Vramirez38

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Welcome!

Hello, Vramirez38, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with Wiki Education; 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.

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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) 13:31, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Aloe vera

Hi! I saw that you chose to edit this article. It looks like the article is of Good Article quality, which means that it will be more difficult to find content to add to the article than it would be for something that is less fully developed, such as say aloe sinkatana or aloe jawiyon. If you do wish to continue on with the aloe vera article, I would heavily recommend that you read the article's talk page and discuss any potential changes prior to moving anything live. Since this article is of higher quality it's important to use the strongest possible sourcing and write as neutrally as possible.

I also want you to review this brochure on editing ecology topics, as it gives valuable tips and insight on editing. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:17, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Studies as sources

Hi, I saw that you used two studies as sourcing for the section you added. Studies should generally be avoided as sources unless they are accompanied by a secondary, independent source that covers the study.

Part of the issue with studies is that they are primary sources for any of the claims and research conducted by the authors, who are almost always the same people who conducted the study. The publishing journal doesn't actually do any in-depth or intense verification - they just review it for any glaring errors or inconsistencies that would immediately invalidate the study. As a result it's still entirely possible for a journal to publish faulty research, even if they do peer reviewing - this has actually happened in multiple cases in the past and will likely always happen as a result of human error. As such, we can't see the study findings as 100% accurate, which poses a verification problem.

The publisher also doesn't provide any sort of commentary or context, which is also something that would be needed as studies are usually very limited in scope. For example, findings could differ greatly depending on the type of tomato, growing conditions, conditions at time of the experiment, as well as a multitude of other factors. As such, the study findings are really only accurate for that one specific group of tomatoes studied at the time of research. This is where context and commentary become important, as something like a literature review can compare and contrast the findings against other, similar studies and make a conclusion that would be seen as a reliable source.

Finally, there's also the question of the notability of the study, as someone could ask why we chose one study over others. Those secondary sources can help show where this specific study is notable.

Other sources that would be stronger would be say, this academic book that has a short paragraph about aloe vera as a preservative. It discusses a study and since this is a secondary source, this would show that said study would be notable enough to highlight. This also mentions a study, looks to be the same one. Page 204 of this source mentions that fruit with aloe vera on it browned less quickly and this one does specifically say that it is dependent on the composition of the covering. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:56, 11 May 2020 (UTC)