Cmc883

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Welcome!

Hello, Cmc883, 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) 16:46, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Fat feminism

Hi! I have some notes for you!

• Be careful about tone. By large the work is fine, but try to avoid wording like "however" whenever possible since it can be seen as original research. It's really important to make sure that the work only summarizes existing research and reads neutrally. If the work comes across as a personal essay or research paper, this can actually make the work seem non-neutral or slanted in one direction or another, even if the average person would agree with that viewpoint.

• The sourcing generally looks good, just make sure that you put in as much information about where the content is published. For example, the source by Linda Wedwick Harling looks like it should be usable since she's typically seen as a reliable source, but it would be good to find out where it was published and under what situation. For example, if it's a thesis paper, what type and for which institution. Be cautious, as Masters theses aren't always seen as the strongest sourcing since the author doesn't always have the mastery over the subject as someone with a PhD would. I know that sounds off, but it's something to be careful of, especially as these don't always get the rigorous examination that a doctoral thesis would.

In general I would recommend using academic and scholarly sources, as these are typically the strongest possible sources. Pop culture sourcing can be usable, but it's going to be seen as weaker in comparison and in many cases has been written from a subjective or anecdotal viewpoint. In those cases it's important to avoid representing these as the general or predominant viewpoint.

• With tenses, it's better to use past tense when discussing past events and beliefs or things specific to a time period. For example, I re-worked the following sentence:

this time period is still refuting diet-culture, the medicalization of fatness, the pathologizing of fat bodies, and is pushing back against sentiments of the “obesity epidemic.”

To this:

During this time period the general public mindset still refuted diet-culture, the medicalization of fatness, the pathologizing of fat bodies, and pushed back against sentiments of the “obesity epidemic.”

This put it into the past tense and also helped to clarify the "who" of the sentence, as the time period in and of itself wouldn't hold an opinion or mindset.

• Avoid terms like "recently", as these will quickly become dated and are often subjective. They're also imprecise since it doesn't really tell people the "when", as recent to someone could be in the past week or the past year. It's also good to avoid them because while something could seem recent, it may have been ongoing and only really received coverage or a resolution after many months or years of work.

• Do not make definitive statements on a subject matter - these should always be attributed to the person making the claim unless it's very widely held and documented as such in multiple reliable sources. Instances of saying that a true follower of X or Y should have certain features or attributes should always be attributed and not represented as a definitive statement. The reason for this is that things like this are highly subjective and as such, won't have any one specific and correct way to be something - especially in feminism of any type. It's best to specify the person making the claim or to at least make a generalized statement such as "Proponents of fat feminism have argued that..."

On a related note, it's really important to again state that we can only include things that explicitly stated in the source material - if it isn't stated or seems a bit unclear, it's important to avoid interpreting the source material.

Now all of that said, I think you've done some good work here - I don't want this to seem like it's only criticism! A lot of this is really just going to be fine-tuning the work to fit Wikipedia's style and format guidelines. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:50, 8 October 2019 (UTC)