User talk:Soudeaforbes

Welcome!
Hello, Soudeaforbes, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with Wiki Education; 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) 22:29, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Peer Review
Hi Soudea, I enjoyed completing my peer review of your updates to New Weird. With the exception of the first link, all of them in your bibliography are functioning properly. I think a little more research and restructuring (placing the definition before the influences) of the article would help with clarity on the genre, but overall this is a great start! Amdoubleu (talk) 20:23, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Reflections for NMAC 5108
Reflective Essay

As I decided on which article to work on independently, I was drawn to the article Lingua franca. I had evaluated this article for the wikiedu training module and I had taken an anthro-linguistics class in college so I felt like that article could be a good fit for me. I was leaning strongly towards that topic because I felt apprehensive about the suggested selection criteria- something that I had expertise in. I really racked my brain to come up with something that I felt like an “expert” in but nothing fit. I tried to think about what hobbies or special interests I had that could fit and still nothing came to mind, at least nothing I felt qualified to write about, so it looked like Lingua franca would be my article. Then I started looking for sources and realized why the gaps that I perceived and wrote about in my evaluation were there- many of the scholarly articles were decades old and it was difficult to find a source that covered the topic in a comprehensive manner. It seemed like the long history of the topic was actually detrimental to finding information on it. So I started my search for a Wikipedia article to revise once again.

My favorite book is Perdido Street Station by China Miéville but I read that over ten years ago and hadn’t done much reading since college. Despite the fact that our class project was literary, writing on a literary topic seemed to be outside of my wheelhouse. As I clicked on links related to Perdido Street Station, I found the page on the genre New Weird. I had never really looked into the strange genre that this book belonged to and that was the first time I’d even heard of “weird fiction” despite taking a Science Fiction and Fantasy reading course in high school. With a history section that was just one sentence long, the New Weird page seemed ripe for revision. Even if I couldn’t provide much in the way of literary knowledge, I could at least do some fact-finding and layout rearrangement.

I also reviewed the talk page and saw that any conversation had dropped off by 2010. In a way, I felt more confident about working on the article because no one else was really invested in it anymore. As I looked for preliminary sources, I found that there had been a wave of writing on the subject (both scholarly and lay) since 2009, which was when the bulk of the article’s content had been added. Having the “Weird fiction” and “Speculative fiction” articles for reference also gave me an idea of what to work towards in my end result.

Oddly, one of the main sources for the original “New weird” article, didn’t actually support the citations linked to it. This was kind of off-putting and frustrating because as I went through my sources I found contradictory information. Ultimately I did find a source to support what was written in the original article (about the first use of the term ‘new weird’) but it was a little alarming that the original citation for that statement didn’t actually address it at all. I had originally retitled the “Definition” section as “Characteristics” as I envisioned laying out some genre-defining themes but I found that being difficult to classify was a feature of the genre and ended up reverting to “Definitions” as trying to create a characteristics checklist seemed contrary to the topic itself. I also thought that might veer too closely into the territory of original analysis. I added some definitions given by genre authors for balance and breadth. I personally wanted to add a bit about the marketing term but I could not find credible sources that talked about how having the term made the genre commercially viable. There were only informal discussions of it.

I think my most important contribution was expanding the history section from a single (somewhat tangential sentence) into a timeline with four major dates. It was a little difficult for me to make the call on which dates to include but the publication of Perdido Street Station, the forum discussion, and the anthology all came up in multiple sources as being important for defining the genre. In addition, I remembered from the training that information in the lead should be mentioned later in the article, so I made sure to include the first use of “new weird” in the History section as well. At the same time, not being an expert in this subject area makes me a bit nervous that I could be missing other important dates, especially since the article feels heavily focused on 3 authors in particular despite the inclusion of many in the notable authors list. I did try to make it more inclusive of other authors but pretty much everything focused on Miéville and the anthology.

I also added an “Other Media” section. This was inspired by the Bookriot article I read as well as learning that the movie Annihilation was based on Jeff Vandermeer’s book. It’s funny because I thought Annihilation was such an interesting movie as someone with an anthropology background and interest in cross-cultural communication and it feels like in the end,everything almost circled back to the lingua franca article I originally wanted to work on. This also feels like the most risky part of what I wrote.

Figuring out which images to add was tricky. I wanted to include the Annihilation poster but the copyright isn’t compatible with Wikimedia requirements. I ended up using images of China Miéville and Jeff Vandermeer since they are so heavily featured in the article. I wanted to include an image of M. John Harrison but he did not have an image on Wikimedia Commons or that I could find copyright information on or through Google Images copyright filters. I did follow him on Twitter to ask him if there was one available but he had messages turned off. I also added a Wikimedia image of the title screen for Pan’s Labyrinth. It feels underwhelming, especially since I found an interesting image from The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind on Flickr that had a CC-by-2.0 license which would be compatible. Based on the Wikiedu training and what I know about video game image copyright from following gaming YouTubers, I suspect that the Flickr uploader doesn’t actually have the authority to give that kind of licensing so I decided to be safe rather than sorry.

