User talk:Tarah123
| This user is a student editor in UAlbany/Black_American_Music_(Fall) . |
Welcome—thanks for helping to build Wikipedia
[edit]Hello—glad to meet you—in the Wikipedia sense. My real first name is Phil—I'm still trying to decide if I should use my full real name—so my user name is Neonorange. I see you are a recently registered editor. Welcome to the most used reference on the Internet. Part of the process here is collaboration. Anyone's contributions here are subject to revision, and can result in rewarding conversations. I have a WP:watchlist that includes the Langston Hughes Wikipedia article, so it pops up whenever someone makes an edit to the article or its talk page. I noticed your edit, reread the article, checked the cite, the and decided to restore the previous version. Please don't be discouraged—the only way to learn the technical details necessary for learning here is to make mistakes. They'll be fixed pretty quickly. Many editors concentrate more on fixing details than anything else. All you really need is good sources and the ability to write in English. The technical details you'll pick up as you need them. I would quietly fixed the technical problems, but the weak source I was unable to fix.
Original version: Some academics and biographers believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, as did Walt Whitman, whom Hughes said influenced his poetry.
Your edit: Some academics and biographers believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems,
and novel “Not Without Laughter,”[30]as did Walt Whitman, whom Hughes said influenced his poetry.
My reasons follow
- The cited source does not mention the novel Not Without Laughter.
- The webpage in the cite states:
The Icon History Display was created by a student intern and is not meant to replace a comprehensive search on these historical figures.
This indicates, to me, a disclaimer. The sources mentioned may very well contain statements supporting the "contained homosexual codes" phrase applies for the novel. We are fortunate to have a great deal of published biographical and critical material on Huges. If you read the Sexuality section of the Wikipedia Huges article, you'll see that Hughes' sexuality is not presented as a settled question. If major biographers differ, Wikipedia must present arguments and details from both—and not try to synthesize anything not in reliable sources.
- The note at the bottom of the webpage lists the sources used for the Huges short bio, but does not give page numbers—any user of Wikipedia would have difficulty in verifying the statement. We want Wikipedia to be the starting point for learning about Hughes, and should cite the best available sources.
- When the novel is inserted, the sentence does not read correctly, since "as did Walt Whitman, whom Hughes said influenced his poetry." only works for the general category of poetry, and does not work got the specific novel.
- Now the get into the weeds: the edit inserted the novel name so that it was published as surrounded in quote marks, indicating a shorter work like a poem or short story. Wikipedia uses italics to indicate a long work. To get this you need to use Wikipedia markup: place two apostrophes on each side of the title (three apostrophes on each side bolds the text.) Also, there is a Wikipedia article on Not Without Laughter, so, if this is the first mention it should be Wikilinked. To do this type ''[[Not Without Laughter]]''; the results will show up in preview or when published as Not Without Laughter. Note the apostrophes must be outside the double brackets.
- Finally—the template for the citation wants a title or the source. For a website it is many time difficult to find a title. For a short web source there may be no formal title. In this case I just take the most prominent descriptive phrase at the top of the page—for this source, Langston Hughes is the best choice.
If you think I made a mistake, we can discuss it on the Hughes' article talk page. That way more editors will have a chance to comment, and perhaps find a supporting source. This is the ideal for collaboration on Wikipedia. (If you check the Wikipedia article on the novel Not Without Laughter, you will find no help because it lacks sufficient citations , and is so tagged—
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this template message
—notice how long the tag has been there! In searching for sources you will likely be able to improve the Wikipedia article on the novel.
If you have any questions you can ask me here, on your talk page that I have just started or at my talk page, User talk:Neonorange. Or you can place, in a new section on your talk page, the words help me within double braces. It will look like this {{help me}} when you type it, but will be expanded when you preview or save the edit. An explanation of the help me template is here.
Neonorange (Phil) 09:53, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Welcome
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This list can link you to all sorts of help. The best place to learn the few sorts of Wikitext markup is to experiment on your user sub pages. You can create one by entering [[User:Tarah123/any title you wish to use]] in the search window. You will get a page that says "not found" and that explains how to create the page. Neonorange (Phil) 10:08, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Famousbirthdays.com as a source
[edit]Hi Tarah123. I noticed that you recently used famousbirthdays.com as a source for information in a biography article. Please note that there is general consensus that famousbirthdays.com does not meet the reliable sourcing criteria for the inclusion of personal information in such articles. (See Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_153#Is_famousbirthdays.com_a_reliable_source_for_personal_information). If you disagree, let's discuss it. Thanks. --Ronz (talk) 18:38, 15 December 2017 (UTC)