User talk:Handanuslu

Comments on spiral of silence

Hey Handanuslu, I'm supporting your class at Georgetown and I have a few comments on the changes you've made to spiral of silence:

Overall the changes look great so far. It's an improvement over the current article
"We can distinguish between fields where the opinions..." This "step" feels like it would be better framed as setting the stage for the actual steps in the process. Noelle-Neumann may (I don't have access to the paper) place it among the steps but it feels more like an initial condition for the reassessment we're describing.
"In contradiction to that quote, the term public opinion..." This is a bit fiddly and tricky, but when writing wikipedia articles we want to avoid referencing our own article if possible. Sometimes (e.g. with figures and captions) it's unavoidable or the result is perverse, but here if we want to say that Noelle-Neumann thought that "public opinion" was outmoded but later expanded her research we should just say so.
"The fear of isolation is the centrifugal force that accelerates the spiral of silence" This wasn't your work (it was added by a previous editor) but my spidey sense tingles a bit when I read a sentence with that much figurative language written without direct quotes. It's possible that we may be closely paraphrasing Griffen here. If you have a copy of the text (or a better reference to connect the fear of isolation to the spiral of silence) can you check this out and see if it is a quote?

I'll try to check back in a few days and offer some more feedback (and hopefully less fiddly feedback). Thanks for your work so far! Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:11, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:31, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]