decluttering.
Someone could disagree that a clean environment typically looks better or state that the reasons behind it are more nuanced, so this needs to be attributed to a specific person or group like this:
According to So-and-so, many people prefer a simple and clean environment and will habitually declutter, which can lead to the extreme of compulsive decluttering.
This gets the same gist across but attributes it so that it doesn't come across as a blanket statement. In general avoid blanket statements, as there are so many differing theories and opinions out there. The only time that something can be stated as a blanket statement and not attributed is if the claim is so widely held that it can be seen as representative of the whole. Even then, it still needs to have a source at the end of the claim.

I hope that this helps! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:31, 10 August 2018 (UTC)Reply