Working on Wikipedia was a little nerve-wracking for me. Despite the fact that I’ve signed up for a writing course, I still get nervous about creating content for public viewing and there’s no place more dedicated to the public consumption of information than Wikipedia. While the Talk pages were useful for starting out, I found it difficult to navigate as more content was added. I also found it a little frustrating that I didn’t really feel like I was actually communicating with others on the group project Talk page. I think that what I liked about working on a “dead” article independently and didn’t like about working on a group article was that I tend to want to build consensus. For the individual project, there was no one to do that with so I felt okay with proceeding how I wanted but for the group project, it was more difficult because everyone was kind of doing their own thing and I didn’t really have the confidence to add stuff without input from someone else. Overall, I did actually like writing my article once I got into the flow of it and I kind of do feel like I’ve made a contribution to general human knowledge through my revision.Soudeaforbes (talk) 03:53, 27 February 2020 (UTC)


 * For your article to count for the class, it must be live. Please be sure you move it today and let me know when I can have a look. This is critical. Thanks. —Grlucas (talk) 16:46, 28 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I've moved the content to the live article as well as the comments from the sandbox talk page. Soudeaforbes (talk) 17:35, 28 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Also would be good to know if you think the additonal citations warning can be removed. It seems like it based on Wiki's rules but it'd be helpful to have the second opinion. Soudeaforbes (talk) 18:07, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, I think you could remove it. —Grlucas (talk) 19:50, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

3Cs log
This is being posted after the deadline because I still didn't quite understand the requirements of the log until I looked at Kerry's talk page. For that reason and the fact that I tend to work at night and Wikipedia uses a different time zone than my own, dates may be off. I also was not consistent in working on Wikipedia everyday (sorry) but I've gathered everything from the Wikiedu trainings and my contribution records to organize here. I am extremely grateful for the training that said to use the 'edit summary' every time I changed something because this would have been a lot more difficult to do retroactively if I hadn't.

1-16-20
 * Completed "Wikipedia policies" training module
 * Completed "Sandboxes, talk pages, and watchlists" training module
 * Created Wikipedia account and added basic user page content

1-18-20
 * Completed "Evaluating articles and sources" training module
 * Evaluated Lingua franca article
 * Completed "How to edit: Wikicode vs Visual Editor" training module

1-23-20
 * Evaluated Norris Church Mailer article
 * Contributed to the Norris Church Mailer talk page about the uncited claims of misogyny used in the article, a true challenge to my personal biases.

2-3-20
 * Began my late in the game search for a new source to add to the FOG article. Naturally, much of what I came across was already in the bibliography thanks to classmates who work in a timely manner.

2-4-20 to 2-5-20
 * Completed "Drafting as a group" training module
 * Completed "Finding your article" training module
 * Completed "Plagiarism" training module
 * Completed "Adding citations" training module
 * Moved Lingua franca evaluation from the default Wikiedu page to a new page with a more relevant title
 * Created "Choose an article" page to decide between Lingua franca and New weird
 * Added a sentence on the perceived origin of the A-I perspective (Fremont-Smith review)
 * Noted the addition of my sentence and that it seemed to contradict (not factually) other content that was there on the FOG talk page.

2-5-20 (later working session)
 * Added the "Mailer on the IRT" source to FOG draft references. I couldn't figure it out on my own so thank you for the magazine citation template link. It was still a little tricky to work out how to use citations despite the training. What I learned about re-using sources from this instance was helpful for my individual project.

2-7-20
 * Drafted changes to the FOG Reception section in my personal sandbox for clarity
 * Moved some of my personal changes to the FOG draft. It felt weird to do so, which was validated by the next class update about making useful edits.
 * Commented on some of the confusion that spurred me to revise the Reception section because there were changes I didn't feel comfortable making since I hadn't read the related sources. Despite tagging being used on the talk page before this point, it didn't click for me that I could have looked up who added the content in question and tagged them in my comment. In retrospect, that would've made for a much better and engaging editing experience.

2-9-20
 * Tried to make use of sandboxes by creating one for future work on the Lingua franca article but ended up very confused about how to pages I created but forgot to add to my watchlist. David (dcb1986) and I worked on a group project for another class and he explained that I needed to go through the Wikiedu links to correctly set up the individual project.

2-11-20
 * Created bibliography for New weird article
 * Created sandbox page for New Weird article

2-18-20
 * Responded to Benjamin's talk page comments about changes to the publication and reception section. It was actually a little annoying to find a new section on the Talk page when I had already created a section for talking about that part of the article. I was also a little miffed about the deletion of one sentence I had added with no prior discussion (how the tables have turned!). This is how I actually realized I could tag someone if I wanted a response from them (which still didn't work anyway).

2-22-20 I realized that I hadn't signed my response to Benjamin on the FOG talk page so went back and did that.

2-24-20
 * Started writing in my New weird sandbox in earnest
 * Created talk page for my individual project to explain the changes I was making. Notably, a source I had contradicted a statement in the original New weird article so I reviewed the original source and it was not relevant to the fact it was being used to support. Eventually, I found an actual source that supported the original statement but that was alarming for a bit.

2-25-20
 * Completed "Contributing images and media files" training module
 * Completed "Moving group work live" training module
 * Made a minor edit to FOG article
 * Added content about Fremont-Smith review to Publication and Reception section of FOG
 * Added 'Other media' section to New weird
 * Finished writing for New weird article

2-26-20
 * Added citations for New weird article
 * Made minor revisions
 * Created a Wikimedia Commons account
 * Added images to New weird