Skezmoh

Welcome!

Hello, Skezmoh, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; 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.

Handouts
Editing Wikipedia, a guide for student editors Choosing an article to edit Add images to articles Citing sources on Wikipedia
Additional Resources
You can find answers to many student questions in our FAQ.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:25, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

GMO and pesticide topics

Hey, just wanted to give you some support like I mentioned on the article talk page, but your efforts are definitely welcome in the subject. I think everyone was pretty clear that you caught something worthwhile when it came to copyright issues earlier. Agricultural topics, especially when they intersect with medical or food science, can get really dicey sometimes on Wikipedia, similar to things like climate change denial, etc. That's absolutely nothing against you, so I don't want to see new editors interested in the topic disheartened. A lot of times, text just needs tweaking on the talk page, or there's some history of previous disputes that resulted in compromise language already that makes navigation difficult, so going to the talk page is exactly what should be done in cases like that. Definitely feel free to ask if you need help navigating the subject, and at least for your student project, grades are not supposed to be dependent on whether your specific content sticks or not. KoA (talk) 17:45, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Skezmoh, I want to add to what KoA said (and pinging Ian (Wiki Ed) as an FYI). In case you didn't see my earlier link, I was so much impressed with your catching the copyvio that I posted a compliment about it here. Please don't feel discouraged about how editing here works. As KoA said, that's just the way things are on Wikipedia (and I suppose that part of the learning process for your class is to experience first-hand what it's like, for better or for worse). It's really true that GMO and pesticide topics have been a troubled topic area on Wikipedia – just see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Genetically modified organisms and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Genetically modified organisms. In any case, you are welcome here, and your work has not gone unappreciated. Best, --Tryptofish (talk) 23:30, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi Skezmoh. I wanted to add a few thoughts about how you might best contribute to this article. Right now, the article depends quite heavily news sources, so it was good to see you add content from a scholarly source in the "background" section. I did a quick search of Google Scholar and there are quite a few articles that mention Johnson v. Monsanto, including quite a few recent articles that go into some depth. In an article like this there is a need to balance medical claims and legal ones, and it's important to remember that claims made in a legal case aren't themselves reliable sources. The legal process is adversarial by design, and participants routinely make claims that go beyond what they can hope to prove. That's especially important with regards to the "ghostwriting" issue. The source you used isn't scholarly or journalistic - it's a law firm that touts itself as Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman is one of the leading law firms representing people across the nation in lawsuits against Monsanto. It's better to avoid sources like this when possible, and to very clearly attribute things to them (and identify them as an interested party).

For a sense of what the article might look like under ideal conditions, have a look at some of the articles listed at Wikipedia:Good_articles/Social_sciences_and_society#Law (which are Good Articles about legal cases) and Wikipedia:Featured_articles#Law (for Featured Articles). Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:56, 1 June 2022 (UTC)