User talk:Aida Getachew
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Happy editing![edit]
Ah, thank you, Aida, for triumphantly spotting this, which had somehow completely escaped my own gaze. Happy editing! 86.144.125.140 (talk) 20:08, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
- Adding: You have chosen (and, I see, have already been working on :-) a somewhat topical page which currently offers considerable room for improvement.
I notice you seem to have an inclusive style of writing, which is helpful to Wikipedia's general readership, especially in the opening lead section, which is a really key part of the page - the part that most users of Wikipedia tend to consult (and, per the final conclusion of this research, "special attention should... be paid to the neutrality and balance of the lead section").
Per the tag at the head of the page, a key improvement could be to provide reliable scientific sourcing (WP:SCIRS in Wikipedia parlance/jargon, haha ;-) as a basis for the information in the text, which you can then adjust and expand (or trim) accordingly. It's perhaps just worth mentioning that should you come across any actual *clinical* claim regarding humans, you'd need to be careful to abide by WP:MEDRS, the rather stricter Wikipedia guideline for reliable medical sourcing. For example, on PubMed, here is a list of some review articles in biomedical journals that might potentially provide suitable secondary sources per SCIRS, while this is a somewhat shorter list of some potential MEDRS published in the last 5 years. However, especially given that many of the journal articles regard individual pathogens, in practise you may often find it more conventient to select books (including standard textbooks) for more general coverage of the topic.
I hope these (uninvited) considerations may be useful rather than merely annoying (in which case, you ca feel free to tell me politely to get lost :) 86.144.125.140 (talk) 15:12, 5 April 2020 (UTC)
- Thank you for all of the feedback and advice! I was focussing on writing the basic content of the page first, but I will be sure to add in all of the necessary citations/references soon :) Aida Getachew (talk) 19:21, 5 April 2020 (UTC)
Hi, yes, I can well understand the reasons behind that approach, especially given the somewhat intimidating character of Wikipedia's vast manual of style (MOS) and multiple guidelines. Editor consensus, however, is that it's actually much easier (and better) to insert your reliable sourcing at the time you add/adjust any content. The good news is that it shouldn't be too difficult...
In practice, you've already got a reflist template inserted on the page, which automatically provides you with a ready-made ==References== section waiting to be used. Now, you can use various handy tools to format your references automatically:
- At the top left of the edit box you can select templates such as 'cite book', 'cite journal' and 'cite web', each of which allows you to enter relevant details into a form (full details at TEMPLATE:Cite book, TEMPLATE:Cite journal, etc) and preview the result before inserting your inline reference. You'll find that the template will do much of the work for you semi-automatically if you copy and paste a url address, PubMed identifier number (pmid), or a doi into the form and then get it to search and autofill. (Though, depending on the output you may want to do some clean-up/housekeeping afterwards.)
- There are also a couple of handy external tools for building a citation: a Wikipedia citation tool for Google Books, and Diberri's template filler.
- Whatever, it's generally a good idea to name each new reference (for example, if you happen to be the first author of a pertinent review article published this year that you've decided would provide a good source for a sentence, you could name the reference <ref name=Getachew2020>; then the next time you cite the same reference, all you need to do is insert the ref name in the text plus a forward slash (like this, <ref name=Getachew2020/>), and your inline citation will automatically be linked to the reference (you can find lots of examples like this coded here).
Other tweaks exist, but no worries: I think you'll find that other editors (such as User:Graham Beards) will only be too happy to see pertinent reliable sourcing being added in to support content, and others may fix particular formatting details in due course (as long as your sourcing has been clearly identified :-)
Hope that helps a bit, 86.144.125.140 (talk) 20:57, 5 April 2020 (UTC)
Wood versus trees[edit]
Sorry Aida, I've just left you an impossibly garbled thing on the article talk page. I could probably have abbreviated it to about three words. Apologies, R 86.134.212.26 (talk) 20:55, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
- Haha, no worries! I think I understand what you were saying, and I'll keep it in mind :) Aida Getachew (talk) 21:17, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
- Yes, take no notice. Once my head starts spinning I sometimes find it hard to stop. So closing down for some jazz now, 86.134.212.26 (talk) 21:29, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
A small heads up...[edit]
Different publishers have different 'instructions to authors', and similar, which we writers all have to abide by... And Wikipedia has its own unwieldly esoteric Manual of Style (MOS), which I've never altogether been able to, erm, pick up. Buried somewhere in MOS is an instruction not to leave spaces (like this one) between punctuation and ref tags. Not an issue, but I just thought you might like to know :-) R 86.134.212.26 (talk) 16:35, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
- Oh, thanks for pointing that out! I wasn't sure if there was a rule about those spaces, I'll try and remove them wherever I see them then :) Aida Getachew (talk) 16:46, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
- No problem :-) 86.134.212.26 (talk) 19:41, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
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