User talk:Hooeychap

Welcome
Hello, Hooeychap and welcome to Wikipedia! It appears you are participating in a class project. If you haven't done so already, we encourage you to go through our training for students.

If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Please also read this helpful advice for students.

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Your instructor or professor may wish to set up a course page, if your class doesn't already have one. It is highly recommended that you place this text:  on the talk page of any articles you are working on as part of your Wikipedia-related course assignment. This will let other editors know this article is a subject of an educational assignment and aid your communication with them.

We hope you like it here and encourage you to stay even after your assignment is finished! Stuartyeates (talk) 08:00, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Welcome!
Hello, Hooeychap, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 01:14, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
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quick note
hi, and welcome to Wikipedia!

You seem to be new here. So - some notes, to help you be happy and productive here (as opposed to unhappy, and constantly getting your edits reverted). First of all, the mission of Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia that provides reliable, verifiable, neutral information for the public. All of those terms have technical meanings at Wikipedia that go beyond their common sense meanings. (see WP:NPOV, WP:RS, and WP:VERIFY). And I really mean it, that we are an encyclopedia - there are many things that we are not, and one of them is a vehicle for anybody to promote their business or ideas or anything. Please see WP:NOT. We are not a newspaper, either - we don't provide content on cutting edge science, especially not in the biomedical field. Instead, as described in our sourcing guideline for that kind of content, WP:MEDRS, we rely on reviews published in the literature, and statements of major medical and scientific bodies.

More generally, if you really want to get involved (and we are always looking for more editors to help!), it turns out that Wikipedia is a pretty complex place. Being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" means that over the years, Wikipedia has developed lots of policies and guidelines (WP:PAG) to help provide a "body of law" as it were, that form a foundation for rational discussion. Without that foundation, this place would be a wild west - a truly ugly place. But with the foundation, there are ways to rationally work things out - if, and only if, all the parties involved accept that foundation and work within it. One of the hardest things for new people, is to understand not only that this foundation exists, but what its letter and spirit is. (I emphasize the spirit, because too often people fall prey to what we call "wikilawyering") The more I have learned about how things are set up here - not just the letter of PAG and the various drama boards and administrative tools, but their spirit - the more impressed I have become at how, well ... beautiful this place is. It takes time to learn both the spirit and the letter of PAG, and to really get aligned with Wikipedia's mission to crowdsource a reliable, NPOV source of information for the public (as "reliable" and "NPOV" are defined in PAG!).

Also, people come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead to WP:TENDENTIOUS editing, which is really destructive. WP:ADVOCACY is one of our biggest bedevilments. And one of the hardest things that happens, is when simple disagreements over content and different understandings of policy, turn into accusations of bad faith editing (e.g. accusations of COI). There are many ways to go wrong, and a narrow path to go right. the wrong paths lead to misery for those who take them, and misery for those around them too. Much depends on how you carry yourself here and how clear you are in mind, that when you edit here, you are here to build an encyclopedia as per our mission, and not for some other reasons.

One of the main things we avoid, is putting too much emphasis on any primary source, especially with regard to anything health-related. This is a general principle of wikipedia, as described in WP:OR and WP:PSTS and is even more important for health related content, as described in WP:MEDRS.

Anyway, good luck! And I am happy to discuss any of this. Jytdog (talk) 01:19, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

response to your question
responding to your question here... First of all, every page in Wikipedia has a log of all the changes made to it, called the "History" - you can access it through the tab at the upper part of the page that says "View History" - so you can see exactly what changes have been made to an article, and who made them. Yes, it was me who reverted your changes. The biggest problem with your edits is that you are writing about health-related information, and relying on primary sources. Please read WP:MEDRS for information on the kinds of sources that are acceptable for health-related content in Wikipedia. Please also see WP:OR as to why it is so, so important to rely on secondary sources instead of primary sources. Please also see WP:PSTS for more on that. If you are interested in pesticides and agricultural worker safety, here is a pubmed search for reviews on that that topic; articles turned up by that search are likely to be acceptable sources. Jytdog (talk) 12:13, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Edit warring
Wikipedia is a collaborative enterprise - we work by consensus here; it is one of our bedrock principles. I made a lot of effort above to explain why your edits do not comply with our policies and guidelines, and instead of discussing them - which is what we do on Wikipedia, you simply added them back. This is what we call edit warring and it is a bad bad thing. Please open a discussion on the Talk page of the relevant article. Or reply here. But for pete's sake, Talk back! Thanks Jytdog (talk) 12:13, 5 May 2014 (UTC)