User talk:Emaran1

Welcome!
Hello, Emaran1, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; 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. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:18, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

About translating from French Wikipedia
Hello, Emily. I noticed your question to Ian about expanding our article on West African Economic and Monetary Union by translating from the French article. I second Ian's comments about verifying sources. Regarding translations: I could say a lot about this topic, as I do a lot of them from French Wikipedia, but for starters:
 * A lot of articles on fr-wiki tend to be very lax in sourcing and WP:Verifiability, and anything you publish on English Wikipedia means you vouch for the content as if it were your own, so definitely verify the sources as Ian said. If citations are lacking, add them; if they are insufficient, add more; if they are in French and there are equally good ones in English, replace them.


 * You didn't mention your level of French, but beware of false friends and other pitfalls of translation. Translation is a lon-nn-ng and complex topic, but awareness of false friends is a bare minimum requirement. If you wish, you may add a Babel language userbox to your user page; see for example,, , , and so on.
 * If you add translated content from the French article, Wikipedia's terms of service require you to attribute the authors of the original French article in your edit summary; see WP:TFOLWP for how to do this. On the scale of which rules you have to follow, and which ones you can fudge, author attribution sits at the top of the pyramid, as it is part of Wikipedia's Terms of use, and can never be ignored.

I've made a simple edit to the section at the ECOWAS article to add the Expand French template to that section, which may help you if you decide to do some translation. In particular, the exact wording that you need to use in your attribution statement mentioned in bullet 3 above is present in the instructions; you can paste it word-for-word into the edit summary whenever you save translated content from that article.

Hope this helps, and feel free to contact me if you need help with French, or any other editing topics at Wikipedia. Mathglot (talk) 21:41, 3 October 2023 (UTC)