User talk:Alexmcdowell

Your submission at Articles for creation
 Thank you for your recent submission to Articles for Creation. Your article submission has been reviewed. The submission has not been accepted because it included copyrighted information, which is not permitted on Wikipedia. You are welcome to write an article on the subject, but please do not use copyrighted work.
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 * Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia! Excirial ( Contact me, Contribs ) 07:17, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Deletion of article due to copyright
Hi Excirial - I'm Alexmcdowell, and recently submitted an article on World Building to Wikipedia. I'm curious about a decision I think you made to delete the article because it used copyright material. I've cut and pasted the specific response from you below.

Your submission at Articles for creation ''Thank you for your recent submission to Articles for Creation. Your article submission has been reviewed. The submission has not been accepted because it included copyrighted information, which is not permitted on Wikipedia. You are welcome to write an article on the subject, but please do not use copyrighted work. If you would like to continue working on the submission, you can find it at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/World Building. To edit the submission, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. ''If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the Articles for creation help desk, or on the reviewer's talk page. Please remember to link to the submission!'' You can also get live chat help from experienced editors. ''Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia! Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 07:17, 25 January 2013 (UTC)''

The material I submitted was written by myself, and as far as I am aware is original. I teach a series of classes at USC Los Angeles on world building based on my design methodology and philosophy, and want to start a wikipage on my subject that the students can use to add research develop their own ideas, and build out the page as an education source. Haven't done this before, so if you can advise on how to resubmit my writing correctly it would be much appreciated.

Thanks! Alex McDowell Associate Professor of Production, IMD, iMAP Director, World Building Media Lab USC School of Cinematic Arts Los Angeles — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexmcdowell (talk • contribs) 09:57, 29 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Hello there Alex,


 * I marked the page as a copyright violation since its content seems to have been literally copied from . Now seeing the above explanation (Not to mention the signature on that particular page) i think i can conclude with little doubt that you have indeed written these pages. However, copyright technically all written content is considered copyrighted unless specifically stated otherwise. Since there is no specific copyright claim or released on the page in question this defaults to "Copyrighted content" which cannot be used directly on Wikipedia (Only content specifically licenses under the CC-BY-SA / GDFL or compatible copyright licenses can be copied directly). Now even if this would not have been the case the page as is would have read like original research. Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia it should base its article's on external reliable sources and provide an encyclopedic summary of these. Most times the easiest way to start an article is by collecting reliable sources other people wrote and afterwards summarizing there while quoting the sources for each citation. Having said the above i should mention i noticed is that there is already an article detailing Worldbuilding, which on first glance seems to be detailing the same subject as the world-building article you created. If that is the case it may be more convenient to expand or improve the existing article if possible, since the subject is already covered in a "live" article.


 * Another point i should comment on is the mention that you may be interested in editing the article as a class project. Now before anything else i would add the warning that editing Wikipedia as a class project is often more complex then the average essay assignment - Wikipedia article's tend to have a different structure than most essays which tends to cause a somewhat steeper learning curve. Additionally there are editors working on Wikipedia article's from around the globe so editing Wikipedia tends to result in a less controlled or stable examining / teaching environment. Now, this does by no means mean that student editing is impossible - there are multiple universities who have one time or periodic curriculum's revolving around editing Wikipedia article's. Note that this is a subject i am not to familiar with, so if you may be interested, the Wikipedia Education Outreach Program may be of interest to you. (And since i happened to have it bookmarked an example: this was what the freshman fifteen page looked like before an university course, and this is what it looked like afterwards. Nowadays (two years afterwards) the core of that article is still based on the writing from that specific course, with some updates / changes / improvements over the years of course.


 * Now, i hope this proves to be useful and apologies for the wall of text. Being brief has never been one of my forte's.  Excirial ( Contact me, Contribs ) 20:46, 30 January 2013 (UTC)