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Hello, Viviaanh, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:31, 16 July 2019 (UTC)Reply


Trump administration family separation

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Hi, I saw that you posted content to the above article. I wanted to caution you that this article is held under sanctions due to it dealing with politics and the Trump administration. As such, this means that any content in the article must be written as neutrally as possible and use the strongest possible sources. If content is removed, you must discuss the removal before re-adding anything, if that's the consensus of the discussion.

Now that said, I did want to let you know that some of the material was removed by Gandydancer. Here are their edit summaries:

  • few tweaks and removed sentence already said earlier also remove study authors per usual WP manner for study reports
  • remove old study that does not apply to this Trump article
  • we can't use a 2012 study to comment on Trump

As I see it, their main concern was that you used some sourcing that pre-dated the Trump administration and didn't really have anything to do with Trump himself or his administration. As such making a connection between the studies' findings and Trump would be seen as original research - claims, connections, and commentary that you came up with yourself as opposed to summarizing the sourcing. Even if the findings could apply to children during the Trump administration, the fact remains that it wasn't conducted during his time in office and he wasn't taken into consideration by the authors of the studies. It could fit in an article about deportation, but it doesn't really fit here.

However that said, there is an issue with the use of studies as sources. Studies should generally be avoided unless they're accompanied with a secondary source that reviews the study or comments upon the specific claim that is being stated. The reason for this is that studies are primary sources for any of the claims and research conducted by their authors. The publishers don't provide any commentary or in-depth verification, as they only check to ensure that the study doesn't have any glaring errors that would invalidate it immediately. Study findings also tend to be only true for the specific people or subjects that were studied. For example, a person in one area may respond differently than one in an area located on the other side of the country. Socioeconomic factors (be they for the person or a family member) also play a large role, among other things that can impact a response. As such, it's definitely important to find a secondary source, as they can provide this context, verification, and commentary. Aside from that, there's also the issue of why a specific study should be highlighted over another. For example, someone could ask why one study was chosen as opposed to something that studied a similar topic or had different results.

Gandydancer edited the content down to more basic information, however there are still studies that need secondary sources. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:42, 16 August 2019 (UTC)Reply