Talk:Racial stereotyping in advertising/Archives/2015

Moved to draftspace

@Shishmeh: I've moved this to the draftspace so you can work on it further. The article had several issues, which I'll detail as follows:

1. The article lacked in-line citations. In line citations are used to back up specific points in the article. This is helpful in that it shows that a specific statement is backed up with a reliable source that explicitly states whatever the preceding sentence/claim was. A proper in-line citation will look like this: <ref>{{cite web|title=Wikipedia:Citing sources|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Inline_citations|publisher=Wikipedia|accessdate=1 April 2015}}</ref> and when put at the end of a claim (preferably at the end of a sentence), it will look like this:
2. The lack of in-line citations has the unintended side effect of making the article's contents seem like it is original research, but I also see where you do appear to be drawing your own conclusions in the text. That's one of the biggest issues that students have when editing a Wikipedia article. Don't take that as an accusatory sentence since this is something that a lot of people do- educators and scholars included. Many are used to writing papers or studies for school, work, or for journals, where you are not only free to draw your own conclusions but encouraged to do so since it shows that you have an understanding of the topic. That's not really the case with Wikipedia since you can't draw conclusions- you can only state what has definitively been stated in prior reliable sources. You didn't do that badly with this, but you do need to be a little less vague with some sentences like this: "There is not an agreed upon way to define racism in advertisement because there is no standard idea of what racism is." If this is stated by a specific source, it'd be a good idea to write something like "According to Bob Smith in his journal article "Racial Stereotypes and Advertising in the United States, it is hard to define racism in advertising because there are differing opinions on the definition of racism itself." This way you're attributing this to a specific person and not showing it as a very general statement. (It still needs to have an in-line citation, though.) You'll have to do this with any article, but it's especially good to be careful with any Wikipedia article that deals with a topic that could be controversial.
3. I was unable to really verify the sources. Offhand they're all academic sources which is excellent- a common problem is that people will source with self-published sources like blogs, but you haven't done that- which is wonderful. However at the same time I don't really see a link to the actual source. You can sometimes find these on JSTOR (or similar websites) where they'll either have a stable URL (like this one) or they'll come up with a link via your institution that you can use. You'll typically find these to the side, under citation tools. In any case, this gives us a chance to potentially track down the source. The big issue I had with this though, is that I couldn't entirely verify that the subjects were specifically about racial stereotyping in advertising or that they backed up specific details. Some of them obviously pertained to the topic, such as "Race and Gender in the Media: A Content Analysis of Advertisements in Two Mainstream Black Magazines", but others are far more vague like "Eating Disorders and the Role of the Media" and "Culture Shock, What Culture Shock?". Think of it from an outsider's perception: while the topic of the article deals with racial stereotyping, these articles do not immediately bring that to mind. That's part of the reason that in-line citations are important since they can show that you're backing up a specific claim, but linking to them will also help us go to the article and see what you're mentioning.
4. Another thing to point out is that you will need to quote specific page numbers if you are using a source for a specific claim. I didn't see Stuart Hall listed as one of the sources in the article, so I can only guess that he's listed in one of the sources on the page. If for instance you're referring to a quote made by him on a page of "Eating Disorders and the Role of the Media", then giving us the page number will help us find and verify it for the article or in case one of us wanted to use the source for a non-Wikipedia research project. That's also kind of the way that Wikipedia differs from a research paper. In research paper you can be more general in citations, whereas you have to be somewhat more specific here. Some prefer that you use a specific page number for each point you back up, although if the work is very general then you can sometimes also just use a general citation.
5. This isn't an issue per se, but I do note that you refer to Stuart Hall twice. Be careful of relying overly much on one person in an article, otherwise it can come across like you were only really looking at one source. It doesn't mean that you have to refer to 10 names, just to be careful of relying on just one. I didn't really see where this was an issue here, but it's just something to be careful about that I figured I'd mention just in case.

Overall the article does look very good and I really don't think that you'll have much trouble finding sourcing for this. However right now this just needs some more work before it's really ready for the mainspace. I do note that moving the article to the mainspace was part of your assignment, so I'm going to ping @Debaser42: so he sees this and so he can know that you did put this in the mainspace but I moved it back so you can work on it some more since someone tagged it for deletion via WP:PROD. I'm also going to let a few of the WikiProjects (projects devoted to editing on a specific topic) know that you're writing this so they can come in and lend you a hand. On a side note, if you were the one who chose this topic or you were influential in its decision, this was an incredibly good idea and I'm actually surprised that it isn't already covered somewhere. This has the potential to be a huge article on Wikipedia since this is a topic that covers a large stretch of history. Well done on recognizing that this needed to be added! This is pretty much the reason why it's so awesome to have students helping on Wikipedia- sometimes you can notice what's missing better than seasoned editors can. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 10:58, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

• One last note: when writing this, make sure that you stick to racial stereotyping. You do somewhat go into other territories with gender issues, but not overly so. However make sure that you don't go too general with this since gender issues would make up a different article entirely. It's already covered somewhat at gender advertising (although that needs a bit of work), so we need to be careful not to be redundant. I'm going to try to help you out some and I've added a new lead, but I have to log off for a few hours. I'll try to get on later on during the day and help out some more. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 11:22, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm the one who PROD'd this, in the hopes that it would get worked on and improved before the PROD expired. I did clean it up a bit while doing so. My suggestion for improvement would be to add some sections to improve readability. Please, feel free to ask questions here. Also, you may want to look into the template {{cite journal}} and its related templates for references, it makes life a whole lot easier. Jerodlycett (talk) 11:52, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

References

Thanks so much both of you - great feedback. This article should have had proper inline citations and it shouldn't have been moved, but when there are eighteen students moving articles at once sometimes they get by multiple peer reviews. Debaser42 (talk) 21:24, 1 April 2015 (UTC)