Talk:Alcohol and drug use among university students

Some redundancy
Another editor attempted a redirect to alcohol education which seemed relevant, although this was reverted. At least part of this article also adresses alcohol education. — Paleo Neonate  – 21:22, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Errata: the redirect was to drug education. — Paleo Neonate  – 21:24, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Recreational drug use seems like a better target IMO. Sizeofint (talk) 23:14, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Perhaps not. Just re-read the content. Despite the title the content is more about alcohol use prevention than the demographics of alcohol and drug use among university students. Sizeofint (talk) 23:18, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Article issues
I've given this article several tags because it needs work in specific areas.

The first is that this reads more like an essay for class rather than an encyclopedia article. While it would make for a compelling essay, it's not really appropriate for a Wikipedia article. For example, a Wikipedia article should not contain original research and personal viewpoints on the topic subject. For example, the phrase "Most students disregard the opportunities inside the universities to help and beat addiction." wasn't backed up with any sort of sourcing to verify that this is true. Without a source that explicitly makes this claim, it's unverified and doesn't belong in an article. Even then, the claim would have to be very specifically phrased to show that it came from a particular person rather than made as a blanket statement because it would be hard to prove that most of the students with addictions disregard campus help. Low numbers of students seeking help may come more from addicted students being unaware of what their universities have to offer (or that they can take advantage of them) rather than them knowing and deliberately turning away from the help. Generally speaking, you should avoid making blanket statements of this type in an article without a very, very good source and even then, not without that same blanket statement getting espoused by several other reliable sources. You also need to avoid statements of passion, such as "Students are not alone" because while we all want people to seek out help for their problems, the article should not be used as a platform to persuade people to seek help. That may sound cold, but it's not meant to be - it's just that this is one of the things that Wikipedia is not meant to be used for.

The second issue was that the article looks to deal almost solely with North American students rather than look at substance and alcohol abuse on a global scale. This can be difficult to do, so you may want to look at switching this to read specifically as "Alcohol and drug use among North American university students" to cover this.

Finally, the article needed help with sourcing. You have several unsourced claims that appear to be made from your point of view. I don't particularly think that you're wrong, however you do need to source these claims. The reason for this is that unsourced claims can be removed from an article.

I think that this is a good choice of a topic, but it needs a lot of cleanup. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:20, 7 August 2017 (UTC)