User:1013-Andrew/archive

NOTE TO JOSH AND GROUP
The commute one way is longer than class time, therefore I will be editing for home today. I'll be on wikipedia from at least 10 AM - 1 PM. --1013-Andrew 12:52, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Okay. We're not editing in class today. We're doing some semester wrap-up and talking about Wikipedia in theory and in practice. Sorry to miss you on the last day of class. Let me know if you have any questions about the final revisions or the reflective essay. 1013-josh 15:31, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

My Project
A Plague of Frogs is the exact title of my project.

My project will be a book report of A Plague of Frogs by William Souder. A Plague of Frogs is one of the definitive texts on frog abnormalities. I am already familiar with frog deformities terminology. A 1500 word book report should be manageable. William Souder is a local author. A Plague of Frogs is not yet entered in the database. A book report was a suggested topic, therefore I assume that a book report on a Plague of Frogs would meet the Wikipedia standards of notability.


 * Silent Spring
 * Walden
 * A Sand County Almanac
 * Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
 * The Botany of Desire


 * Deformity
 * Mink Frog
 * Ribeiroia
 * Decline in amphibian populations
 * funny legs


 * Thoughts from Josh. Andrew, this sounds like a good project. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it, as it connects to your position paper from earlier in the term. Remember, your final article needs to be 1500-2000 words of concise encyclopedic material. Don't think about it as a "book report," but rather as an encyclopedia article about the book. Some of the articles you plan to use as models are considerably shorter than yours needs to be. Have you thought about what kind of information you will include? Chapter summaries? Information about how the book was received by the public? Have you started looking around for research material yet? Will you include any references other than the book itself? If you have any questions about your project proposal, write me a note here, and write "QUESTION FOR JOSH" in the edit summary box when you hit the "save page" button. I'll stop by later to answer. 1013-josh 21:36, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Workshop: A Plague of Frogs (book)
Workshop Guidelines

Hey Andrew,

I would love to give you the link so that the buffalo ridge area would be more obvious but i didnt add it and i have no idea how to change it myself. Hey Andrew-

I thought your article was very interesting. I think it would be good to start the article with more general information about the book, like fiction, non-fiction, and more info on what exactly is about. Your article is also set up with an and then.....and then feeling that loses the readers interest and doesn't flow well throughout the synopsis. The paragraph should be broken up into the different points and events that occur during. This will help break up the information and make in easier to understand. For example issue that is explored and the different scientist data and expierement that lead to there points should all have individual paragraphs. The paper has many short choppy sentences that need to be strong together to create flow and meaning behind the statements. It seems like you have a lot of info and know a lot about the book it just needs to be organized and strung together a lot better to make it easier for the reader to understand. It might even be good to make different sub-headings for different scientist researsh and things like this. This article is a good start but still needs some work.

1013-Isaac 03:03, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi Andrew, I'd like to nominate your article to be on the front page of Wikipedia at Did you know, but I'm waiting until the synopsis section is cleaned up into sentences. Let me know when you get a little farther along with the article. 1013-josh 22:22, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Hey Andrew


 * I have never read A Plague of Frogs but you summarize it well. I like that you have a section about reviews from other people.  It is useful to readers who havn't read A Plague of Frogs.  You have separated your page into four sections: preview, chapters, synopsis, and reviews.  One suggestion I have would be to make two headings, one discussing the first part of the book, The Hell; and the other heading being, Famous Last Days of the Golden Toad.  Separating your one summary of the book into two sections I think would help to organize your page more and make it easier for the readers to comprehend and remember what the book is about.  Also it is difficult to understand what you are talking about sometimes because you don't have complete sentences so maybe going through it and making complete sentences would help.  I think you choose a good topic to write on and am excited to see the final product.

-Christi 1013-christi 22:33, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Hello Andrew,
 * I like your article. It's a great start!  I really like how you introduce the article with the chapters/sections from the book.  Your summary or plot synopsis has a really strong beginning, but then you end with just notes.  I'm sure you are going to elaborate on the end of your summary, but it was a little confusing.  I fixed minor grammatical errors and added to some of your sentences.  It was really hard to get the heart of the article because I've never read the book.  I think you should add the footnotes to the reviews you added.  I see that you have the reference you got them from, but maybe adding the footnotes next to the reviews would be the best.  You have a really great article to start with, and I can't wait to see what the finished product looks like!

