User talk:SpaceStones

This user is a student editor in Caltech/Organic_Geochemistry_2023_(Spring_2023) .

Welcome![edit]

Hello, SpaceStones, 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.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:37, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As you are learning while reading the modules, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a place to write all-encompassing essays. Make sure you focus specifically on an article's own topic, and not related topics that are covered in other articles. Your contribution to the amino acid article was not in keeping with this concept. DMacks (talk) 00:02, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is not a homework assignment space[edit]

If you are planng to drop a huge chunk on a specialized theme on top of a major, nonspeculative topic (the components of life), try to do so under the supervision of an instructor who has experience editing Wikipedia. Often these homework projects can be inferior and almost always they require a lot of work for others after the student moves on. These articles are the result of a lot of effort, involving consultation, reversions, source checking, formatting.

Wikipedia is not intended as a forum for primary literature (WP:SECONDARY). A mature area like extraterrestrial organic chem should probably rely on very mature sources (WP:NOTNEWS). Wikipedia is not a textbook: Wikipedia strives not to explain things, instead Wikipedia present facts (WP:NOTTEXTBOOK). We also need to keep things in balance (WP:UNDUE), and it is likely that few would agree that extraterrestrial topics deserve 13% of an article on amino acids (hint: check your biochem text). So maybe some of your content could be re-allocated to an article on an extraterrestrial theme. For our amino acid article, maybe you want to contribute a couple of sentences and cite a review on this obscure (yes, its obscure!) topic, intriguing as it might seem to you and me.

So, congratulations on learning a lot about a complicated topic and good luck with your homework score. But please give some consideration to my quickly written notes above. --Smokefoot (talk) 00:22, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback. I agree that it was a bit ambitious to post that to the main amino acid article without any prior wiki-writing experience! I'll look to chop things up and see how I may be able to add more applicable contributions. SpaceStones (talk) 00:30, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]