User talk:Victor Mabuku

 Welcome, !

Hello,, welcome to Wikipedia and thank you for your contributions! I'm Jimmy Pitt, one of the many editors here, and I hope you'll like it here enough to decide to stay.

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Jimmy Pitt  talk  20:34, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Civil law and polygamy in Namibia
Hello. I came across your page on "Civil law and polygamy in namibia" while patrolling new pages. At present it isn't quite ready to be released as an article and, to prevent it being deleted, I've moved it into your userspace. You'll find it at User:Victor Mabuku/Civil law and polygamy in namibia.

I hope you won't feel offended if I point out a few things where the article could be improved. And the first is, do not sign your name to the article: you only need to sign your name on talk pages. As you can imagine, if every editor signed his or her name when editing an article, the articles would soon become unreadable.

Another (minor) point is to capitalise articles properly: your only mistake here is to omit the capital N from "Namibia" (which, I might add, is a whole lot better than capitalising every word, or -- worst of all -- capitalising the entire title!)

As to the article itself, you should try to avoid writing it like an essay Among the things to avoid are: - using pronouns such as "you" or "our": instead of "our culture" or "our heritage", say "the culture" or "the heritage of the Namibian people", or something similar. The aim is to avoid anything phrasing that has a personal tone; the aim, in fact, is to write an article in such an impersonal manner that a reader will have no idea where you come from or what your views might be.

Similar, it's not the job of a Wikipedia article to make suggestions. Instead of "A good suggestion would be ...", you should write something like "It has been suggested that ..."

Which leads on to another important point. All statements in a Wikipedia article should be verifiable, which is to say that there should be reliable sources to support any statements; and conversely, nothing in an article should fall into the category of original research. So if the "good suggestion" is your own idea, and nobody else's, leave it out -- good as it may be, it counts as "original research". But if the suggestion has been made by a prominent lawyer, politician, activist, or whatever, and you can point to a source where that person was quoted or the suggested was discussed, then by all means include it, but provide a reference to the source.

In conclusion, avoid phrases such as "in conclusion"! They're fine in an essay that you might write in college, but Wikipedia articles shouldn't draw conclusions -- the aim of the encyclopedia is to present the facts (including opposing points of view, where necessary) and let the readers draw their own conclusions.

I hope you'll accept these comments in the spirit in which they're offered -- to help, not to criticise. If you have any questions, or want any help, feel free to ask, either here or on my talk page. Regards. Jimmy Pitt  talk  21:03, 14 October 2010 (UTC)