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Hello, Ncjone19, 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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  • 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) 15:33, 10 September 2018 (UTC)Reply


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Hi! I was alerted to your Ask question about finding topics for the Enlightenment.

A good option would be to look at the page for the writers of the Encyclopédie, at Encyclopédistes. Click on the pages for the contributors, like Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d'Argis, and see whose pages need improvement and expansion. For example, Arnulphe d'Aumont needs work, as does Jean-François-Henri Collot, Étienne Noël Damilaville, and César Chesneau Dumarsais.

You can also go to the category page, Category:Age_of_Enlightenment and go through the pages there to see which ones need work. Transylvanian School needs work and so does the page on Women in the Enlightenment. You may want to look through Category: French salon-holders as well, since salons were a popular place for women during the Enlightenment.

As far as researching goes, that will be dependent on what topic you choose. You'll definitely want to make an appointment with your college's research librarian since they will have the best knowledge of what they have in their libraries and databases. The library website also has a chat function, if you aren't able to go in person - although going in person is always better. As far as basic searching goes, it's always good to start with the tried and true general search on your library's website. When you look for sources, always try to find the best possible sources - these will typically be academic or scholarly sources, but not always. If you use Google, be extremely careful and selective as not all Google results are seen as reliable on Wikipedia. This is why it's better to start with your school's offerings and go from there, since that's where you're likely going to find the strongest sources. You can also use key terms for searching. I used the terms "Age of Enlightenment" and women to search your library's database and found this, for example. Now you'll notice I put quotation marks around the term Age of Enlightenment. The reason I did that is because doing this will restrict the search engine by telling it to look specifically for the term "Age of Enlightenment" as opposed to searching for anything that has those three words in it, regardless of where they are in the source or their proximity to one another.

I hope that this all helps! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:14, 9 November 2018 (UTC)Reply