HollyAnderson2698

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Welcome!

Hello, HollyAnderson2698, 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) 13:14, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

News media

Hi Holly, Victoria.grayce, I wanted to leave you a quick note on your contribution to news media. When you add to an article, always make sure that the content is written as neutrally as possible and is sourced very thoroughly. Anything that could be seen as a controversial opinion needs to be sourced very well. One of the two sources that was added doesn't actually say anything about what the source is, as Wikipedia wasn't able to retrieve any of the information about it such as what the article was, who published or wrote it, when it was published, and so on. All that it shows is that it's a ProQuest source, which makes it nearly impossible to verify the claims. Also, I noted that another section relies solely on the Economist as a source. While the Economist isn't a terrible source by any means, it isn't good to rely on it alone to back up controversial claims - and anything involving Trump and his administration or the topic of fake news is going to be controversial. Ideally sourcing should be academic or scholarly. News media isn't terrible, but in many cases the journalist doesn't have the background knowledge that an authority on the topic would, as they're expected to report on a wide variety of topics - even if the topic area is limited to a specific zone such as politics of a certain country. They're not the strongest sourcing out there, essentially.

Also, make sure that the writing is neutral in tone and that any major claims are attributed to the person making the claim. For example, the statement "This increase in fake news has progressed over time and continues to show, especially in today's media." can be seen as relative to the reader. Some may argue that the amount of fake news hasn't increased and that it's just that awareness and communication has increased or even that media is the most visible way that fake news propagates. With the section about Trump, make sure that the content is very, very carefully written because content about him is just automatically controversial. Avoid writing things that could be seen as pro or anti-Trump or leaning in any specific direction. Phrases like "to his chagrin" should be avoided since that could be seen as a bit of a potshot, for example. You've got to be that careful.

I would honestly recommend that the section about Trump and Google results have more sourcing, as I'm finding a variety of opinions on the topic of whether or not Google search results are biased. One opinion contributor to USA Today states that it is, the Economist and Google says that it isn't, and there are likely other opinions out there. This news article goes over some of the responses to Trump's claim, for example. My point is basically that a section like this should not rely solely on a single source from the Economist, especially when it comes to claiming that Google is unbiased. There are a lot of opinions on this and it's unlikely that any one specific research study would be able to answer this satisfactorily enough to really make a definitive statement. Just be very cautious. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:24, 14 September 2018 (UTC)