Welcome! edit

Hello, Zrstnr! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking   or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! JBchrch (talk) 17:17, 4 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
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Your submission at Articles for creation: Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch (June 6) edit

 
Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Hoary was:  The comment the reviewer left was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.
Hoary (talk) 06:17, 6 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
 
Hello, Zrstnr! Having an article declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! Hoary (talk) 06:17, 6 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Adoption edit

Hi, Zrstnr. After not hearing back from you for a while regarding adopting you as an editor, I'd assumed you weren't interested. I didn't notice your message on my talk page, and it was eventually archived; I only just now came upon it. I have a few ideas to get you started that vary in difficulty depending on what you feel comfortable with, so please let me know if you're still interested, and I can make sure we come up with a gameplan to find something you're interested in. I'm really sorry that I missed this. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 20:52, 26 June 2021 (UTC)\Reply


Hey,@TheTechnician27:, no worries! Things were a bit hectic for a while on my end but I somehow figured you would or wouldn't respond. In any case I am glad you did. I would be interested in a gameplan; something not too difficult just to get the ball rolling. I think this would enable me to get the hang of things and decide how much time I can realistically dedicate. Looking forward to it. Zrstnr (talk) 15:48, 28 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Zrstnr: Alright, I'll have five ideas by 23:59 GMT, and for each of the five, I'll explain roughly what broad ideas they'll teach you about. The first thing I would do – even if it's just something basic like, "I am a new editor who studies East Asian art history and religious studies, but I am generally curious about and interested in various topics. I am fluent in English and German and I am a trained library technician." – is to create a user page. It gives you a way to tell other editors what projects you're currently working on, what you do in general, what languages you speak, how experienced you are, what permissions you have, things you've accomplished, what WikiProjects you're currently a part of, etc. Likewise, Wikipedia has tens of thousands of active editors, so even just a basic description will help people remember who you are. Some editors have thousands of edits and never create a user page, but it can be nice to just have your own little desk, so to speak.
The second thing I would do is to check the WikiProject Directory. There are over 2,000 WikiProjects on the English Wikipedia, and many of those have their own task forces for even more specific issues (e.g. WikiProject Video games has a Nintendo task force). Joining a WikiProject isn't like joining a guild or anything; it's 100% a social construct wherein you're free to join or leave at anytime and you have zero requirement to do anything. WikiProjects are a resource, and they also tell other editors what your focuses are. For example, I had an obscure question about the Civil War one time while improving the article 50th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, and as I recall, a half hour later, a coordinator had answered it correctly. Additionally, WikiProjects will have announcements, intiatives, guidelines for articles under their purview, lists of other members you can have discussions with and seek help from, article statistics, etc. As an example, if you take a look at WikiProject Religion, you can see a table of 'Religion articles by quality and importance]], tasks, etc. Likewise, WikiProject Arts has a huge section of article alerts as well as descendant WikiProjects for more specialized work.
The third thing I'd do – and I'm not joking here; these exist – is to get a basic overview of Wikipedia editing philosophies and some questions that you'll eventually come across with more experienced editing. You should basically never run into these as a new editor who isn't jumping right into the deep end (e.g. creating new articles), but as easy as it is to start contributing, at the end of the day, everyone here is working on one of the most important, most-used reference sources in the world held together by a hodgepodge of pseudo-politics, so everyone eventually develops some implicit philosophy to how they want to contribute and how the project should operate (the first two on that page are especially prominent). These aren't factions or anything – nobody's going around beating each other with canes – but rather, they're a broad spectrum of ideas that underpin what editors choose to contribute to the project and why. This isn't even close to required reading, let alone something you deliberately choose; if you edit for long enough and eventually get into the weeds, you'll find these ideas on your own.
The fourth thing I'd do is to make sure you understand the absolute most important edict on the entire Wikipedia. </sarcasm>
Regarding the five ideas that I'll be presenting to you later, none of them should be taken as expectations. They're only five of dozens I could come up with on the spot, so if you find any area that interests you that I may not have thought of, definitely bring it up, and I'll see how we can get you on track to contributing to said area. With 6,326,475 articles (and increasing by one every ~2 minutes depending on the time of day), Wikipedia may seem to most people as broadly complete; as a library tech, I'm sure you'll understand that this couldn't be further from the truth, and the scale and scope of what's left to do is unfathomable. Unless you have a very strong interest in a specific topic, most of the time you'll find new interests and things to do just on a whim because they happened to be there (as an example, I built the article Socrates Nelson almost from the ground up because I found it by clicking 'Random article). You can see by the amount of WikiProjects alone that there's always something to do, and I would estimate there are millions of notable subjects that aren't covered (e.g. last year, I created ten articles on king crab species out of a pool of hundreds if not thousands of ones not yet created; two years ago, I created an article for a modestly popular multi-platform video game that I couldn't believe didn't have an article yet). And that's only the English Wikipedia. In total, across all languages, there are 312 Wikipedias, 56,729,414 articles, 232,865,315 total pages, almost 3 billion edits, and almost 100 million registered users. While the English Wikipedia is by far the most complete, there are 14 other Wikipedias with 1,000,000+ articles, and plenty of those articles are well beyond the ones we have. For example, take a look at our articles on Freudenstadt and Risch-Rotkreuz. I left tags on both of these that they "may be expanded with text translated from" the Deutsch Wikipedia. Now click on the corresponding articles and compare. And that's only Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a dozen sister projects, many of which themselves have multiple languages. All this to say that Wikipedia/Wikimedia in general is very much still incomplete, and these ideas are here to capture some fundamental concepts before really jumping in. Essentially, these five ideas are akin to returning books to the shelves just so you can familiarize yourself with the library.
Sorry for the wall of text, btw. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 19:47, 28 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Hey,@TheTechnician27:! This is awesome, thanks! I will take a few days to go through your text and "five ideas", i.e. comments on my attempted article and possibilities of citing/editing the article on Korean art, and will get back to you by the weekend. I hope that suits you. I really appreciate your help and look forward to beginning in earnest. Very cool, thanks!