--Jessica 1013-jessica 03:24, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi Andrew, it's Jessica again. I was just looking for some more info on spark notes and other areas on the Internet. It seems like there is a section of the bible that contains the Plague of Frogs, so you might want to add that as a wiki link to other interested readers. I didn't add it in your article because I didn't know if you wanted to even include it if it wasn't related to your article. Just a suggestion! Talk to you tomorrow! --Jessica1013-jessica 02:53, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I think this is an excellent idea for an article, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it. There are relatively few book summaries on Wikipedia, but I think it would be useful to have more of them, and in this case you are documenting not only the book and the cultural debate surrounding it but also the underlying problem it is reporting on. At this point, the synopsis section reads more like notes toward a synopsis than a synopsis in itself. You have some sentences that are extremely vague and don't present much information, i.e. "The book gives more details about McKinnels." You have others that give your personal opinion or analysis, "I'm not sure why these details were not first included when the author introduced McKinnel," which is not appropriate according to Wikipedia policies. And then you lapse into sentence fragments: "Thalidomide. Toxicologists summary. Miner Canary." All of this makes it very hard to for the reader to rely on your synopsis for a clear summary of the main points of the book. I think you should spend much of your time getting this synopsis in shape and breaking it into paragraphs. I very much like your reviews section, as it helps to provide a sense of the cultural commentary surrounding the book's reception, but you are missing relevant information here (such as the reviewers' newspaper affiliations) and, more importantly, you're missing citations. I'd encourage you to get those things cleaned up as soon as possible. Wikipedia works best when articles are edited collaboratively, but you're effectively closing off collaborative editing on your article by making it hard to see where you're going with it. 1013-josh 12:43, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

I just noticed that in the reviews section you're also using reviewers' comments without quotation marks. These quotations need to be marked and cited to avoid plagiarism. 1013-josh 14:20, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Some suggestions
Hi Andrew, there's a script that goes through your article and then comes up with some hints that might be applicable to this specific article. I've removed the suggestions that were definitely not applicable, the rest is up to you to decide if you want to do anything with it.

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question. You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, LittleClogs 21:35, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at Lead. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.[?]
 * Consider adding more links to the article; per Manual of Style (links) and Build the web, create links to relevant articles.[?]
 * This article has no images. Please see if there are any free use images that fall under the Image use policy and fit under one of the Image copyright tags that can be uploaded. To upload images on Wikipedia, go to Special:Upload; to upload non-fair use images on the Wikimedia Commons, go to commons:special:upload.[?]
 * This article needs footnotes, preferably in the cite.php format recommended by WP:WIAFA. Simply, enclose inline citations, with WP:CITE or WP:CITE/ES information, with . At the bottom of the article, in a section named “References” or “Footnotes”, add .[?]
 * Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.[?]

