Saw2188

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Hello, Saw2188, 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.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 01:16, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Can I discuss your question in class?

Hi Sarah

I want to illustrate a talk page comment tomorrow in class. Can I use your talk page? I am picking on you because you asked an interesting question. I hope this does not dissuade you in future! Here's your question:

"Reading Kaplan's Atlantic article, this Slate article came to mind. The article takes the same tone as Yeats' "The Second Coming." Am I misreading the piece or is it really as inflammatory/ill-founded/ethnocentric as I think it is?"

My response by email was "yes and no". There's some social science hypotheses underlying the article that I want us to discuss.

--Chrisblattman (talk) 02:07, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Add to Article -- Assignment for February 15th

Added to the Douglass North article. I did some copy editing of the lead, biography, and education sections. Added citations and deleted dead links. I also added a section about a 1992 paper ("Transaction Costs, Institutions, and Economic Performance). --Sarah Whittenburg (talk) 05:19, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Proposed Topics

Proposed Topic #1: Military Use of Children

Proposal: Military Use of Children [redirects from “child soldiers”]
Rating: C-Class.
Watchers/Edits: The Military Use of Children page has 134 watchers. 12 have recently made edits. So perhaps most of my work should center on the use of child soldiers in a particular conflict on a less-trafficked page. Child soldiers in Africa has fewer than 30 watchers and has not been edited since 2014. Both have respectful and productive Talk pages.
Related pages: Child soldiers in Africa, Lord’s Resistance Army, Trafficking of Children, Child Soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Human Rights in Sudan
Initial reading: Children at War (Singer), “The Logic of Child Soldiering and Coercion” (Berber and Blattman), Child soldiers in the age of fractured states (Gates and Reich), "Studying Issue (Non) Adoption in Transnational Advocacy Networks” (Carpenter)
Notes
• The page discusses the international laws prohibiting the recruitment of child soldiers, lists the nations and groups involved in the military use of children, gives some historical context around the use of child soldiers since 1800, and discusses the reintegration of child soldiers (and that discussion largely hinges on a single World Bank working paper).
• Most nations listed on the Military Use of Children page do not have full articles devoted to their use of child soldiers; some only have 1-2 sentence descriptions.
• The Military Use of Children page does not include research about the underlying causes of child soldier recruitment. Or what factors (widespread unemployment? vulnerability to indoctrination?) make recruitment successful. Nor does it discuss how the international norms condemning the use of child soldiers came into being. There is a lot of scholarly research addressing these questions.
• The Child soldiers in Africa page is very brief. Could expand that with similar research questions.
• The Lord’s Resistance Army page does not devote a section to child soldiers, though the page mentions child soldiers repeatedly. A lot of research on child soldiers centers on Uganda. There is relevant information about that on Wikipedia, but it is very scattered and without a theoretical discussion. (The three LRA insurgencies each have their own article.)
Routes: I could add social science theory to the Military Use of Children page and add more information to each conflict subheading (in Military Use of Children or Child soldiers in Africa.) Or create a page on the social science literature around the Military Use of Children and link it to that page. Or create an article about child-soldiers in a conflict that is not currently well covered (Sudan, for instance).
--Sarah Whittenburg (talk) 04:46, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Proposed Topic #2: Literature on Wartime sexual violence

Proposal: Include this in discussion of Military Use of Children.
Create a page on the social science literature around rape in war. Link it to Wartime sexual violence.
Rating: B-Class.
Related pages: Rape during the Sierra Leone Civil War, Rape during the Rwandan Genocide, Gang rape, Rape, Genocidal rape
Watchers/Edits: 138 watchers. 33 made recent edits. Last edit on 26 January 2016. Weary of the Wartime sexual violence talk page. Would want to create a new page and link to Wartime sexual violence.
Initial Reading: "Female Combatants and the Perpetration of Violence" (Cohen), "Explaining Rape during Civil War" (Cohen), “Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare?” (Wood)
Notes:
• Wartime sexual violence does not include an extended discussion on the causes of sexual violence in war. The “causes” section needs more social science; it relies heavily on news articles. Wood and Cohen discuss rape as a recruitment and socialization tool.
• Though Wartime sexual violence discusses the rape of men, that section is brief and also relies heavily on news articles.
• More broadly, I want to investigate the role of female participants in armed groups. Cohen argues that women regularly participate in the wartime rape of noncombatants. She mentions specific cases in Liberia, Haiti, the DRC, and Rwanda. Creating a page on the literature around wartime sexual violence would enable me to discuss competing explanations about why women and men participate. I could integrate my page into other pages on specific conflicts (e.g. Rape during the Sierra Leone Civil War, Rape during the Rwandan Genocide) or add to those pages directly when appropriate.
• Wartime sexual violence does not discuss why rape is rare in some conflicts.
--Sarah Whittenburg (talk) 06:48, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Selected Topic + Preliminary Source List (Environmental Determinism)

Source List for
Environmental determinism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism)

Books
AJR Chapters 1 and 2 of David Landes (1999). The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor.
Status: Requested BorrowDirect
Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_and_Poverty_of_Nations)
David Landes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Landes)

Engerman, Stanley L., and Kenneth L. Sokoloff. Economic development in the Americas since 1500: endowments and institutions. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Status: Requested BorrowDirect
Engerman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Engerman)
Sokoloff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Sokoloff)

Herbst, Jeffrey. "War and the State in Africa." International Security (1990)
Status: Obtained
Jeffrey Herbst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Herbst)

Jared Diamond (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Status: Obtained
Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel)
Jared Diamond (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond)

Articles
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. 2015. “Paths to Inclusive Political Institutions”
Marcella Alsan (2012). “The Effect of the Tse Tse Fly on African Development,” unpublished working paper.
Mellinger, Andrew D., Jeffrey D. Sachs, and John L. Gallup (1999). “Climate, Water Navigability, and Economic Development”
Nunn, Nathan, and Diego Puga. 2010. “Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa.” Review of Economics and Statistics 94 (1): 20–36.
W. Easterly and R. Levine (2003). “Tropics, germs, and crops: the role of endowments in economic development” Journal of Monetary Economics, 50:1.
Boaz Atzili. "When Good Fences Make Bad Neighbors Fixed Borders, State Weakness, and International Conflict." International Security, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Winter, 2006/2007), pp. 139-173.

See also
Factor endowment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_endowment)
Environmental history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_history)
NB: “Environmental possibilism” redirects to “Environmental determinism.”

--Sarah Whittenburg (talk) 08:50, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Improvements to North's article

I want to thank you for the particularly good job you did summarizing North's 92 paper, especially considering the less than ideal example of a paper summary within the article itself. You got to the point immediately, used wikilinks to compress or elide digressions and summarized the article well and concisely. Good job! Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:46, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

A brownie for you!

Brownies and Power Chrisblattman (talk) 14:38, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Teamwork Barnstar
	Thanks for the feedback on the article! Your suggestions will definitely improve my finished product! Crcarey (talk) 11:33, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

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