User talk:Lhochhauser

Welcome!
Hello, Lhochhauser, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian 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. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:44, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Doping in Professional U.S. Sports
Hi, Lhochhauser. I'm Adam, a content expert at Wiki Ed. is out right now and will be back to help you out later today. I see that your article Doping in Profession U.S. Sports was redirected to Doping in the United States, an existing article which covers the same topic. Please wait for Ian to review the work in your sandbox but I would recommend reading that article in the meantime to get a sense of where what you've researched can help improve it. Thanks. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:28, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Article feedback
Hi Lhochhauser. Nice work putting that draft together, but there are a few things you need to do before you can move your work into mainspace. There are two things you need to work on - making your draft fit the form of a Wikipedia article, and figuring out how to merge your content into the Doping in the United States article. I do think your title is better, but that's a separate issue.

The first thing you need to think about is the lead section. Unlike an introduction, a lead section is supposed to succinctly summarize the major points in the article. It needs to start with a statement of what the topic is, something that conveys a sense of what the topic is to the reader in a sentence or so. Something like

The second thing that struck me was the issue of sourcing. Everything you add must be supported by a reliable source. This is especially true in the case of living people - in that case, not only does it need sources, but it's also crucial that the sources be high-quality sources. This is a big deal on Wikipedia.

Thirdly, you can't copy verbatim from sources - that's a copyright violation and is often considered plagiarism, even when the source is linked. While a list of factual information (like the drugs listed) cannot be copyrighted, the examples can be. For example, for the first list item, you wrote "Natural Cannabinoids (e.g., THC, Hashish and Marijuana)". While the "natural cannabinoids" part is just information on the list, the (e.g., THC, Hashish and Marijuana) part is not something you can just copy. You need to put this in your own words. The "procedural details" sections also pose a problem of this sort - while they may not reproduce the source precisely, they use a lot of the same words in roughly the same order - "close paraphrasing" - which also may pose copyright problems. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:48, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The second issue has to do with what you're presenting in the article. For the most part, you have added two sets of information - a list of banned substances, and a drug testing and punishment protocol. Both sets of information appear to be based on primary sources. For the most part, these aren't the sort of information an encyclopedia article is best at presenting. Long lists of drugs are only of interest to someone who wants to know if "compound X" is permitted or banned. In either case, they would be best off looking at official lists maintained by the NBA, or NFL, or whichever group it is. They will have definitive, up-to-date lists. An encyclopedia article might talk about types of compounds, classes of compounds, and reasons why they are banned, and it should do it using secondary sources that discuss the banned substances. A link to the official list is also useful, but the fill content on the list is less useful. The drug testing and punishment procedure, on the other hand, is too step-by-step and too close to the original (as I mentioned above). You need to write this using secondary sources - sources that have written about the topic - and you need to craft it as prose rather than lists.

The final issue is figuring out how to merge your additions into the existing article. But that's something we can work on after you make these changes. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:06, 18 April 2016 (UTC)