User talk:Syntaxemilie

Welcome!

Hello, Syntaxemilie, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help. Need some ideas about what kind of things need doing? Try the Task Center.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Mathglot (talk) 22:17, 5 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sourcing at Gender neutrality article

Hi, Syntaxemilie! I saw your good faith attempts to make changes to the article Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns; thank you very much for your contributions. Unfortunately, these edits did not comply with Wikipedia's requirements for WP:Verifiability, in particular, sourcing your edits with citations to reliable sources, so they have been undone. I know you spent a great deal of time on them, but none of your work has disappeared; it can all be retrieved from the page history. Going forward, all you have to do, is find appropriate sources for the changes you wish to make, and add citations for them. In addition, as a new user you may wish to discuss your changes first at the Talk page, especially if you have big plans for the article, as it appears you do.

If you are editing for a student class assignment, can you please identify the class you are involved with? If you are in a Wikipedia Education class, please go over your training modules again, especially the ones relating to verifiability and sourcing. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me below (use {{Reply}}), or on my talk page, or at the WP:Tea house, or WP:Help desk. Adding EvergreenFir. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:23, 5 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Mathglot:! Thank you for your message. I appreciate your time and patience. As you noticed, I'm new around here. This is an ongoing project, and it was in my agenda to add citations to my changes this evening. I am super aware that citations are vital; I thought that adding the citation within 24 hrs would be sufficient. I see now that that isn't the case, and I won't make this mistake again.

As far as the Talk page goes, I am part of a university level Syntax class, and my group member has left a message on the Talk page for the Wiki article (and included my username). I'm happy to add an additional one myself, if you think that that isn't adequate. Additionally, as you might have noticed, I'm trying to make my edit notes clear while also flagging them as ongoing -- this way people know that I am not just making large changes and disappearing. I hope this all makes sense! Again, big sorry for my misstep. I really want to take part in this ecosystem in a way that works for everyone! Thanks again. Syntaxemilie (talk) 15:17, 5 December 2021 (PST)

Hi Emilie, no worries, and I don't consider it a misstep, just part of the Wikipedia learning process. In theory, adding the citation within 24 hours would be sufficient; OTOH, you can hunt around and find other articles that have been tagged as "{{citation needed}}" ten years ago, and still haven't had them added. (Articles in the topic of linguistics and language are a particular offender in this area, because everybody considers themselves an expert in their own language, and in some ways, they are.) This is a volunteer project, and in a way, it's just your bad luck that I happened to show up at the article today, and not tomorrow or next week or next year.

Be that as it may, my personal feeling is that adding citations later is bad practice; for one thing, maybe you won't have time—who knows what tomorrow brings? For another, it's a backwards approach: in theory, while doing your research, you are looking at sources first, and figuring out how best to summarize them second; therefore, you already have the sources in front of you, while writing; so, why not just include them at the same time? If you are doing it the other way round, namely, writing down what you know about syntax, and after you are all done, looking up sources to support your writing, that is wrong, and possibly against Wikipedia principles of Original research. Per Wikipedia principles, our role is quite specific: we summarize the content representing the majority, and significant minority, viewpoints of reliable sources on the topic area of the article; that's pretty much it. If they ever develop a computer that can do that, they won't need us anymore. We do *not* write from our expert knowledge of a topic, and *especially* not on our original views about something. This is sometimes hard for advanced students (especially grad students going for a Ph.D.) to get on board with, because the exact same thing that will get you your Ph.D. and an appointment somewhere as an associate professor, namely a highly original work on some aspect of your field that depends on your own experiments or original ideas or synthesis of what came before, will likely get you banned here if you make a habit of it.

So, if you've been doing it that way (i.e. your own ideas first, find sources later) please read WP:Original research and start over, and do it the other way round: stack up all your best sources on your desk (or in your browser tabs), read them all, figure out what the narrative summary you want to say is, based on those sources, and write it down, sourcing each separate assertion of fact with a citation. Ideally, using the citation templates, like {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}} (but beware of WP:PRIMARY), {{cite web}} (but beware of WP:RS) or {{citation}}; but you don't have to use those, as long as you include a reference that uniquely specifies the source and how to find it, you can use any style you want, while respecting the existing format in the article by editors who came before you. Btw, I'm just one eeditor, and all of this is my interpretation of the editing guidelines; you can read up on how to edit on your own, and draw your own conclusions if you wish. You could try Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Introduction, but there are tutorials and "Wikipedia 101" pages galore, there's no "official" anything here, just stuff that has more, or less, support from the editing community. The links in the Welcome message above may help.

One other thing: please read WP:THREAD regarding replies on discussion pages like this one; I've added colons to yours to provide proper indentation. Thanks, and hope this helps! Mathglot (talk) 23:44, 5 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again @Mathglot:. Absolutely. I agree with everything you've said. We're being really careful about the original research bit; this has been heavily emphasized in our class' introduction to this project. I had the Syntax books I was working from next to me as I worked on the page, but I was working in a stepwise fashion that you (rightfully) caught. Again, I really appreciate your patience and time; I'm very aware that you're taking time out of your day to help me! I'm working on a more detailed outline for the page's Talk page, so that everyone is more explicitly on the same page about what my group is up to. Feel free to reach out to me if anything else comes up -- very open to discussing further. Syntaxemilie (talk) 16:57, 5 December 2021 (PST)