Talk:Detransition, Baby

Wiki Education assignment: LGBTQ Reproductive Health

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2023 and 6 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Szimmerlee (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Szimmerlee (talk) 20:54, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Hello to this class! It looks like you've done some great work on the pages already.

Just wanted to draw your attention to some resources on Wikipedia that you may find useful. Often we struggle with the decision of how to present a piece of information, or make an article flow; it's good to make our own decisions as editors which gives personality to the writing, but it's also helpful to not always be reinventing the wheel—and to avoid pitfalls others have identified.

- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Writing about fiction is a Manual of Style (MoS) page which discusses some of the challenges about writing about fiction, how to present it, and how to source it.

- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Novels is MoS page which is a useful summary of the generally agreed upon structure of pages for novels. It also has a list of examples of particularly good pages about novels, which I recommend taking a look at for inspiration on what to add/change about this page. Often when stuck on adding a page,

- Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels is a group dedicated to encouraging consistency between pages on novels. Their forum may be somewhere to search for answers you can't find elsewhere.

- Wikipedia:WikiProject LGBT studies is a group dedicated to improving LGBT topics in general. Their Talk page is reasonably active and may also be a good resource.

- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking describes the best practices for when and how to link between articles. It's a tricky balance to get it right sometimes; both underlinking and overlinking detract from how useful the article is.

I'm also very happy to help answer any questions you may have about editing this page or others. Feel free to reply here, or reach out on my Talk page. I'll keep my eye on the page, and may make some edits where needed, but I'm certainly not here to be a cop. Keep doing what you're doing and I'll help where I can.

Thanks very much for contributing to Wikipedia; I hope you find the process enjoyable and that maybe even you'll stick around after the class is finished. :) Handpigdad (talk) 20:45, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Hello @Szimmerlee, @Jureumi, @Daisy 2349, @Downeyml2023. Thank you so much for your contributions to this article. I want to ask you to please look at the links I posted above to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Writing about fiction and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Novels. The themes section you have coauthored is a good piece of research about some of the issues discussed in the novel; however, despite your citations looking like reliable sources to me, it would all still count as original research because it does not cite any scholarship about the novel itself, and therefore is inappropriate for a novel's Theme section. Wikipedia editors are not permitted to do original critical work on pages; as a tertiary source, we must instead summarize existing sources, secondary to in this case the novel, which have themselves done the critical work.

From the Manual of Style: Novels page: "You cannot present your own opinion of what the novel's themes are (WP:OR). You must present the consensus of literary scholars and historians."

If this section is to stay on the page, more research from literary scholars or critics will be needed. I'm very happy to help out when I have the time, but I don't want to see your contributions go to waste! Please let me know if you have any questions. Handpigdad (talk) 20:31, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi! Thank you so much for letting us know. A bit of a rookie mistake on our part unfortunately, we should have double checked that our contributions followed the guidelines. I'll go ahead and remove the themes section for now. Glad to see that our other edits stuck, though! Thanks for helping us out :) Jureumi (talk) 15:22, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Jereumi. Sorry to have been the bearer of bad news! You're in good company though, we've all made these kind of mistakes. It's a real drag that it affected such a substantial contribution. Thanks so much for your work, and again, I hope you can stick around after the class it over. There's a never ending amount of things to do here, and other places on Wikipedia where the sort of research that wasn't appropriate to this page would be very useful. Handpigdad (talk) 21:54, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Publication by a major publishing house

I have trouble with the statement here: "Detransition, Baby was one of the first novels written by an out trans person to be published by a big-five publishing house" as this is very vague and possibly incorrect. Jan Morris's novel Last Letters from Hav was published in 1985 and shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize. A reference has been added to this but I think it needs more clarity to accurately reflect the situation. Perry Middlemiss (talk) 05:18, 2 April 2024 (UTC)