User talk:Informationbyway

Welcome!
Hello, Informationbyway, 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) 13:16, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Sourcing
Hi - I wanted to give you a bit of a warning on the LiveAbout source you used in your sandbox. The site can't be used as a reliable source for two reasons:

The first is that they do advertising through their site and they're not entirely clear about what type of advertising it is. If it is just the advert bars present in the article, those would be fine, however some sites do sponsored posts for their clients, which are posts written explicitly to promote their stuff. Sometimes websites will clearly mark these posts and sometimes they won't - the main point is that in almost all cases this makes a site unusable as a reliable source, even for the non-sponsored posts.

The main reason, however, is that the site doesn't seem to have any editorial oversight. Per their terms of use page, they specifically say that the site can't be held liable for any of the content posted on their site and that"LiveAbout makes no guarantees as to the accurateness, quality, or completeness of the information and LiveAbout shall not be responsible or liable for any errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in the information or for any user's reliance on the information. User is solely responsible for verifying the information as being appropriate for user's personal use." This means that they probably only look over the information to catch grammatical and spelling errors, not to ensure that the material is accurate. This invalidates the site and content as reliable, even if the material looks to be correct.

I didn't know if this was just a test edit or something you were going to post live, but I wanted to give you a head's up on this. At first glance the site looked good, it's just that a deeper look showed some issues. No worries if you didn't catch any of that when you pulled up the site, as this is something I learned to look for the hard way on Wikipedia. (IE, I had some of my work reverted and given a warning about the sites I was using.) Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:13, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Hi Shalor! Thanks for the info. I'm actually a TA for this class. A student was having issues with syntax so I just dumped her code into my sandbox to help her see how it works. I'll delete it now. Informationbyway (talk) 18:28, 4 October 2017 (UTC)