User talk:Tiffanyferland

Hi! I would like to say; Nice job! At seeming to figure out how to use wikipedia, how did you get all those badges?? I cant seem to do it. I think it will be awesome to see what your final will be, when i read your writing it feels enthusiastic about this project. I know you mentioned healthcare/health as something you would like to look into when you commented on my post last week, so good luck finding what your looking for! Sarahkimes (talk) 20:36, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Welcome!
Hello, Tiffanyferland, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor 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. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:35, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Copyright
Hi - I saw that you used content from the National Institutes of Health. While this is a government organization and as such, falls under the public domain, the material does need to be properly attributed. This includes using a template that marks it as such - this is something you wouldn't have known about previously, so I'm not going to fault you for it. I've added it to the article.

I did notice that you're using CheckOrphan - be very wary of sites like these for a few reasons. Some just mirror content that was published elsewhere like Wikipedia, so you need to make sure that you get the original source, not a copy. Also you can't always guarantee that they're using the most updated version or that they haven't edited the content to make it less accurate, so again - always better to get the original source.

One thing aside though - while you can take content from the Federal Government since it's in the public domain, ideally the content should be written in your own words. Sometimes this content may not be written in ways that could be clear to the average reader, so it's always good to make sure that it's easy to understand. Secondly, not all content published on government websites is in the public domain - sometimes they republish content that is held under a very restrictive copyright that would not allow it to be used verbatim on places like Wikipedia.

Finally, I want you to take this training on editing medical topics, as Wikipedia is extremely selective with what is considered a reliable source with medical topics. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:02, 7 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Actually case in point - the treatment section was taken from a journal article published on the NIH website. The NIH had permission from the copyright holder to use the material verbatim, but this only pertains to them - Wikipedia cannot use this text verbatim because the copyright is more restrictive than the one Wikipedia uses, which allows commercial use and for people to edit the work freely. I've removed this portion. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:04, 7 August 2018 (UTC)