HistoryisKing
Welcome!
editHello, HistoryisKing, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Adam 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. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:14, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
Issues concerning ancient warfare article
editHi - my name is Shalor and I'm the content expert for your class. I'm going to ping Scurvyyy and Tali1193 on this since the three of you were editing Ancient warfare. I'm also pinging your professor, Ieremu.
Recently an article that the three of you edited was mentioned at the administrator noticeboard for incidents by Doug Weller. His concerns were essentially this:
- The three of you were adding a lot of unsourced material to the article.
- Part of the additions came across as original research and a student essay.
- Some of the content was taken from here without attribution.
When editing an article you must source the content with in-line citations that backs up the claims you make. You can use things like academic articles, books, or newspapers to show where you're pulling this information from, but you do need to show where the claims are being made. This is especially important for when you're inserting quotes, as you need to show where you took the quote and also who said it. Ideally you should write this as something like "According to wilding scholar Ygritte, Jon Snow knew nothing about true battle or the wilderness." and summarize the quote.
You also need to be careful about how you phrase things. This can be one of the biggest differences between writing an academic paper and an encyclopedic article. Making editorial statements and coming to your own conclusions is reasonable and a good thing in an academic paper, however in an encyclopedia article you can only state what other people have explicitly stated in a reliable source and even then, you need to be careful about how you phrase things.
Finally, avoid using content word-for-word from other places. While you can use material taken from other places such as the Project Gutenberg website, these types of places almost always require that you give the source material attribution, even if the content is released under a creative commons license. Even then I'd avoid taking it word for word, as you can't always guarantee that the content is written in an encyclopedic style. I've also personally found that even when you attribute the material properly and ensure that it's neutral, in most cases re-writing it is inevitable since it will frequently attract attention from people assuming that it's copyvio. Now as far as other places go, you shouldn't be taking material from copyrighted websites at all unless you're citing a brief quote. In all of these cases you must attribute the work properly because otherwise it comes across like you're claiming the material as your own original work. Even if you didn't intend for it to be seen as plagiarism or a copyright violation, it will still come across in this manner.
I'd recommend looking over the training modules again just as a refresher. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 05:13, 30 April 2017 (UTC)