Catycherry

March 2019

Hello, I'm Chris troutman. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, Disinformation, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. If you need guidance on referencing, please see the referencing for beginners tutorial, or if you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Chris Troutman (talk) 14:16, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Catycherry (talk) 15:19, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi Chris. I added this sentence to talk about what Facebook is doing specifically to combat disinformation because their platform has been specifically mentioned so much in the context of disinformation and ways tech platforms are fighting it. The only reporting on their white paper is from Facebook itself, so I believe the sourcing mistake was made in error.≈≈≈≈ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Catycherry (talk • contribs) 10:19, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Was wordpress the only delivery mechanism for this white paper? The sentence you added was "Disinformation has once again become relevant in the public discourse again in light of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, encouraging Facebook to issue a report about the prevalence of information campaigns on its platform and steps the company is taking to combat it." Perhaps it would have been more encyclopedic to say that Facebook has published a white paper, in light of the 2016 election, about what they plan to do to prevent being a platform for the spread of disinformation. I reverted your edit because the text read (to me) slanted and you cited a blog. Chris Troutman (talk) 15:51, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Catycherry (talk) 15:56, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Oddly enough, yes -- I referenced it in my MA thesis after hours of digging for another platform on which it was released. That edit makes sense though, would it be acceptable to change to the below? "Disinformation has once again become relevant in the public discourse again in light of its prevalence on social media platforms during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Facebook has published a white paper, in light of the 2016 election, about what they plan to do to prevent the spread of disinformation on their platform."

Also, do you have any guidance for the citation issue?

Thank you! Catycherry (talk) 15:56, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

I still find your suggestion problematic. "Disinformation has once again become relevant in the public discourse again in light of its prevalence on social media platforms during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election." Who says disinformation is relevant? Wikipedia cannot declare that as fact. Does Facebook claim disinformation is relevant or do you, personally? Also, who says disinformation was prevalent on social media during the 2016 campaign? Maybe you believe that's true. Maybe Facebook believes that to be true; I don't know. You have evidence that Facebook has published its white paper and Wikipedia can say that, based upon the existence of same. Our content can only say what our cited sources say, with a careful eye to neutrality and verifiability. We cannot publish opinion as fact; we have to preface opinions and assertions as such, identifying who said so in what context. The sentence I suggested summarizes the issue, stating only the facts: Facebook published what, why, and about what. Your sentence pushes a point of view and assumes facts not in evidence. Chris Troutman (talk) 16:43, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Catycherry (talk) 18:06, 6 March 2019 (UTC) The sources on the 2016 Election page, and on the disinformation page, say it occurred during the 2016 election and mention specific instances in which others commented on it. How about the below? "Disinformation was prevalent on social media platforms during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Facebook has published a white paper, in light of the 2016 election, about what they plan to do to prevent the spread of disinformation on their platform." Catycherry (talk) 18:06, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

References

Recommended articles

SuggestBot is making a list of articles that you might like to edit. You will receive these suggestions soon. In the meantime, you might be interested in checking out the following WikiProjects. If you're interested in a project, feel free to add yourself to the member list and introduce yourself on the project talk page!

• WikiProject_Feminism (project page, talk page)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!

Views/Day	Quality	Title	Tagged with…
153		Media democracy (talk)	Add sources
436		Propaganda techniques (talk)	Add sources
2,927		KGB (talk)	Add sources
105		Operation Infektion (talk)	Add sources
46		Broadcast law (talk)	Add sources
736		Psychological warfare (talk)	Add sources
109		Clandestine HUMINT operational techniques (talk)	Cleanup
284		Criticism of advertising (talk)	Cleanup
2,392		Histrionic personality disorder (talk)	Cleanup
703		Fake news website (talk)	Expand
720		Racial hoax (talk)	Expand
64		Chekism (talk)	Expand
284		Media ethics (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
284		Black propaganda (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
1,015		Media bias in the United States (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
831		Newspeak (talk)	Merge
65		Data-driven journalism (talk)	Merge
104		Data journalism (talk)	Merge
179		Guilt-Shame-Fear spectrum of cultures (talk)	Wikify
156		Suggestibility (talk)	Wikify
599		Deep state (talk)	Wikify
8		Angela Barker (talk)	Orphan
2		Total Espionage doctrine (talk)	Orphan
2		Ali Mohammad Ghorbani (talk)	Orphan
104		Transfer (propaganda) (talk)	Stub
9		Roy Godson (talk)	Stub
69		Jewish guilt (talk)	Stub
33		Name recognition (talk)	Stub
36		Managing the news (talk)	Stub
12		Counter Misinformation Team (talk)	Stub

Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. Your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping.

