User talk:Anna.tonoyan

Welcome!

Hello, Anna.tonoyan, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; 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) 16:42, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Notes

Hi! I have some notes for your draft:

• Since you're editing on a science topic, you need to be very selective with sourcing. While this isn't a medicine topic per se, this anything dealing with climate change brushes against this area because this has an impact on health and as such is considered to be biomedical information. As such, you must take these guidelines from WP:MEDRS into consideration: (This is somewhat altered from the way it's written on MEDRS, but the gist is the same.)

1. Primary sources should generally be avoided unless you have secondary, independent sourcing that helps establish the source's notability and helps verify it as well as give it context. A primary source is one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. Studies are a good example of this.
2. Secondary sources are better to use, as they typically summarize one or more primary or secondary sources, usually to provide an overview of current understanding of the topic, to make recommendations, or to combine results of several studies. Examples include literature reviews or systematic reviews found in journals, specialist academic or professional books, and medical guidelines or position statements published by major organizations.
3. Tertiary sources are also OK to use, as they usually summarize a range of secondary sources. Undergraduate or graduate level textbooks, edited scientific books, lay scientific books, and encyclopedias are examples of tertiary sources.
4. Popular press sources, such as news articles, should be generally avoided for several reasons that are detailed here.

I would also like you to take this training as well. On a related note about sources, I saw that you used Wikipedia as a source - Wikipedia can't be used, not even to source itself, as it's easily edited by anyone.

• I'm somewhat concerned that the topic area may be too specific for Wikipedia as an article on its own. You may be able to have a general topic on the effects of climate change on the Great Lakes, but focusing on one specific element is usually seen as too specific and narrow, given that Wikipedia takes a very general overview of any given topic area. I would broaden your focus area. You can still use this information that you've written, of course, as this would be very good for a subsection in an article about the more general topic.

• The information is also very technical. While it doesn't need to be laid out in extremely simplistic terms, the content should be able to be understood by a general audience. Layman's terms, in other words, if possible.

• I also want to caution you to make sure that you avoid original research - we can only summarize what has already been written about in reliable sources as opposed to synthesizing new material. I don't think that a lot of what you have is original research, but I would avoid words like "therefore", as those can give off that impression. Basically, avoid things that could come across as "if... then..." type words or phrases. This was definitely one of the things that I got caught on when I started editing, as they're words and phrases that are otherwise innocuous elsewhere.

I hope that this doesn't discourage you! It can take a while to get used to Wikipedia, to be honest. Let me know if you have any questions! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:06, 11 October 2018 (UTC)