User talk:Maddiemarshall

Welcome![edit]

Hi Maddiemarshall! I noticed your contributions and wanted to welcome you to the Wikipedia community. I hope you like it here and decide to stay.

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Happy editing! Panian513 03:24, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

January 2024[edit]

Hi Maddiemarshall! I noticed that you recently marked an edit as minor at Heather Has Two Mommies that may not have been. "Minor edit" has a very specific definition on Wikipedia—it refers only to superficial edits that could never be the subject of a dispute, such as typo corrections or reverting obvious vandalism. Any edit that changes the meaning of an article is not a minor edit, even if it only concerns a single word. Thank you. Nat Gertler (talk) 06:09, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for letting me know. I am very new at this. I will keep that in mind next time. Maddiemarshall (talk) 15:49, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reliable third-party sources[edit]

Maddie!

I appreciate the enthusiasm you're throwing into your edits, and I appreciate the effort you put into adding sources to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. However, there is a learning curve to adding sources, and I'm afraid you've run into some of the sourcing complications, as you use sources that we would generally avoid. We want to rely on what we call "reliable third-party sources". Taking a look at some of the sources you used:

You used both barnesandnoble and a publisher website. These are pages designed to sell the books that they are talking about. This doesn't mean that we absolutely cannot use them -- they can be used to verify non-boastful facts about a book, say. that it exists, or the number of pages it has. But it cannot tell us whether the book is worth talking about, worthy of inclusion in our articles. So, not utterly unusable (at least the publisher one), but less than ideal. We also discourage links to sales pages in part because we don't want people coming on here and trying to promote sales of their works by linking to sales pages wherever possible.. which I'm sure was not your goal.
You used Goodreads, and since anyone can edit Goodreads information without editorial review, we consider it a self-published source, and there are strong limits on what we allow from such sources. You can see it mentioned at WP:GOODREADS that it's a site to avoid. (And if you're immediately thinking "hey, Wikipedia can be edited without editorial review, so wouldn't that make Wikipedia an unreliable source?", you're right! We actually have a frequently cited essay, WP:WINARS, for "Wikipedia Is Not A Reliable Source".)
Forbes. I'm sure you're thinking "Forbes is a long-running and respected magazine, it's bound to be a reliable source"... and indeed the magazine is. But on the website, they have a mix of the sort of material that they have in the magazine, with good editorial oversight, and blogs that they let people run, with basically no oversight. So how can you tell the difference? Under the name of the writer of the article, if it's by the magazine staff, it will say so... and if it's just a blog they host, it will say "Contributor" (or, in the case of the link you added, "Senior Contributor"). This is explained at WP:FORBESCON.

Yeah, it's messy and tricky, but I suggest that if you have time, see if you can find sources like book reviews and the like to replace the ones you used. Don't let this discourage you. Wikipedia is cool but complicated in ways, and all the experienced editors started out as newbies making mistakes at first. I hope you stick around here for a long time! -- Nat Gertler (talk) 06:32, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your feedback. Instead of using Goodreads and Barnes and Noble, should I have used the publisher website instead? Also, I would've never guessed that Forbes wouldn't be a reliable source but your explanation makes a lot of sense to me. Maddiemarshall (talk) 15:54, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The publisher website is better than a store site or Goodreads, but it's not ideal. Our favorite sources are reliable, third-party sources... and the publisher is not a third party in this case, they are obviously very involved. Reviews in newspapers and the like are good. I tried looking for an actual review of The 6 Most Important Decisions You'll Ever Make, and didn't find the right thing -- even in the section for the publisher to post review quotes in the Amazon section, it's reviews from "a teenager" and the author's dad. Still, the publisher website can be used for basic factual details, but one advantage of third-party coverage is that they show that the topic is worth talking about. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:10, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Maddiemarshall! I came here to make a similar comment about your edit at Tapputi. Websites written by non-scholars such as girlmuseum.org are not considered wp:reliable sources for Wikipedia's purposes. It's pretty clear that the person who wrote the feature at girlmuseum.org consulted scholarly sources, but we need you as a Wikipedia editor to do the same. We even need you to go further and directly base your writing upon what these scholarly sources are saying, as well as refer to them with a full citation including page numbers. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thanks for taking this into consideration, ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 21:58, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your input. I will go back and find the correct sources for the information I added. Maddiemarshall (talk) 17:07, 19 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Women in Red[edit]

Hi there, Maddiemarshall, and welcome to Women in Red. I see you've been making improvements to a number of women's biographies but have not yet created any yourself. If you decide to do so, you'll find some useful tips in our Ten Simple Rules. I've taken the liberty of adding the WiR user box to your user page. Please let me know if you run into any difficulties or need assistance. Happy editing!--Ipigott (talk) 13:35, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Women in Red March 2024[edit]

Women in Red | March 2024, Volume 10, Issue 3, Numbers 293, 294, 299, 300, 301

Online events:

New: Alphabet run Q & R | Art+Feminism | Find Her

Continuing: #1day1woman | Education (year-long initiative)

Announcements

Celebrate Women – All content gender gap events, in every language Wikipedia, in March 2024
Francophone Women★ Writers Fortnight 2024
Feminism and Folklore 2024 Writing Contest

Tip of the month:

When creating a new article, check various spellings, including birth name, married names
and pseudonyms, to be sure an article doesn't already exist.

Other ways to participate: