User talk:Ashlee999

Welcome!
Hello, Ashlee999, 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) 18:46, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Suggestions for "lavender scare" article editing
Hi Ashlee999, thanks for editing Wikipedia and doing research to support your edits! I watch the lavender scare article, because it's important to me as a queer person who spent a few years working in the federal government recently, and I noticed your recent edits. I wanted to give some friendly feedback on this part:


 * Homosexuals were categorized with the “criminally insane” and “morally deprived”; this came about because of the new science behind sexual orientations and their involvements in institutions in the United States. The communists and homosexuals were linked together due to common beliefs about both of the groups. It was widely thought that both groups lacked morals and a god. They were called “psychologically disturbed” by the public.

When writing about historical perspectives that are outdated/obsolete about marginalized people, it's important to be very precise in how you use sources, and to be careful to frame them as the perspective of that specific time, so that you don't accidentally reinforce the biases of current readers. A reader unfamiliar with this topic (and unfamiliar with current scientific understandings of LGBTQ+ people) could see this framing (including "new science") and wonder if there had been some reasonable scientific grounding behind that perspective, instead of bias. The passive voice of "homosexuals were categorized" makes it unclear who was doing the categorizing, and the article speaks about "morally depraved" instead of "morally deprived".

It's a great article though, and I'm glad you're referencing it! I see that you're working with the material on page 728; I'm going to make an effort at rewriting this to more precisely reflect the sourcing. I encourage you to continue working on your edits and contributing to Wikipedia, because there's so much that editors can do to tell these important stories together. :) Dreamyshade (talk) 20:59, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Quick followup question while I'm working on this: one of your references has a title of "Shibboleth Authentication Request" without information about the title of the article, and I don't have access to the linked site. Can you update the article with the reference info? Thank you! It looks like this in the article text:



Dreamyshade (talk) 23:26, 1 November 2019 (UTC)