Welcome

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Hello, Melanierobertson and welcome to Wikipedia! It appears you are participating in a class project. If you haven't done so already, we encourage you to go through our training for students. Go through our online training for students

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. Please also read this helpful advice for students.

Before you create an article, make sure you understand what kind of articles are accepted here. Remember: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and while many topics are encyclopedic, some things are not.

Your instructor or professor may wish to set up a course page, and if your class doesn't already have one please tell your instructor about that. It is highly recommended that you place this text: {{Educational assignment}} on the talk page of any articles you are working on as part of your Wikipedia-related course assignment. This will let other editors know this article is a subject of an educational assignment and aid your communication with them.

We hope you like it here and encourage you to stay even after your assignment is finished! SPF121188 (talk this way) (contribs) 18:35, 6 October 2022 (UTC)Reply

How to use the talk page

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Hey! I noticed your edit to Alan Sieler, where it appears you're trying to provide a resource for others to use. These kinds of messages go on the talk page of an article. I've moved your message to the talk page of Alan Sieler for you, but make sure you're doing the same in the future. For help on how to use talk pages, please read Help:Talk pages. If you have any other questions on how to start editing Wikipedia, you can ask the lovely people over at the WP:Teahouse. Thanks! ― Levi_OPTalk 16:33, 12 October 2022 (UTC)Reply

Welcome!

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Hello, Melanierobertson, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; 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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  • You can find answers to many student questions in our FAQ.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:20, 18 October 2022 (UTC)Reply

Your edits

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Hi, Melanierobertson! You added a lot of stuff to our article on Dog, and I removed it as unencyclopaedic. At that point, if you disagree with my assessment, your next step is to start a discussion on the talk-page. Instead, you added back the same (or very similar) content with a series of edits. That's a mistake – simply re-adding the same stuff again is not going to make it stick (and yes, it's already been removed again).

I see that you are a student editor. I don't want to be inhospitable or discouraging, but the chances of an editor with little or no experience or understanding of editing Wikipedia making any substantial improvement to a high-profile general article such as Dog are ... well, not good. Your course instructor should of course have told you this. You could try making some tiny nerdy improvements to that page (a comma added here or removed there, for example), or you could choose an obscure dog page with relatively few page views and try adding something significant to that (you presumably have the advantage of extensive access to sound academic sources, as most of us do not). Ian (Wiki Ed), please correct me if I'm wrong here, but it looks to me as if this editor has embarked on a voyage to nowhere, presumably as a consequence of the usual inadequate preparation by the class instructor. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:39, 10 November 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Justlettersandnumbers I've sent the instructor a note asking them to remind the class about a number of issues.
@Melanierobertson, please rememeber that you're not supposed to engage in edit warring. If someone reverts your additions, you need to figure out what the problem is and resolve it before making further edits to the article. And, of course, you need to remember that you are you contributing to an encyclopaedia article. This is formal writing with a neutral tone. For starters, the dog article is the wrong place to add this level of detail to the main article about the topic.
In addition, if you're writing about the mental health benefits of dogs, you need to take the Editing health and psychology topics training. Health-related topics require higher source quality than most Wikipedia articles; in particular, you need to use recent review articles, not individual studies like you did here.
I think some of this information might go in the Emotional support animal, Assistance dog or Psychiatric assistance dog. But it need to be supported by appropriate sources, and written in a style that's appropriate for an encyclopaedia article. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:05, 10 November 2022 (UTC)Reply