User talk:PenNameMS

Welcome
 <div style="background-color: Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask at the help desk, or place  on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes (~) ; this will automatically produce your username and the date. Also, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to help you get started.  Happy editing! -  wolf  23:13, 2 May 2021 (UTC)   Hello, PenNameMS, and Welcome to Wikipedia!
 * 1) 084080;font:bold 120%/1.6 sans-serif;border:1px solid
 * 2) CEF2E0;color:
 * 3) FFC000;padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Getting started
 * Introduction
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Intuitive guide to Wikipedia
 * 1) 084080;font:bold 120%/1.6 sans-serif;border:1px solid
 * 2) CEF2E0;color:
 * 3) FFC000;padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Finding your way around
 * Table of contents
 * Directories and indexes
 * Department directory
 * 1) 084080;font:bold 120%/1.6 sans-serif;border:1px solid
 * 2) CEF2E0;color:
 * 3) FFC000;padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Editing articles
 * How to develop an article
 * Simplified Manual of Style
 * 1) 084080;font:bold 120%/1.6 sans-serif;border:1px solid
 * 2) CEF2E0;color:
 * 3) FFC000;padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Getting help
 * Frequently asked questions
 * Cheatsheet
 * Our help forum for new editors, the Teahouse
 * The Help Desk, for more advanced questions
 * Help pages
 * Article Wizard – a Wizard to help you create articles
 * 1) 084080;font:bold 120%/1.6 sans-serif;border:1px solid
 * 2) CEF2E0;color:
 * 3) FFC000;padding:0.2em 0.4em;">How you can help
 * Community Portal
 * Join a WikiProject
 * Follow Wikipedia etiquette
 * Practice civility
 * Discover what's going on in the Wikimedia community

Civility and Menachem Mendel Schneersohn
This is a warning regarding your conduct on User talk:Elmahag91. The sentence "you don't have any advanced English education or training" was clearly uncivil, in violation of Wikipedia policy. Elmahag made the reasonable decision to revert edits you made that added a biased point of view to the article. If you disagree with them, then Talk:Menachem Mendel Schneersohn is the place to discuss that.

As to the article itself, if you see grammatical issues and such, feel free to fix them yourself; just make sure you read up on our Manual of Style first. Every publication has its own style, and we're no exception. As a publication not just oriented toward Jews, and indeed with many readers who've never met a Jew, we don't tend to shorten something like "Orthodox Jewish rabbi" to "Orthodox rabbi." Although beyond that I do agree that the "Russian Empire-born..." sentence could use some work. For what it's worth, though, when I worked at the copy desk at one of the two magazines you mentioned, I don't think anyone would have had an issue with "wide-ranging contributions to traditional Torah scholarship". -- Tamzin (they/she) &#124; o toki tawa mi. 09:10, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Civility and Menachem Mendel Schneersohn
Dear Tamzin, Wikipedia is right to issue the warning. My intro to was a bit abrasive, and I should have been more sensitive and compliant with the civility guidelines. Regarding the edits, I would prefer to go beyond just simple grammar and punctuation to rewrite a few sentences and even paragraphs. Keeping my biases from oozing in as much as possible, of course. Is that even a possibility for this article? You see, I believe form as much as content. Please advise. Thank you. MS — Preceding unsigned comment added by PenNameMS (talk • contribs) 20:55, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for understanding, MS. To answer your question: If you want to make an edit that is purely a copy-edit, you should absolutely follow our maxim to be bold and fix things yourself. As I said, just make sure to familiarize yourself with our Manual of Style first. For more comprehensive things, you're always allowed to rewrite sentences or paragraphs at a time, and often doing so can be entirely noncontroversial. However, given that Menachem Mendel Schneersohn is a high-profile and sometimes contested article, and that you, like any new editor, still have things to learn about how Wikipedia works, and that you do seem to have a bias (which is not in itself a problem), I would say that at least for that page or similar ones, you probably should seek consensus on the talk page first for any edits that significantly change the meaning of things. So if you want to change "Russian Empire-born" to "born in the Russian Empire," for instance, that's a "be bold" situation; but if you want the article to devote more time to certain perspectives about Rabbi Schneersohn, that's the kind of thing to discuss on the article's talk page.
 * One big tip I'd give to avoid conflict is breaking up big edits if parts touch on different things. Your edit here, for instance, had some parts that were entirely reasonable, and other parts that raised neutrality issues. If you know that an edit you're making touches on something particularly sensitive, it can often really help to have that be the only thing that the edit does, especially because you can then dedicate your whole edit summary to that topic. For instance, here is a recent edit I made. I knew that I was touching on a very controversial subject, so all I did with the edit was add the six words I needed to, and then wrote a lengthy note in my edit summary explaining why I was doing so. Another editor came along and offered a different approach, with an edit summary likewise explaining their point of view, which I saw as reasonable; that way we avoided conflict. If I had made that change amidst a larger edit to the article, they would not have been privy to my reasoning for making it, and might have been quicker to revert my change.
 * P.S. Please remember to sign your posts with at the end! Also, please see WP:THREAD for how to show that you're replying to someone.  -- Tamzin (they/she) &#124; o toki tawa mi. 05:09, 5 May 2021 (UTC)