Welcome!

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Hello, Nmalq001, 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) 13:47, 29 August 2019 (UTC)Reply

The Vaccine War moved to sandbox

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Hi, Nmalq001. I just wanted to let you know that I moved your article back to User:Nmalq001/sandbox, because it isn't ready to be published yet. To remain published, Wikipedia articles need to have sources that discuss the subject of the article in depth. There were many sources about vaccines and anti-vaccination in your article, but none that actually discussed the film itself. You need to add sources such as film reviews or news articles that are specifically about The Vaccine War. Also, you may want to read Wikipedia's guidelines on plot summaries: WP:PLOTSUMMARY. Thanks and happy editing. Pinging Shalor (Wiki Ed) for more advice. SpicyMilkBoy (talk) 17:02, 9 March 2020 (UTC)Reply

Wiki page

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Hi. When my page was revised, it was pointed out that my synopsis and such may be argumentative based and that I may want to review the guidelines for an essay. Where could I improve because I went through the entire documentary, breaking down each significant part without provided an opinionated bias within the synopsis. Thank you for the feedback. Nmalq001 (talk) 17:02, 10 March 2020 (UTC)nmalq001Reply

Wikipedia articles need to be based on secondary sources, like reviews, books, or news articles that specifically discuss the documentary. The issue with your article is that it is mostly a summary of the documentary, which is considered a primary source. The other content in the article relates to vaccines and anti-vaccination in general, but not to the documentary. To understand how an article like this should be written, you can look at other articles on documentaries - for example, see the article on Behind the Curve. You can see that the references are all reviews of the film and the article only includes information that is directly related to the film, rather than discussing the Flat Earth movement in general. The synopsis only gives a brief summary of the documentary rather than detailing everything that happens. Hope this helps. SpicyMilkBoy (talk) 17:58, 10 March 2020 (UTC)Reply

Notes

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Hi! Here are my notes:

Firstly, I want to make sure that you have this brochure on editing film articles.

  • The article needs to be focused solely on the film. You have a lot of information about things that the film covers but don't pertain to the film per se - what this film should contain is the following:
  1. Lead section
  2. Synopsis section
  3. Development section
  4. Release section
  5. Reception section
I have a basic template that has this and some information about what should be in each section here.
The reason that all of this information currently in the article is an issue is because it draws away from the central topic, which is the documentary. It tells us about things that are relative to the documentary but not really anything about the documentary itself. It's also generally unnecessary to explain this information since there are already articles on these topics and the expectation is that people can either click through to these articles to find out this specific information or they will already have some awareness of this information. If the article does contain information, it should specifically be how the documentary covers these issues. The article on An Inconvenient Truth gives a good example of how a documentary article can be set up.
  • SpicyMilkBoy is correct in that the article shouldn't read like an essay or that it's petitioning the reader to see things in a specific way. The reader shouldn't feel like they're being told to see things in a specific light.
  • This is actually an episode of a TV series, so I've altered the article to reflect this. I've also replaced much of this with a basic template that can be followed. While this is an episode of a documentary and investigative series rather than a documentary film per se, the basic outline and guidelines for films will still apply here.
  • Make sure that the sourcing specifically focuses on the documentary. While the overall topic of the vaccine controversy and the main series are notable, the documentary doesn't inherit notability from either - it needs coverage that specifically focuses on it by way of reviews and coverage of the episode in places like newspapers and academic and scholarly sources. Also be aware that Wikipedia cannot be used to source itself.

I've started some cleanup as mentioned above - I'll try and see if I can find some specific sources to help show as an example of what coverage you should be using. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:54, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply

  • This is a good review to use for the episode, as the NYT is a reliable source. I will warn you - when looking for sourcing, make sure that you are careful to check and make sure that the source isn't a blog post - Forbes is a site that still has their contributor posts up. These were self-published posts that didn't undergo any editorial oversight. With these you need to make sure that the person is routinely seen as a reliable, authoritative source and in the case of general blogs, that the blog is seen as a reliable source by other reliable sources such as academic and scholarly sources. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:09, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply