User talk:Jfhennessy98

Welcome!

Hello, Jfhennessy98, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor 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. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:02, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Notes

Hi! I have some notes for you:

The gender pay gap article is sanctioned, which essentially means that the writing should be as neutral as possible and the sourcing be the strongest possible sourcing. Also, I would recommend discussing any potential edits on the article's talk page. However I must also note that this is also a pretty heavily edited article in general, so it's not going to be the easiest topic to edit. I wanted to make sure that you are aware of that.

Now on to the draft specific notes:

• There is already an article on the gender pay gap in the United States. The general gender pay gap article is meant to take a general, globalized view, with only a short overview in each country specific subsection, as the expectation is that the reader will click through to the country specific article if they want anything more detailed. As such, this is something that should be in the US specific article, not the general one on the gender pay gap. It would still be important to discuss any changes on the talk page for the US specific article, however.

• This is written in a fairly casual tone and gives off the impression that portions of this are original research. Writing for Wikipedia differs greatly from writing in other avenues, as we can only summarize what others have explicitly stated in reliable sources - whereas if we were to write for almost anywhere else, we could draw conclusions and create ties between sources, even if this isn't in the source material.

• Be very careful with sourcing, which includes primary sourcing. For example, in the first section you note that a letter to the editor was "one of the first notable attempts for equal pay for women workers in the country - stirring enough attention to cause the writing of an appropriations bill that was passed by the House of Representatives in 1870 but eventually denied by the Senate."

The issue here is that the source you used for this makes no mention of this letter at all and your statement makes it seem like it was the impetus for this bill. That's a huge claim and unless we have sourcing that explicitly states this, it can't be included in the article. The Time source does mention the letter and then mentions the bill, but it doesn't actually say that the letter played a role in the bill's creation. We could argue that it's implied, but that would be original research since it's not actually stated anywhere. Even saying that it was one of the first or that it was the first notable attempts can be seen as a subjective statement since it comes across like we're assigning importance to the letter ourselves. It's vitally important that we be careful about how we phrase things and that we avoid any sort of subjective statements like notable.

• The second section is definitely stronger, as it also takes a more general look at the topic area - just be careful of the aforementioned issues. (I didn't look at the sourcing as closely as I did the first section).

Now I do want to say that while you should discuss any potential changes on the article talk page, I think that it's a good idea to add a section that covers the history of the gender pay gap in the United States as it's of obvious importance and I don't see where this is really covered elsewhere. This could potentially even justify its own article, but I would work on creating a section first and if it gets to be lengthy, then look at spinning that off into another article. (IE, you'd have to create a section for this in the US pay gap article anyway, so starting with a section would just make that step a little easier.)

Let me know if you need any help with this and I also heavily recommend that if you haven't already done this, that you set up an appointment with one of the librarians to help you narrow down the sourcing. Some potentially useful sources I found offhand are this and this, although I don't know how much information they give history-wise. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:39, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Gender pay gap edits

Welcome to wikipedia. Sorry to revert your edits which look careful and well meaning. However, wikipedia edits need to be much more clearly sourced. I think another editor has already suggested some resources to become more familiar with wikipedia on your talk page. Feel free to leave me a message if I can help or explain more.-Pengortm (talk) 01:14, 14 April 2020 (UTC)