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please tell me on SuggestBot's talk page. Thanks from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 16:44, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi there

elcome to Wikipedia Catycherry, from WikiProject Editor Retention
Thank you for registering! We hope that you find collaborative editing enjoyable. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that started in 2001, is free for all to use and edit within the guidelines and principles users have established and adhere to. Many of these principles and guidelines are listed below. Click on the link next to the images for more information. REMEMBER - each policy and guideline page has a discussion you can join to ask questions, add input and contribute your voice towards any current policy or guideline change underway! Join the discussion by going to the talk page of the article. Please take a minute to view a number of quick start pages for an overview of how to work within these guidelines and more information to help you better understand the practices and procedures editors are using. These include: The Newcomers Manual and User:Persian Poet Gal/"How-To" Guide to Wikipedia. Sometimes new editors become frustrated quickly and find their experience on Wikipedia less than enjoyable. This need not be. If you are having a difficult time for any reason, please feel free to ask me for assistance! Or, better yet, visit The Teahouse where veteran editors are waiting to assist you.
	Policies, guidelines and peer assistance		Help and Tutorials
	The five pillars of Wikipedia. The fundamental principles of the project.		Tutorial. Step-by-step guide on how to edit.
	Main policies of Wikipedia. Wikipedia's main policies and guidelines.		How to start a page. If you want to create a new article
	Style Guide. The complete guide to how articles should look.		Help. The complete help guide
	Copyright. Addressing copyright concerns.		Quick reference. A handy quick reference guide for editing Wiki.
	Help Desk. Here you can ask other editors for assistance		Your user pages and your sandbox. Editing in your own "personal" space
	Adoption program. Request an experienced guide for your first steps of editing.		Frequently asked questions. Some common questions and their answers.

This is being posted on your talk page where you can receive messages from other Wikipedians and discuss issues and respond to questions. At the end of each message you will see a signature left by the editor posting. This is done by signing with four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking in the editing interface toolbox, located just above the editing window (when editing). You won't need to sign your contributions to articles themselves; you only need to when using talk pages. If you have any questions or face any initial hurdles, feel free to contact me on my talk page and I will do what I can to assist or give you guidance.

Again, welcome! Gog the Mild (talk) 19:14, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

An invitation

Thanks so much Gog! I'm still getting the hang of coding on here so any tips you have would be helpful. I'd love to join the copyediting community, I got started here because I love doing grammatical edits, so I'll be joining the March challenge and try to copy edit a few articles a day at least after work. Thanks again! Catycherry (talk) 13:33, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi. And good. I suggest that you start with the February and March articles from the backlog - the further back you go the more you will find that the easier articles have been cherry picked. Feel free to shout for me or one of the coordinators if you feel at all uncertain. (I have found User:Reidgreg to be helpful and friendly, but frankly they all are.) I suspect that your biggest issue will be picking up the Manual of Style, but that just takes time and a willingness to learn. Gog the Mild (talk) 13:50, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

PS Lesson one: note how I have tidied up your floating reference. And two: to attract another editor's attention one usually "pings" them - {{ping|Gog the Mild}} at the start of the message - or just cut and paste their user name - [[User:Gog the Mild|Gog the Mild]]. This will cause a red bell to appear at the top of their pages, as I hope, this post has caused one to appear on your pages. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:21, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi Catycherry! Welcome to Wikipedia! I'm Reidgreg, the GOCE coordinator that Gog mentioned (because he linked my name, I received an alert and read this). I don't think I've ever advised copy editing to an editor with so few edits. It's not a matter of competency, but more about familiarity with Wikipedia's style and encyclopedic tone, and just understanding editing practices. Nonethless, feel free to be bold and start copy editing right away; any editor is free to edit just about anything on Wikipedia, and even small improvements are improvements. If you work on a GOCE editing drive or blitz, coordinators may check your work and offer feedback, so that's a plus.

I've decided to review your copy editing so far. Please receive these notes constructively.

