JenniferKaiser2020

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Hello, JenniferKaiser2020, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:20, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

I don't work with the Wiki Education Foundation, but I second that welcome, JenniferKaiser2020. It looks as though you will be working on an article I've also been working on. I've been around for a bit, but I've never had any formal training in wiki editing, so I we may both learn from one another. Please feel free to post to my talk page about anything. HLHJ (talk) 04:08, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

E-cigarettes

@JenniferKaiser2020, Dumbpepper, Colleen mccann, and Grracelee:

Hi. I noticed that you had made some edits to the Marketing of electronic cigarettes article, and I wanted to warn you that this is a very contentious topic on Wikipedia, and might not be the best topic to work on.

If you do choose to work on it, please be very careful about what you say and how you support what you say. Make sure that the information you're adding is precisely about this topic, not background.

For example saying something like this is likely to be reverted as off-topic:

Propylene glycol can have ill effects on user health; including irritation of the eyes and throat.

This might be appropriate in another related article, like the Safety of electronic cigarettes, but in this article, it's best to simply link to the safety article and keep this one focussed on marketing.

It's also important to remember than Wikipedia isn't meant to be a US-specific project.

In recent years, there has been a national shift toward outlawing the sale of flavored tobacco, starting with the ban on flavored cigarettes in 2009.

• "In recent years" is both overly vague ("recent" means different things to different people) and likely to become dated over time; the oldest parts of Wikipedia are approaching their 17th birthday, and "recent" in 2001 isn't recent any more.
• You can't refer to a "national shift" without specifying the country. The article is already tagged as not representing an appropriately global view of things. Even if you can't fix the problem, don't make it worse - make sure that the information you are adding doesn't just apply to the US.

Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:20, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, Ian (Wiki Ed), that's good advice. I'm not sure if you know, but there was an RfC which concluded that when marketing claims are documented, due weight should also be given to critiques and evidence against the marketing claims, including health information. So there is some scope for such information, carefully judged.

Unfortunately this is a contentious topic, and a lot of editors don't want to get involved with it. At worst, though, that means that Phillip Morris writes the articles, literally. In this case, I created the article, and it passed third-party review with modifications, but then so many people started editing it that I couldn't keep up. You students have been editing far more constructively than almost all of the editors of the page, and I would welcome any advice on how I can help them. HLHJ (talk) 05:10, 10 November 2018 (UTC)