Mason1986

Your recent edits

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Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 15:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Working on an assignment

Hi, I saw the conflict regarding nonverbal influence. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't make exceptions to the rules just because someone is working on an educational assignment (especially for something with legal implications like a copyright infringement). Ideally, your instructor will spend some time going over important policies/guidelines, but it's unrealistic to cover everything except in a course dedicated to Wikipedia. So article assignments can be challenging. If your content is removed, ask the person who removed it to help you get it to a point where it could be included. Most people are willing to help out or at least to point you in the direction of some helpful information. I know nothing of the subject of the article, but let me know if I can help with general Wikipedia questions.

PS: Does your instructor have a Wikipedia account? --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  20:12, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

I think he does have a Wiki account but I do not know what it is and I don't remember him sharing it with us, I will double check this. I do understand that there are legal issues with copyright infringement. I had an issue with something that was removed from the page when i used my own words to convey a concept from my research and I also cited the material. There was one section of the page that I had not populated that did indeed violate copyright infringement laws and I was not discussing that portion at that time. I understand there are no exceptions as this is a place of shared and collaborative knowledge and the information needs to be as accurate as possible given the circumstances. Our problem was instead of getting constructive feedback, things were immediately removed instead of letting us correct it by working with the person that caught the error. This also made our professor think we had not done the right amount of work due to large portions being removed. One example in the conflict was that the section on Nonverbal Expectancy Violation was a copyright violation stating my words were found verbatim in a google book. When I conducted the same search of my words in that section no such google book showed up in this search. This is also a subcategory of nonverbal communication and as such there may be an overlapping of ideas but no plagiarism is meant when that happens. Again we appreciate feedback in the form of discussion so we can fix it instead of just removing it. As far as our professor, he only had a limited amount of time to show us what we needed to do so we have been learning along the way. Again, when i find his info, I will be more than happy to share that with you. I have never done this wiki submission stuff before (and after this experience, I don't think I will likely engage in doing this again). Again thanks for your note, time, and patience. And I will of course be asking you lots of questions as they arise with this submission. Thanks for the offer of support.

I've used Wikipedia in a number of classes that I teach and based on my experience something like 1/5-1/4 of students have some kind of interaction with other editors that, combined with the mandatory and consequential nature of a class assignment, makes for a stressful time. Editing when a grade isn't on the line, and once you've gotten a feel for how things work, is less trying, I assure you.

Regardless, I don't know if this is something you've gone over, but know that if you add something and it's removed by someone else, your work is still preserved through the article history. See the history page for Nonverbal influence. On each line that you see your name, there is a link marked "prev" on the left side. If you click that, it'll show exactly what you added and when. This is important information when grading assignments because you never know if what the students did was completely undone just in time for the due-date. So if you're worried the work you did isn't showing up, you can always give your professor links to the pages you see when you click "prev" (that kind of page is called a "diff").

One more thing. I don't have the time to scrutinize what you did, but I did notice that it looks like you're duplicating citation formats. If you use the <ref></ref> tags, you do not need to add the "works cited" style citation at the end; it's generated automatically. --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  22:10, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Mason1986, you are invited to the Teahouse

Hi Mason1986! Thanks for contributing to Wikipedia. Be our guest at the Teahouse! The Teahouse is a friendly space where new editors can ask questions about contributing to Wikipedia and get help from peers and experienced editors. I hope to see you there! Doctree (I'm a Teahouse host) Visit the Teahouse This message was delivered automatically by your robot friend, HostBot (talk) 16:08, 11 May 2014 (UTC)