Sluqa94
Welcome!
editHello, Sluqa94, 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.
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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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:48, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Your edits to E. coli
editHello Sluqa94! Welcome to Wikipedia!! I noticed your recent edits to Escherichia coli. A couple of suggestions:
1. Your reference formatting is all messed up. Notice elsewhere in the article citations are clickable while yours are not. When we add references, we don't add the reference number, the software sorts that all out behind the scenes. Instead, if you're using visual editor, click on the "cite" button in the toolbar and follow the instructions to insert formatted citations. This is also mentioned in the citing your sources handout linked on your talk page, and you can find more at Help:Referencing for beginners.
2. In this edit you add a bunch of explanation about what a plasmid is. This probably isn't necessary in a page about E. coli (otherwise the page would read "bacteria are tiny little critters... Escherichia is a genus of... a genus is an artificial grouping of organisms... etc. etc. etc."). Instead, you can just make a wikilink to the page for plasmids by doing this: [[plasmid]] which shows up like this plasmid.
Due to those things, it's possible someone will come along and revert your edits. If that happens, don't fret! It happens. Especially when you're new. There's a lot of formatting and norms to learn around here and no one gets it right their first try.
That leads me to my biggest piece of advice: if you're really interested in improving the encyclopedia (and I hope you are!) then my suggestion would be to not start with pages like E. coli which are already pretty well-developed. Hundreds of editors have been working on that page for over a decade. Quite frankly, we're mostly happy with it. If you go in and try to change things up, you're likely to beat your head against a bunch of more-established editors who are trying to maintain the article. Instead, I'd suggest you take a look at one of the literally hundreds-of-thousands of poorly-developed pages where with a little bit of attention you could make a huge improvement! If you're interested in pathogenic E. coli, many of the related pages could really use some care: Shigatoxigenic and verotoxigenic Escherichia coli needs more info and needs to be reorganized to look more like other pathogen pages. Escherichia_coli_O157:H7 needs more info. 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak needs to be reorganized so that text is in prose rather than bullet points. 2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_outbreak still reads as a play-by-play since the article was written in 2011. It needs to be reworded in retrospect and new sources added (I'm sure much has been written on it in the 6 years since). Its causative agent Escherichia_coli_O104:H4 also needs more info. Those are just the first things that come to mind. There's so much that needs to be done here, and not enough people interested in doing it.
If you have any questions about editing, feel free to ask me at my talk page or ask friendly editors at WP:TEAHOUSE. If you'd like other suggestions for where to get started, let me know. I'm happy to help. I hope you decide to stick around and help improve the encyclopedia. Happy editing! Ajpolino (talk) 18:27, 19 May 2017 (UTC)