User talk:Sarahgilbert18

Welcome!

Hello, Sarahgilbert18, and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent contributions seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes. Wikipedia does not allow advertising. For more information on this, please see:

If you still have questions, there is a new contributors' help page, or you can click here to ask a question on your talk page. You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
How to edit a page and how to develop articles
Help pages
Tutorial
Article wizard for creating new articles
Simplified Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! Doug Weller (talk) 19:55, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Spamming Worlds Together Worlds Apart

It appears that you and several other accounts are spamming this general textbook. Perhaps there is another reason for this? In any case it isn't appropriate to do this and we should not be using a general textbook but specialist academic sources. Thanks. Doug Weller (talk) 20:00, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello sir, I go to Western Kentucky University and for my history class we have an assigned 20 wikipedia edits/additions we must make by the end of this semester. We had to do these by adding information from our textbook. I was in no way trying to spam Wikipedia. I am sorry for the confusion. Sarahgilbert18 (talk) 00:13, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I just saw the ANI thread opened by Doug Weller and came here. @Sarahgilbert18 can you be kind enough to elaborate further? I would like to ask whether your teacher/tutor specifically asked you to "add the said textbook as a source"? or did she ask you to "add the material/information" included in the textbook? If the first is true then I am afraid you will have to disappoint your teacher, and perhaps put him/her in touch with wikipedia personell so they can clarify the issue. However if the second is true, i.e. that she/he only asked you to add the "information contained in the textbook" to wikipedia, then you can do that by simply finding a Reliable source for your text. The guideline WP:RS is the one you will have to follow. feel free to ask me for help. Regards FreeatlastChitchat (talk) 07:08, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

November 2015

You have been blocked indefinitely from editing for advertising or promotion. From your contributions, this seems to be your only purpose. If you think there are good reasons why you should be unblocked, you may appeal this block by first reading the guide to appealing blocks, then adding the following text to the bottom of your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}. Doug Weller (talk) 21:49, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's possible that you may be unblocked if you provide a suitable reason for your actions and those of the other editors, as I assume it isn't a coincidence that several editors are adding this book. Doug Weller (talk) 22:09, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Doug Weller (talk) 22:08, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Unblocked

Thanks. Could you possibly get your colleagues to stop for a while? Your (all of you) edits are creating problems, eg adding information to pages that aren't articles but links to related articles, adding citations at the beginning of a paragraph etc. And could you give us an email address for your teacher so we can explain this and get him or her advice on registering the project and getting support? Thanks. Doug Weller (talk) 07:12, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sourcing and inserting info

Hi Sarah! I thought I'd stop in and give a bit of an explanation about everything. I'm going to tag @Jaredlynn: and @AlexandraMKing: in this as well, but if there's any other people involved with this, especially your professor, then please let them know about this post!

Basically, the big issue here is that you and several people from your class were given the task of inserting mention of this book into Wikipedia. Inserting sources isn't always a bad thing on here, but it does need to be done very carefully, especially if you're new since there are so many different rules to things on Wikipedia.

The first thing to do when looking to add sources is to see if the source itself would be considered a reliable source per Wikipedia's guidelines. This might initially seem like common sense, except that Wikipedia is fairly picky. For example, while the book is a textbook, not all textbooks are usable. This textbook is the source of the now infamous "Electricity is a mystery" picture that you may have seen floating around the Internet. While it's a textbook, it's clearly not a reliable source. Now the book that you're trying to add is by W. W. Norton & Company, which means that it's most likely reliable. There are other things that play into this, but they get fairly nitpicky and I'm trying to keep this relatively brief.

The next step is to see whether or not the source is really warranted. If there's already a ton of sourcing backing up the claims in an article, odds are likely that adding a new source is unnecessary. Having a ton of sources in an article can lead to WP:CITECLUTTER, which can make it harder for people to read the article. It doesn't happen all of the time, but it can happen.

Another important thing to take into consideration at this point is if the source explicitly states the claim you're trying to back up. If the source only vaguely mentions the claim then it's sometimes better not to add the source since it can come across as original research (OR). OR is something that's fine in academic papers, but not really on Wikipedia for several reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that much of the content on Wikipedia is added by average, random people, which means that it doesn't undergo the vigorous verification process that a claim would need in order to become reliable or notable enough to be included on Wikipedia. There's actually a lot to this and it can get pretty complicated, but the basic gist is that unless something is very clearly and explicitly stated in an academic source it shouldn't be added.

There are other things to take into consideration, but those are some of the biggest ones that stand out initially. Now something that would be a good idea is for your professor to set up a page for the course via Wikipedia:Education program. It might be a bit late in the semester to do this, but it would help us keep track of what everyone is trying to do and add. I think it might also be helpful in that it'd give us a better idea of what the professor wants you to add to the page - it might be that s/he wanted something a bit more in-depth. It might also be that they weren't looking for something from this book specifically but rather something to show that you understood the material presented in the book. Is it possible that they would be OK with you using a different source, if it's considered to be reliable per Wikipedia's guidelines? We could probably help you with finding sources that would be considered usable. Also, if you want your professor can contact some of the people involved with Wikipedia's education division or ask questions here: Wikipedia:Education noticeboard. Some of the people s/he can contact are Eryk/Owlsmcgee at erykwikiedu.org or Adam/Protonk at adamwikiedu.org. (I'm tagging them so they can see this!)

Basically, what caused concern was that you were adding things in fairly rapid succession, to a textbook that's from a reliable publisher but also covers the topic in a fairly broad manner. It may not have been as big of an issue if it was only one or two additions or if they'd been more spaced out. I personally don't have that big of an issue with the use of the textbook, given the publisher, although I would recommend using a wider variety of sourcing. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 08:17, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Mostly I want the teacher to contact us so we can try to see if there's an alternative to this specific book and so we can better understand the program. It can also be beneficial since we could also let them know that you did try to complete the assignment, but ran into some issues. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 08:24, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

And that's happened now. See my reply to him at WP:ANI. By the way, I think this[1] must have been an error as you added the source to the beginning of the paragraph. Doug Weller (talk) 15:55, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping, Tokyogirl79. ~~Sarahgilbert18, please ask your professor to get in contact with me, using the email address above or at contactwikiedu.org.~~ (They're on Wiki, disregard) Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:04, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]