User talk:Abbybarnes

Welcome!
Hello, Abbybarnes, 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.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:50, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Sexuality
Hi! I wanted to let you know that I removed the claim about Alice Walker's sexuality. The issue is that the source you used was a self-published source and didn't seem to have any editorial oversight. It also didn't state which documentary Walker made the statement in, just that it was a PBS documentary, which poses an issue of verification. It's probably Beauty in Truth, but it's also possible that she made this statement in another documentary. If you can find a copy of the documentary and find the claim, the PBS documentary would be an excellent source for this and you can definitely add it back. The main thing is to make sure that you get the statement exact - for example, if she states that she doesn't identify as straight, gay, or bisexual but doesn't specifically state that she's asexual, we can't state that she is as such. Sexuality is perhaps something that Wikipedia tends to be very careful with as far as living people go, as Jodi Foster's article didn't tag her as being in the LGBT category until 2017, when she made a speech about coming out. Even then the article doesn't state that she's a lesbian since she never used the terms gay or lesbian in her speech - those are terms that others used in news articles about her. (IE, she could identify as bisexual, demisexual, or pansexual.) Essentially, make sure that Walker says that she identifies as asexual. A direct quote can be used for this if she isn't really all that clear.

I just wanted to give you a head's up about this since it is something Wikipedia is so specific about. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:04, 9 April 2018 (UTC)