Talk:Nahuatl honorifics

Authorship

Credit for this article should have been given to Aannaassttaa who posted the text here. — RHaworth (Talk | contribs) 08:25, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Whether it was Aannaassttaa or someone else who wrote the original text, it had evidently been taken or written for some other purpose than a wikipedia article. Haven't been able to determine yet whether it had previously been published elsewhere, however to avoid any potential copyvio concerns I have removed the original text and made a start on rewriting the intro para. The original text can be recovered from here, should it either later prove not to be a copyvio or if someone wants to go through and rewrite to a more wiki-appropriate style. As a wikipedia topic it is suitable, and there'd be readily enough sources to flesh out a decent article at some later point. --cjllw ʘ TALK 04:09, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi - Aannaassttaa here. I'm new to wikipedia so please excuse my formatting etc. I did write this text, last fall, as part of my master's degree. I thought my research would be a valuable contribution to the information on Wikipedia about Nahuatl. It has not been published elsewhere, so there are no copyright violations. If you need sources for my research I can readily provide them. Also, I know the formatting looks awful, I was not sure how to get it right so feel free to make it look nicer. Aannaassttaa (talk) 03:08, 22 August 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aannaassttaa (talk • contribs) 03:00, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi Aannaassttaa, and welcome to wikipedia! Thanks for clarifying the source of the text; hope you understand the reasons behind the caution here. Even when a contributor adds in material to wikipedia that they've previously published elsewhere, there can be some tricky licensing issues to consider, which is one reason we most usually prefer the material to be purpose-written for wikipedia. Another reason is that this external material is rarely in a suitable form for an encyclopaedia, wikipedia or something else. Our articles in theory at least should strive to reflect and summarise the common consensus viewpoint(s) on a topic as they appear in published reliable sources that are verifiable, without containing stuff that might be considered original research. By contrast, a Master's thesis, or paper submitted to a journal, might be expected to contain some novel proposals or original synthesis, which we try to stay clear of.

You are of course most welcome to contribute here, and I can see there's a lot of great and useful info on this linguistic aspect in the material you'd added (NB, the reason it was removed from the overall Nahuatl article was more to do with proportionate balance, that article needs to cover all aspects. Hence, the setting up of this separate article where it can be gone into in more depth). Don't worry too much about getting formatting etc down pat, others here will be only too glad to help out and you'll pick it up easily enough as you go. Getting the content in synch with wikipedia policies and intended direction is more important.

I would suggest, that you first take a quick look around at the policy guide, manual of style and what wikipedia is not, to get a feel for the intentions and writing-style for an article. Then, so long as the statements being made can be referred back to some published reliable source(s), your original contribution could be reworked without too much effort to align more with an encyclopaedic entry and a little less like an essay or a research paper. If you have any questions or comments, asking on a talkpage or a user's talkpage like you've done usually does the trick. If I can set aside some time will see about doing some rework of the original, though it's not something I'm overly familiar with. There are a couple of other editors round here with a Nahuatl linguistic bent who might be able to help out, or at least comment on any developments. Cheers, --cjllw ʘ TALK 09:33, 22 August 2008 (UTC)