User talk:BethanyJ1998

Welcome!
Hello, BethanyJ1998, 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) 13:46, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Undocumented students
Hi! I had to revert your addition to undocumented students and I wanted to explain why.

The reason is ultimately that your addition was a personal reflection on the article and on a news article you read. Content shouldn't contain stuff like "I", "we", and so on. The content also needs to be written in an encyclopedic fashion to fit in with the rest of the article.

For example, you wrote "In an article that I read it showed an graph of how undocumented students had higher GPA than regular students. The reason that they do have higher GPA is that undocumented students often need scholarships and financial aid." This didn't really fit in with the paragraph you added it on to and was a personal reflection. A good way to get the same information into the article would be to look at the last sentence in the paragraph and see if you can build off of that. (Last sentence was "While exact numbers are not known, there has been an increased emphasis on the challenges facing undocumented students nationwide.")

You could do something like this: "In a 2015 report by the Institute for Immigration, Globalization, & Education at the University of California, Los Angeles researchers found that the most significant factors reported by the surveyed undocumented students were (list the concerns from the graph). The report also found that the surveyed students had higher GPAs than the national average, something that researcher Robert Teranishi felt was likely due to the high need for scholarships and financial aid, which can be difficult to obtain." (You can use any of this, if you want, or rewrite this - I don't mind. :) )

This can get the information in, but in a way that fits the MoS on Wikipedia. Don't take any of this badly - the information you found is fantastic and absolutely does belong in the article since a report like this can be hard to make for obvious reasons. It just takes a while to get used to the writing style on Wikipedia, is all - I did the same thing when I first started editing. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:34, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Copyright and plagiarism
Hi - I received a notification that some of the content you added to the article on undocumented students was considered to be a copyright or plagiarism issue. When looking at the content it looks like the main reason for concern was that you had taken content verbatim or nearly verbatim from this report. All content is considered to be copyrighted to the organization or author of the work unless it is explicitly marked as falling within the public domain or under a compatible Creative Commons license. The Center for American Progress looks like they typically copyright their work in a way that would prevent it being used in this manner, so this would be considered a copyright violation. It is also, unfortunately, considered to be a form of plagiarism because although you did cite the report, it was still written in a way that makes it seem like it's your own work.

The other content that came up on the report were quotes. While the quotes were relatively short and were attributed, so they're not considered to be a copyright or plagiarism issue, the content should still be written in your own words as much as possible. Quotes should be used sparingly and only in situations where the content cannot be re-written or summarized without losing something integral, such as a quote from a major speech.

I would like for you to go over the plagiarism and copyright module before progressing further, thanks. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:50, 21 November 2017 (UTC)