@TheTechnician27:! Haha, this was a great write-up! Thanks for the effort. I decided to create a user-page although it is bare. It was nice to look at those WikiProjects and I think I will spend some more time familiarising myself with what they're up to. The editing philosophies are also quite interesting to consider, I can see how over time, and with more involvement, those can become more relevant. Wow, I didn't know about this! I think this is what I enough most about Wikipedia, you're always learning something new beating each other with canes. lol @ the absolute most important edict on the entire Wikipedia.

Five ideas edit

So I was originally going to give you a handful of broad ideas and let you find what's out there, but I noticed you recently jumped into the deep end and tried to create an article for Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch, which gives me something to sink my teeth into. I'll address the draft, and then I'll move on to what I think you might want to do first which – as far as I can tell – could help improve coverage of East Asian art. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 00:03, 29 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

The draft edit

So the first thing you should know about article creation is that – for reasons I won't get too much into – it's hard, and it's even harder when creating one about a living person. WP:TASKS suggests article creation for advanced editors. That really is true; I had over 500 edits and had spent over a year editing before I created my first article, and even now, I need to go back and overhaul it because I botched one of the most important sections.

The main reason your draft wasn't passed is because it's a biography of a living person (BLP) where large chunks of prose are uncited. Here are some tips for creating an article

  • With few exceptions, on the English Wikipedia, anything you say in an article has to be supported by a reliable source. There are two exceptions to this that are broadly accepted, those being basic arithmetic (e.g. if you establish through a reliable source that a subject's birthdate is January 1, 1970, then make the claim that they were 24 when they did something on May 1, 1970, that's totally okay) and plot summaries. The former exists because we expect that readers are numerate in at least basic arithmetic, and the latter exists because it's implicit what the source is, and citing every individual statement to said source would be mind-numbing (and would also flood the 'References' section with redundant nonsense).
  • This is doubly the case when it comes to BLPs. As a whole, Wikipedia's editors don't mess around when it comes to statements made about living persons.
  • It is much easier to start with a short article and expand out from there than to meticulously create an article beforehand. This is because others can chip in and help, it helps you and others identify and fix potential issues early on before they become systemic, it gives you a meaningful sense of progress, it lets you space out expanding the article without feeling pressured, you haven't wasted a ton of time if the subject turns out to be notable, etc. This one is very much personal preference, and there are tons of editors who just drop absolute bombshells of an article when they create new ones. Nevertheless, I still think my way is much easier for new editors who want to try creating an article.
  • A corollary to this is that stubs are good. As long as it's accurate, having something is better than nothing. Editors are far more hesitant to create a new article than they are to greatly expand an existing stub, and even just having that stub there gives readers some important information.
  • When a subject doesn't meet notability criteria, it doesn't mean that you've failed in any way. At its core, notability is essentially out of your control.
  • Even if you know them by heart, reading the notability guidelines for the type of subject you're writing about is very useful if you even think it's plausible they don't meet notability criteria. In this case, that would be WP:GNG and WP:NACADEMIC.
  • In addition to potential issues of libel, BLPs are also heavily scrutinized because some see Wikipedia as a place for self-promotion and then come here to write an autobiography/résumé.
  • This is especially the case when using terms like "lauded", "acclaimed", and "pivotal" (these sorts of claims are generally reserved for attributed quotations).

