User talk:James.p.McKee

An Invite to join WikiProject Canada
Moxy (talk) 07:05, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Comedic journalism
Hi, James.p.McKee. I'm an admin here at Wikipedia. I reviewed the deletion request placed by another user on Comedic journalism, and I declined it, because I didn't see any instances of copyright violation. I did remove some chunks of original research, but that's a simpler issue. I saw your comment on the article's talk page, so I thought I'd give a little more info to you. Had it been the case that the article was largely copied from somewhere else, deleting it would have been not only an option but, in fact, mandatory, as copying of that nature is not only against our policies but very possibly illegal. Copying smaller chunks is also bad, but can sometimes be fixed through normal editing. While in many cases you are correct that we can work on things incrementally (allowing people fix them over time), copyright violations are not one of those things. I just figured I'd let you know, so that you can pass the same message on to your students.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a message on my talk page and I'd be happy to help. Qwyrxian (talk) 07:11, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Canada Education Program
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The discussion is about the topic WP:ANI. Thank you.  Chzz  ► 12:36, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Please note that some of the student article are being moved back into userspace; I'm updating the links on the course page as needed. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:32, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Where to look
Hi. Just picking up on your comment, "if there is somewhere we could direct our students to look";

The core policies are described on WP:PILLAR.

The specific policy concern in this case is WP:NOR, in particular WP:SYNTH.

As another user mentioned, WP:FIRST is quite a good intro to writing articles.

I always recommend that users edit existing articles at first, to get more familiar with Wikipedia before starting a new article. Even if users just spend some time fixing typo's, it helps. One place to find things is WP:BACKLOG.

One of the best ways to understand Wikipedia "style" is, to read some exemplary articles; WP:FA shows the best articles, so if you can find something in a similar topic area in there, and the students have a read, that should help.

There is always plenty of help available; Wikipedia mostly becomes 'aggressive' when people create live articles - so instead, students could ask for them to be checked by experienced editors before making them live. One way to do that is, by submitting them via WP:AFC.

They could also ask for help (e.g. "please check over my draft") on WP:HD.

I hope that helps.  Chzz  ► 07:26, 16 December 2011 (UTC)