Welcome!

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Hello, 1lilrisse, 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.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:52, 26 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Reply

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Hi. Your sandbox is at User:1lilrisse/sandbox. You can also access it from the "Sandbox" link at the top right of the page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:39, 27 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Sourcing

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Hi 1lilrisse, I saw that you wanted to create an article on the US public opinion of foreign policy against Cuba. Be very, very cautious about this, as it could be easily argued that this topic belongs in the overall article about relations between Cuba and the United States. I'm aware that the current article focuses predominantly on the government and military side of things, but the article is also small and as such, people could argue that the content could fit into the existing article.

I noted that you had four sources, however you will almost certainly need many more sources than four to establish how the topic would merit an independent article, especially as political topics tend to come with some inherent controversy. I'm also concerned about one of the sources, as you noted that one of them is a poll. Be very cautious about using polls, as they come with their own set of problems as follows.

  1. You have to consider who is conducting the poll and for what reason - people and organizations will frequently create polls and studies that are intended to fall a particular way. It's not that you absolutely can't use a poll conducted by someone who has an ulterior motive, but you should absolutely be careful with both the numbers and the final results. With this sort of thing it's preferable that you use secondary coverage for the poll, meaning that you use a reliable source written by someone who is completely uninvolved with the poll, study, and organization who conducted the poll. (This falls under WP:MEDRS in that medical studies also have the same issue, which Ian (Wiki Ed) can tell you more about.) Also, the poll needs to be through an extremely reliable source - a casual poll wouldn't fall under this guideline.
  2. When was the study conducted? If you're using an outdated poll, make sure that you're careful on how it's used in the article.
  3. How was the poll conducted? Were there any safeguards in place to prevent people from voting more than once or otherwise trying to sway the results?
  4. Who was polled, in what areas, and how? Sometimes the who, how, and where can sway an entire answer. The best example of this is the newspaper poll that resulted in the infamous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline.
  5. Is there any interpretation of the polling information or is it just raw data? If it's just raw data or a basic reporting of numbers without any interpretation, then I would recommend against using it in most situations. The reason for this is that it can be argued that anything pulled from raw data would be considered original research, which shouldn't be on Wikipedia.

I hope that this doesn't deter you too much - I do think that there should be something on this topic, it's just that you need to make sure that the content is very well sourced. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:49, 16 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

April 2018

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Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. This is a message letting you know that one or more of your recent edits to Donald Trump in music has been undone by an automated computer program called ClueBot NG.

Thank you. ClueBot NG (talk) 04:33, 26 April 2018 (UTC)Reply