• In your edit on Dogma (film) you added spaces around the dashes and removed some double spaces. The double spaces don't really have an effect; some editors type them from habit or to make the text easier to read in the edit window (particularly with template parameters), but the mediawiki software always renders these as a single space (so long as non of them are non-breaking spaces). For the other matter, Wikipedia allows two acceptable styles for dashes: spaced en dashes or unspaced em dashes, with one style used consistently throughout an article (see MOS:DASH). The em dash is a bit longer (originally, the width of an m compared to the width of an n) and copy editors learn to spot the difference pretty quickly. So those spaces around the em dashes aren't needed.
• In your edit on Disinformation you added a bit to the lead of the article. This is addressed at length above. I'll add that the lead (or lede) acts as a summary and introduction to the article, and generally shouldn't have anything that isn't in the body of the article (i.e.: everything between the lead and the references). It's generally better to add new material to the body, and if the edit is not contested and if it holds enough weight in the overall article, the new material may be briefly summarized in the lead. Personally, I feel the lead is putting too much weight on the US–Russia aspect and not taking a global view by including EU and former Soviet states. For the language itself, with Disinformation has once again become relevant in the public discourse again in light of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election you don't need to have 'again' in there twice. I might have rewritten it as: Disinformation continued to be used by post-Soviet Russia, though it did not receive public attention in the U.S. until the 2016 Presidential Election, after which Facebook (etc), assuming the sources supported that.
• I noticed a couple spots in your edit to Travis Manawa:
  • he says his priorities are for the protection of his family. → he says his priorities are the protection of his family. I think this should be "priority is" to agree with "the protection of his family" as singular, where before it could have been multiple priorities related to the protection of his family.
  • However, he fails and she is dragged back under and later awakens. → However, he fails and she is dragged back under before waking up. I feel like the language could be simplified around the back-under-before-up. Those words can be used different ways and it might not be clear if the reader is unfamiliar with a phrase. We should try to consider an international readership, readers who might not be too fluent in English, and machine translators. Actually, looking at it, I'm not sure that sentence is needed at all. The first two sentences convey that it is a dream sequence and Travis' role in it; Madison's fate in the dream sequence does not seem relevant to the character of Travis.
• In your edit to Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • Buffy surrounds herself with a circle of loyal friends who become known to some as the "Scooby Gang". You added the "to some", which I don't think is necessary. This might be a place to try the "opposite test". What would the alternative be, to be "known by all"? I can't think of where that would ever literally apply. Thus the "to some" can be safely assumed, and doesn't have to be stated. I'll note that normally in copy editing we will be removing words and making language more concise, particularly as this is an encyclopedia it is our job to summarize material and give readers the essential facts in a relatively small package. If you can avoid wordiness, do so.
  • as well as This is a perfect example of unnecessary wordiness (expressing something in too many words). and will serve perfectly well here.
  • The Turok-Han vampires and a sinister, misogynistic preacher known as Caleb, begin causing havoc for the Scoobies. You added the comma before begin; this interrupts the clause and separates the subject from the verb. The main problem here is actually the first comma: Wikipedia does not put commas between compound modifiers. (If anything, we would join them together with a hyphen, not separate them with a comma.) Get rid of that misplaced comma, and then I can understand if you want to put commas around known as Caleb as a parenthetic. Commas are the most misused punctuation on Wikipedia, so familiarize yourself with MOS:COMMA and keep an eye on them.
• In your edit of Dutch East India Company
  • It was originally established on March 20, 1602 as a chartered company to trade with India Adding the underlined comma was correct, but you need another one after the year to complete the parenthetic. mdy dates get commas around the year, dmy dates do not.
  • Slightly above that is March 20th, 1602, This has both commas, which is correct, but Wikipedia does not use ordinals for dates, so the th should be removed.
• In your edits (1, 2, 3) to Campus card:
  • The campus card is “available for individuals on campus who need access to services via a card," allowing it to You combined a couple sentences, which improved the flow. However, another thing to watch for is punctuation at quotation marks. Wikipedia uses the logical quotation system (MOS:LQ) which places punctuation outside of the quotation unless it is part of the actual quote.
  • I'll also point out that some of the quotation marks in the article are "curly" and MOS recommends straight quotation marks (MOS:CURLY). Curly quotes can be an indicator that text was copied and pasted from a website, which may be a copyright violation.
  • In one of your additions you used the term "student card" where maybe it should be "campus card" for consistency. Sometimes it seems like "campus card" is used as a proper noun but I have not investigated this.
  • You removed the years of adoption at Nova Southeastern University and Missouri State University. These may be extraneous details, but on the other hand this might establish the institutions as early adopters and why it is worthwhile mentioning them.

I hope that doesn't overwhelm you. I just reviewed your edits, I didn't thoroughly look at the articles. You made some improvements, some so-so, and maybe introduced a couple small mistakes. All in all, not bad, and if you fix the things I pointed out I'd be pretty happy about it. We were all new editors at some point, and it takes a while to assimilate Wikipedia's style conventions. I will point out Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/How to which lists some pages with resources, advice, and tutorials for copy editing on Wikipedia. If you have any questions, feel free to get my attention with {{ping|Reidgreg}} or you can ask on one of the GOCE talk pages: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Coordinators, or the current blitz or drive talk page. Happy editing! – Reidgreg (talk) 18:28, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the guidance {{ping|Reidgreg}} and {{ping|Gog the Mild}}! I made those edits, and will more carefully review the style guide before making others going forward. Appreciate the help.

Catycherry (talk) 01:12, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi Catycherry. By putting in "tlp|" you blocked the ping, and linked to the guidance page on pinging instead. I know, sometimes Wikipedia drives me crazy too. I will repeat the valid pings here - @Reidgreg: and @Gog the Mild: If you look at this post in "Edit source" you will see the difference. And thanks for the response. Gog the Mild (talk) 12:37, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

You pinged? See how fast that was! (Well, fast for me.) – Reidgreg (talk) 13:46, 18 March 2019 (UTC)