Admittedly, I don't know if Lee-Kalisch is notable or not. However, my recommendation is to place the 'Life' section (which is generally named 'Biography') as well as the section 'Publications (Selection)' (generally named 'Selected publications') in your sandbox and to simply present your draft as the lead, references, and external links (I would also recommend, if at all possible, finding one more source of substantial coverage from a reliable, independent source, as a rule of thumb for the aforementioned GNG is three of them; that, or have a strong argument for NACADEMIC). If this seems too little, I would at most also include the rest of the material that you are able to cite to a reliable source. This means you don't run into the issue of uncited material, and it will allow you to expand from there in the future once you can substantiate the rest of the material. If Hoary finds that Lee-Kalisch would "probably be kept" if it were nominated at Articles for Deletion (AfD), I believe they should be able to pass it without issue after you remove the uncited material. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 00:39, 29 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

PS: If you're trying to create the article here, I would also try hopping over to the Deutsch Wikipedia and translating your work over there (same deal applies as English, as while they're ostensibly more forgiving of uncited material, I have to imagine they have a similar policy on BLP), as they also lack an article on Lee-Kalisch. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 00:44, 29 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Hey,@TheTechnician27:! Thanks for your help and feedback. I made an attempt at writing a new article to kind of test out my writing style and see what might be good or bad practices. Granted I recognise that it is kind of a bold move for a beginner but I thought it could be motivating. In German you say that it's good to "jump into cold water" as a way to get used to something, so that was my thought-process behind it. Would you say I should create the German article despite not having the English one accepted? I've made a few changes and in the coming days would prepare a translation.

Going forward edit

You seem to be familiar with Lee-Kalisch's work, and she appears to be an accomplished scholar on the subject of East Asian art history. What I might do if I were you is check out Wikipedia articles on subjects she's written about and see if they can be made more robust by citing her work. For example, Korean art is actually heavily uncited, so you could probably use her work to either substantiate information that's already in the article or to expand out certain sections such as that on the art of the Three Kingdoms period. I really think you could help a lot working on this article with your knowledge of and passion for the subject. And even if editing this very broad article doesn't suit your interest, there are many sub-articles like Korean calligraphy, Korean painting, Korean sculpture, Korean Buddhist sculpture, Korean architecture, etc., that you could get more specific in. Up to you, but I think this would be a fantastic place to start. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 01:24, 29 June 2021 (UTC)Reply


@TheTechnician27: This is a great idea. I think my plan of attack for the next few weeks will be to first translate the page into German; that way I can get an overview of the article and better figure out how I will organise myself when going about adding citations or even expanding sections. I will keep you posted in case I have any questions. Thanks for this!

@Zrstnr: I was going to check back in after three weeks just so it didn't feel like I was meddling, but I guess four will have to do instead, since things got pretty hectic in my life (not bad at all; just a bit hectic, but it's calmed down). I haven't checked up on how things are going, but once I get an hour or so later this evening, I'll take a look. Hope things are going well!   TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 23:40, 2 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Your submission at Articles for creation: Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch has been accepted edit

 
Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.

Congratulations, and thank you for helping expand the scope of Wikipedia! We hope you will continue making quality contributions.

Since you have made at least 10 edits over more than four days, you can now create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for creation if you prefer.

If you have any questions, you are welcome to ask at the help desk. Once you have made at least 10 edits and had an account for at least four days, you will have the option to create articles yourself without posting a request to Articles for creation.

If you would like to help us improve this process, please consider leaving us some feedback.

Thanks again, and happy editing!

Missvain (talk) 23:53, 13 December 2021 (UTC)Reply