Greetings!

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Hello and welcome to your talk page. You can use this message to practice answering, and you should try to contact someone else too!Jagrif02 (talk) 17:35, 6 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Welcome!

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Hello, Charismatic88, 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.

Handouts
Additional Resources
  • You can find answers to many student questions on our Q&A site, ask.wikiedu.org

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:09, 6 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Non-free images

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Hi! I was recently notified that you used non-free images on your userpage. I just wanted to let you know that these images cannot be used on your userpage, as this would violate the fair use guidelines. What fair use means is that Wikipedia can use a copyrighted image as long as it meets certain criteria, which can be very generally summed up as this: No non-copyrighted version of the image exists, it will only be used to identify a particular topic (ie, a logo for a TV series used to identify that series), and that the image expands on the topic in a way that words alone wouldn't be able to do. One of the specific rules for using non-free images is that it can only be used on the specific article for which they were uploaded, as anything else would violate fair use.

It's an easy mistake, but just be careful about this in the future. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:47, 11 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Gender identity

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Hi! I just wanted to let you know that the article gender identity is under discretionary sanctions. What this means is that the article is being watched more closely than your average article and the bar for what's considered to be disruptive is set lower. You haven't done anything wrong - you're actually doing well here by discussing edits on the talk page. I just wanted to give you a head's up since you will need to progress with caution here if you want to make larger changes to the article. The basic gist with articles under discretionary sanctions is that you should discuss large and/or controversial changes on the talk page prior to making them, to gain some community consensus about whether or not to make the change. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:17, 19 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Sexual objectification

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Hi, Charismatic88, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thanks for your recent edit to Sexual objectification; unfortunately, I had to revert it, but I hope these tips will help. I noticed your edit summary, large addition to objectification theory-- also removes former information that is in new addition. Indeed, it is rather large, and this topic is a somewhat sensitive one. I reverted your change with This is too big a change for a new user in a mature article. Please try again with much smaller edits, and provide justification for each one in the edit summary. To the "too big" reasons, I should have added, "...in a sensitive subject area," but the edit summary was too short to contain it.

I should add that you didn't do anything wrong by trying a bold edit, as Wikipedia's editing guidelines call for this, so that attempt was fine. That it got reverted, is also fine, and follows step 2 of the standard Bold, revert, discuss cycle. We are now in step 3, discussion, which is how it's supposed to go. However, you should be aware that the bolder you are, especially in a sensitive area like this, the more likely something is going to get reverted. Also, learning Wikipedia and how it works takes some time, and you have to walk before you can run, and crawl before you can walk. My recommendation would be to break up your edit into several different, individual edits (probably a dozen or more) and see how that goes, taking care to provide an adequate edit summary each time to justify it.

Large edits can be problematic, and are more likely to be reverted:

  • One problem with large edits, is that if only bits and pieces of it are challenged by someone, it may be harder to fix what's wrong, than just start over and add the good parts back piecemeal. So adding gradually, with separate edits, is the way to go; that way, if someone needs to challenge something, they can just alter or revert one of your small edits, and not one huge edit that takes out everything you did.
  • Another problem with large edits, is that it's harder for others to see what you did. Wikipedia's Diff utility has a hard time with large edits with lots of little changes. Here's a diff of your edit; see how hard it is to figure out what stayed the same, and what got changed? I know I had a hard time.
  • Another problem with large edits, is that it's easy for mistakes to creep in. That's why I used an offline diff program to look at the two versions, to find that you had removed a source reference that existed in the old version; see if you can spot it. Removing text and its supporting reference without explanation is generally considered a no-no; at the very least you'd need a detailed explanation in the edit summary, and even better, a section on the talk page to explain why you removed sourced material. Of course, when you make a large edit like that, the tiny edit summary simply isn't large enough to explain everything; yet another reason to break it up into multiple edits.

A couple of minor things that crept in: watch your personal notes to yourself, like, (link to wiki anxiety) and the they’re / there / their distinction.

I mostly don't want to address the specific points just now that you raised at the Talk page, but I did want to comment on one thing; where you said,

Because there needs to be an understanding about self-objectification before one can fully understand objectification theory, ...

Even if this is true, who says so? Writing for Wikipedia is not like writing an essay or thesis in school where you develop your own thoughts and come up with some original take on things. In fact, it's quite the opposite: one of the five pillars of Wikipedia is that articles are written from a neutral point of view, a core feature of which is not including any of your own ideas in an article. So, a piece of work that might get you an 'A+' in school if you do a brilliant job of synthesizing some existing ideas or even invent something completely new, gets you an 'F', here,[a] and is completely forbidden. Remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; it is not a forum for original thought. Now, maybe you meant something else, or maybe the quoted statement above is commonplace in objectification theory; in that case, all well and good, but just make sure that if you are using that as a premise for expanding or improving the article, that you are on a firm foundation and can cite one or more reliable sources to back you up.

Feel free to discuss any of these more general points about editing Wikipedia articles here, if you wish. As far as specific ideas about how to improve the Sexual objectification article, the appropriate place to discuss that is at the article Talk page. Hope this helps, Mathglot (talk) 00:35, 1 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Notes

  1. ^ Well, it doesn't really get you an 'F' of course, because nothing is graded like that here; instead, it just gets reverted or altered to oblivion.