User talk:Cooleen93

Welcome
Hi Colleen/Cooleen. While Bellingham is nice, Austin isn't too bad either. Looking forward to seeing your contributions on Wikipedia. John.Farquhar (talk) 19:42, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Welcome
Hi! I just wanted to stop by and quickly welcome you to Wikipedia. I'm helping out a bit as the online Ambassador for the "Reality Check" course, so if you need any assistance just give me a yell. You can leave a message on my talk page, or send me an email - both should work well, and I'm really happy to receive questions. I'm in Australia, so our time zones will be out of sync a bit, but I'm normally online during the mornings and evenings your time. At any rate, it should be an enjoyable course. :) - Bilby (talk) 06:10, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Welcome
I'd also like to welcome you to Wikipedia! I've been interested in issues related to skepticism and rational thinking for many years. I'd be happy to help if you have any questions. Dustinlull (talk) 02:11, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Communal reinforcement
Hi! Nice work on Communal reinforcement - if nothing else, your edits appear to stick, which is great, and they make for very good reading. :) I have just a couple of brief suggestions. The first is that, as a general rule, every statement added to a Wikipedia article needs a source. You seem to be doing this, although the sources are implicit in the text rather than explicit as references, so things are ok, but it might be easier if they were more explicit. One of Wikipedia's problems is that it is difficult to know if unsourced statements are accurate, especially given how anyone can add content, irrespective of their expertise or point of view. By requiring sources the system brings greater emphasis to the concept of verifiability, which allows other people to confirm that the text is ok. The other brief comment is that you need to be careful of reading too much into a source - I am not sure that you've done that, by any means, but the risk is that contributors may enter into original research, which runs into the verification problem. The role of Wikipedia is to summarise other sources, especially secondary ones, and there's a risk that sources referring to something else can be pulled together to make a new claim. In a sense this runs very much counter to what you are normally expected to do in university, as there you are expected to create original thought, or to bring multiple sources together to make an argument - but on Wikipedia you need to be careful to avoid this sort of writing. - Bilby (talk) 22:29, 13 November 2011 (UTC)