User talk:LING300DM

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Hello, LING300DM, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Mathglot (talk) 22:57, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Sourcing at Gender neutrality article
Hi, LING300DM! I saw your good faith attempts to make changes to the article Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns; thank you very much for your contributions. Unfortunately, these edits did not comply with Wikipedia's requirements for WP:Verifiability, in particular, sourcing your edits with citations to reliable sources, so they have been undone. I know this may be disappointing, but none of your work has disappeared; it can all be retrieved from the page history. Going forward, please find appropriate sources for the changes you wish to make, and add citations for them. In addition, as a new user you may wish to discuss your changes first at the Talk page.

If you are editing for a student class assignment, can you please identify the class you are involved with? If you are in a Wikipedia Education class, please go over your training modules again, especially the ones relating to verifiability and sourcing. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me below (use Reply), or on my talk page, or at the WP:Tea house, or WP:Help desk. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:00, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Mathgloth!

I did not add any content, so I do not know what you mean when you say I needed to add 'sourcing'. All I did was add subheadings and reorganize the information that was already there. I don't understand how this works. It seems there are hundreds of pages without citations. This page we are working on lacks at least a couple. However, you did not erase those paragraphs. You only erased my work (and my teammates work). The other student was very clear that we were not done and that citations would be added within 24 hours. This does not seem good faith to me. Could you explain your point of view? LING300DM (talk) 04:39, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Hm, have I gotten confused? Let me look at the article again. Mathglot (talk) 05:40, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, I see what's going on, and you're right about your contributions. Two things caused me to misidentify your edits; one is another user in your class with a similar name (except it ends in MW), and the other is the diff program results: primarily what I'm looking at is this set of 8 edits (diff), and generally what is in the right column is "added" material, and what's in the left column is "deleted", but it looks like you added or subtracted some blank lines, causing the diff program to display it in both columns, and it looked to me like you had added unsourced material, whereas it had been there all along (in which case it can be removed), but in any case, it wasn't you who added it, so no foul regarding sourcing.
 * Looking at the two versions, that is to say, the "before" version (1058540508) and the "after" version (1058696781) I see that you just added subheadings, and that's fine. But putting just your headings back without putting back the previous revisions by your classmates is too complex, so I'm just going to put it all back for now. Stand by... Mathglot (talk) 06:12, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
 * So, I've restored your revision 1058696781‎ of 02:25, 5 December 2021; does this contain all your subheadings? This revision includes stuff I previously removed for lack of sourcing, but I can't deal with that, now, and will have to look at it again later. Mathglot (talk) 06:18, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Ok. Thank you for restoring my headings and everything else. We will reconsider our approach based on your comments. Our edits reflect a process rather than a product. We were working top-down because we found the page very confusing when we first read it; we wanted to add some clarity on what the three grammar patterns were and where English fits in the broader context. I will talk with my teammates so that our work reflects a bottom-up approach from now on. LING300DM (talk) 07:50, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Not everything was restored, only the stuff to the point mentioned, and everything before that. Top-down, or bottom-up, it's up to you. Just remember that every revision should be better than the previous one in some way (no matter how minor), and since anybody can read it at any time, ideally it should be coherent at all times, and not in an "unfinished" or "in-between" state, waiting for some future edit that is an integral part of a the plan and that makes no sense until it is completed. I think you have some latitude here, because this is not the most popular article in the encyclopedia (about 200–400 page views per day), but try not to leave an "unfinished" look between edits. You can always sandbox a complex sequence of edits until it makes a self-contained whole, and then transfer that to the article.
 * Having said all that, since you mentioned "top-down", and "confusing", there is one other approach, but it is a drastic one, and that is WP:TNT. It is usually reserved for articles that are such a mess, that junking it and starting over from scratch would require less effort than starting over. I've only done this twice in many years, and while I wouldn't say this is completely off-limits to you three as new editors, it would be very unusual to say the least, and you'd have to present a persuasive argument on the Talk page, and appeal to other editors to get buy-in (WP:CONSENSUS) for a plan like that.  Given that you only have till the end of the year, this is probably not possible anyway. It's kind of the hail Mary pass of Wikipedia improvement, best reserved for highly unusual cases. Mathglot (talk) 08:09, 6 December 2021 (UTC)