User talk:Aparmit

What's up

Welcome to Wikipedia! Drop by the Teahouse anytime for a cup of tea, or some help with editing!

Hello! Aparmit, you are invited to join other new editors and friendly hosts in the Teahouse. An awesome place to meet people, ask questions and learn more about Wikipedia. Please join us! Sarah (talk) 06:22, 23 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sandbox article

Looks pretty good so far for a start!

Some thing to note:

The first part of every article is called the lead (sometimes "lede" as a callback to old newspaper terminology). It serves the purpose of a general summary for the contents. The basic idea is that the lead should simultaneously satisfy basic curiosity about a subject and provide them with a skeleton for what the rest of the article will look like. For very long articles this can mean a few paragraphs. For an article like this a few sentences will do. Yours could include just a little more detail on his term as mayor (since it makes up such a big proportion of the article. Also the lede doesn't need its own section heading. You probably know that (because your section heading is the title of the article) but just an FYI.
Eventually you'll want to wikilink relevant and useful terms in the body text. This is hard to do (and tends to make the text tougher to parse before you get used to it) but it is useful to do so before you bring the article into the mainspace. If you want pointers on this or you want actual help doing it, let me know on my talk page. Bear in mind that Wikipedia has LOTS of articles on stuff. His state senate district may have an article, as an example.
Note: this is the only big problem with the text Be careful that you don't assume the voice of your sources. Re-read the state senate and mayoral sections and you can feel the official bio bleed through. Sentences like "Upon arriving at the Senate, Finch initiated the "Who Wants to Change the World?" Contest – a hands-on program to involve youth with government and inspire them to be active citizens." or "During his first year as mayor, Finch focused on professionalizing city government, aiming to stabilize the city's finances, and signing his first Executive Order to Promote Sustainability in Bridgeport." feel innocuous in isolation but give me a hint that you might be paraphrasing the source material too closely. This presents two problems. First, even though the official bio is a government document it still has a point of view. It is written by Finch's staff and intents to paint the mayor in a positive light (not to mention the campaign bio). That's a laudable goal for that document but not for us. Second, closely paraphrasing sources, especially sources which comprise such a large fraction of the references, makes it harder for us (in a technical sense) to reuse your work in other articles or other resources entirely. Think about it this way. If we want to write an article on all the mayors of bridgeport (assuming such an article doesn't exist already) what is easier to use when starting a section on Bill Finch? A paragraph which sounds a lot like a campaign biography or a neutral paragraph drawing from multiple sources with a more dispassionate tone? Trust me, cutting down on paraphrasing makes your fellow editors' jobs easier.

Other than those points this is a fairly sound new article. I'd love to see more sources on the subject but you've done well with what you have so far. Let me know (on my talk page, here, or via email) if you need any help. Protonk (talk) 04:47, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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