User talk:Kpsherman

Welcome!

Hello, Kpsherman, 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.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:30, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Gender identity

Hi! I wanted to give you a head's up about this article and discuss your recent addition with this edit.

First, a bit of explanation about the article. Some articles are more controversial than others on Wikipedia. This doesn't always have to do with the article's topic and can sometimes just mean that there have been arguments between people who have edited the page, although if the topic is one that is controversial outside of Wikipedia, this can often make the arguments more intense. These arguments typically stem over how the article is written, what sources should be used, and whether or not the edits are neutral. What this means for you as an editor is that all of your additions need to be written as neutrally as possible and use the strongest possible sourcing. If content is removed, you need to discuss the edits rather than just re-adding them. While you were editing on the history part of this, I would like you to take this training module on editing health and medicine topics, as this may be useful when it comes to sourcing.

Now as far as your edit goes, I saw that you didn't use any sourcing when adding content. This is incredibly vital for any article, but especially for one dealing with gender and health. Also, when using phrases that could be seen as subjective, always make sure that they are clearly attributed. For example, if stating that someone was a perfect participant, you need to state something along the lines of "Money saw twins as the perfect participants" since that shows that it was his viewpoint rather than ours. Also keep in mind that Money's work is pretty wildly controversial for several reasons - one of which being that David Reimer was unable to consent to the gender reassignment surgery because of his age and Money had a vested interest in persuading the parents to go through with the surgery, as he wanted to test his theories on gender and biology. This means that terminology needs to be very carefully chosen to keep this in mind and the writing as a whole needs to be very carefully phrased. It should neither come across as pro or anti Money.

That said, the sentence felt out of place since twins aren't mentioned anywhere in the paragraph or the one preceding it. It needs to be written to make sense in context, like "Money used this situation as a case study, but felt that twins would make better participants."

I hope that this explains things! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:06, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Note

Hi! Two notes -

• Make sure that you capitalize names properly.
• This sentence needs to be tweaked so that it's attributed to the study:

The females in the litter also behaved like male rats and would even try to mount other female rats, proving that biology played a major role in animal behavior.

The issue is that the sentence makes the content come across as absolute fact - this should be avoided since most findings aren't solid enough to completely guarantee that it's an absolute fact. It's one of those things that seems kind of nitpicky but can make a big difference in how something is represented. I'd recommend writing it like this:

The females in the litter also behaved like male rats and would even try to mount other female rats, which the researchers stated proved that biology played a major role in animal behavior.

This puts the onus of the claim on the researchers so that even if there's other work or people that disagree with their findings, it takes it into consideration via the attribution.

I hope this helps and thank you for continuing to work on and adapt your contributions! ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 16:13, 7 December 2018 (UTC)