Some further comments about the article
Hi Andrew, I was reading through your article. Please be aware of the differences between a book report or an essay about a book, and an encyclopedic article. There's a policy about "original research", which basically means that you're not supposed to analyse the book yourself. You can write something about the plotline, but stuff like "I am not sure why these details were not first included when the author introduced McKinnel." should be left out. Basically be careful when drawing conclusions and interpretating stuff. Another thing: it would be nice to have an image in the article. Book covers are copyrighted, but use in articles about the book itself is regarded as Fair use. Finally, it would be nice to include, for instance, a tiny bit of the background of the reviewers that you're citing. For instance "Paul Stephen Corn, a biologist, states that the book is very accessible" (I don't know if he is a biologist, I'm making that up right now). That puts them into some perspective: he's not just some magazine journalist who read the book, but he has a professional background and wrote it for a professional journal, and as such he's not just interested in how thrilling the story line was or wasn't. Finally: be aware that the article is part of the encyclopedia right now. It's read by readers, who don't know that the article is still a work in progress. Therefore, consider storing the unfinished bits of your synopsis in a draft version, or on the talk page, but not in the article itself, as the current state of those last sentences is pretty confusing to the reader this way. Kind regards, --JoanneB 07:48, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion
Hi Andrew, I have no idea how much time (and words :-)) you still have to finish the article, but if you're looking for inspiration, this might be an interesting starting point: WikiProject Novels/ArticleTemplate. It pretty much describes the outline of an article about a novel, and the ways in which it can be described. --JoanneB 17:37, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Participation: Andrew
I changed word Choice, and attempted to change tone to more encyclopedic in Jessica's article --1013-Andrew 21:29, 5 May 2007 (UTC) 	+ I added invisible comments, took out forms of to be, and reworded some phrases in Isaac's articles. --1013-Andrew 21:29, 5 May 2007 (UTC) I changed word choice and sentence structure in Christi's article. --1013-Andrew 21:29, 5 May 2007 (UTC) I deleted an instance of basically in Christi's article. --1013-Andrew 21:29, 5 May 2007 (UTC) Wrote brief suggestions on workshop's talk page. --1013-Andrew 21:29, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Homework
The current version of A Plague of Frogs is the final version. --1013-Andrew 12:36, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

I am doneUser:1013-Andrew 03:37, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

In Aguirre, the Wrath of God, I have moved sentence referring to the ship in the tree to a more proper chronological location. --1013-Andrew 18:38, 16 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Good work. Remember to add a comment to the edit summary box to make it easier for other users to follow your changes. You may want to add the film page to your watchlist so you can see what becomes of your changes. 1013-josh 06:51, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I consent. --1013-Andrew 21:11, 20 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay, great! Let me know at any time if you change your mind and would like to switch to an off-line research assignment. 1013-josh 00:19, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Done. --1013-Andrew 15:59, 23 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Off to a good start. Sentences are a bit choppy right now, but you can work on the flow for your rough draft. Paragraph breaks and section headers will help. Are you planning to use any sources other than the book? What about a section called "Public Reception" or something like that, with a discussion of how the book was received by book reviewers and what kind of effect it had on political discourse. On another note, what about the hard copy of Portfolio 3 (with the correct final draft) that you were supposed to bring for me today? 1013-josh 18:32, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Remember to sign homework! Rough draft not signed. 1013-josh 21:57, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Notes from Josh & the Class
Hey, I just posted some helpful research links; don't miss them! 1013-josh 21:37, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi Andrew, I've noticed you making changes to your colleagues' article, which is great! But some of the changes have been a little rash. When you are fixing sentence wording, remember to check that you don't actually change the meaning of the sentence or delete relevant information. An example is here:

re: "Basically anyone" > "Anyone": yep, that's more like it. 1013-josh 18:44, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Thats really fast response. I've tried to reverse engineer what constitutes rash editing n the edit history. Some are obvious when I accidentally delete a sentence or two (I knew the edit page looked off but there was too much wiki code too verify), but editing quantifiers is really confusing. I have understanding that wikipedia dislikes them sometimes, but the quantifiers do convey some information. Thanks. --1013-Andrew 19:07, 3 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Sometimes it might help to do the edit in two stages to make the edits easier to check in the preview box. Editing quantifiers is always a judgment call, and it's always going to be a community decision about when they are appropriate and when they aren't. You are right to be thinking about these things. I just wanted to remind you to be careful not too lose info in the process. Quantifiers that provide information are generally a good thing, unless they violate Wikipedia's neutral point of view (NPOV) policies. If you identify a neutral point of view problem, try to see why the author may have written what s/he did, and see if there is a way to fix your POV concern while keeping the rest of the author's intentions intact. If in doubt, it may be better to add an invisible markup within the page, ask a question on the talk page, or use the ever handy tag, which you produce with this code:   1013-josh 19:20, 3 May 2007 (UTC)


 * excellent work on the Isaac's article. You've got the hang of it... 1013-josh 18:59, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Notes from Wikipedians
Wikipedians, if you're commenting specifically about the A Plague of Frogs (book) article, feel free to chime in in the "Workshop" section above.

Welcome!

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