Jenjen1jenjen

Nomination of Life in the Abyss for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Life in the Abyss is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Life in the Abyss until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion template from the top of the article. Yutsi ^Talk/ Contributions 14:51, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia: check out the Teahouse!

Hello! Jenjen1jenjen, you are invited to the Teahouse, a forum on Wikipedia for new editors to ask questions about editing Wikipedia, and get support from peers and experienced editors. Please join us! Sarah (talk) 15:09, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Your article for a school project

Hi Jenjen, and welcome to Wikipedia! I noticed that you stated the article you created, Life in the Abyss, was for a school project. Unfortunately, it appears to be written like an essay, not an encyclopedia article, and has been nominated for deletion. Wikipedia is, first and foremost, an encyclopedia, and so all articles should be written in a formal tone in accordance to our Manual of Style.

If you don't mind, I'd like to move this article to your user space, so that you can work on bringing it up to Wikipedia's standards without fear of deletion.

Also, I suggest you have your professor contact one of the Wikipedia users listed here, as we like to keep track of all University-assigned editing that goes on.

I understand that, at first, editing here can be confusing or even overwhelming with all the rules and guidelines I've referenced above, so if you have any questions at all please contact me on my talk page. Thanks! -RunningOnBrains^(talk) 22:51, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

I have userfied your article

...that is, moved it into a user sub-page at User:Jenjen1jenjen/Life in the Abyss where you can work on it. I did that as closing administrator for the deletion discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Life in the Abyss. I have some advice to give you, but it will have to wait until tomorrow, as I am out of time tonight. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 22:25, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Welcome message

I am sorry to see that nobody gave you one of our standard Welcome messages, which contain useful links. Better late than never, here is one:

Hello, Jenjen1jenjen, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! JohnCD (talk) 22:01, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

About class projects

First, I would like to repeat the advice given above: please ask the instructor in charge of your class project to read this section, which is addressed to her/him as much as to you.

Class projects are welcome, but it is highly desirable to list them at Wikipedia:School and university projects, where there is advice and lists of useful contacts, and also to establish a central page where all the students' usernames and their articles are listed, with a contact in case of problems. Other useful pages are:

• Wikipedia:School and university projects/Instructions for teachers and lecturers
• User:Jbmurray/Advice

Two points where previous class projects have encountered problems:

• Copyright is a perennial issue. Wikipedia cannot accept material copied from elsewhere without a formal copyright release, not even in user pages, not even temporarily. It is important that all the students read Wikipedia:Copy-paste, and also Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing which explains that minor rewording is not enough to avoid copyright problems
• One important respect in which an encyclopedia article differs from a normal student paper is that the point of a student paper is often to advance a novel point, maybe backed up by combining material from different sources. On the other hand, the role of an encyclopedia is only to summarise material already published by reliable sources, so one of Wikipedia's fundamental policies is WP:No original research, which includes WP:SYNTHESIS: "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources." JohnCD (talk) 22:01, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

About your specific article

As you will see from the deletion discussion, those taking part thought there was good material there, but "but not with this tone and this title". The title is easily changed, and the suggested "Ecology of the abyssal zone" sounds good. The problem with the tone is that it reads more like a magazine article, or the commentary for a TV programme, than an encyclopedia article - one feels your aim was to make the reader think "Gee whizz! How extraordinary!" rather than to supply information. Phrases like "mysteriously dark... unique environmental characteristics... phenomenal animals... Another extraordinary organism... mysterious existence... The abyss’s hidden wonders... " are not what we would call encyclopedic. See WP:PEACOCK.

Your aim should be not to impress but to inform the reader. There is good advice in WP:Writing better articles, and a good way to get a feel for the encyclopedic style might be to look at some existing articles from the list of WP:Good articles and WP:Featured articles. You will also see there that ideally individual facts are cited to sources, rather than listing a number of references that collectively cover the whole article.

One useful suggestion made in the deletion debate is that you should consider, at least in the first instance, writing a shorter section for the existing article Abyssal zone. I think the necessary compression would be a good exercise in helping you to extract the essence of what you have to say, and that could be expanded later to split off into a separate article.

Regards, JohnCD (talk) 22:01, 29 May 2012 (UTC)