User talk:BennyD519

Broken Link

The link to your article Intensive farming on our course page does not work. It is up to you to make sure the links work and you can preview them before you save your changes. Links within wikipedia are case sensitive. Please fix your link on the course's table of articles. Other students cannot access the page you are working on if you leave it with a broken link. Thanks Sub specie aeternitatis (talk) 17:55, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Intensive farming

Hi BennyD519! I've been going through a few articles, and unfortunately I found a few problems with the Intensive farming article that you worked on, that means I've had to revert some of your work. There were two problems I ran into. The first was that you used Wikipedia as a reference a few times. :) Unfortunately, Wikipedia can;t be used as a reference for Wikipedia - the aim of the project is to bring together the work of other, preferably secondary, sources, and thus Wikipedia doesn't qualify as a source in itself. But that's ok - it is a minor error, but one worth watching out for.

Of more note, I also hit a second problem where you had copied over some content directly from other sources. You referenced it correctly, so my assumption is that you were treating it as more of a quote, but as a result you inadvertently added copyright violations to the articles. Wikipedia is in an unusual position. As it is published under a free use license, it tends to need to be more restrictive in terms of what is permitted than what other, similar, projects might be. This is because where when add content we are explicitly giving permission for that content to be released under a free licence, and if we don;t have the rights to the content, we can't release it that way. So when we right for Wikipedia, one of the big rules is to make sure that what we right is in our own words, or (if it isn't very long) expressed as a direct quote. In this case the sources were fine, but you need to write the content in a way that a reader can recognise that the source fully supports what you are saying, but without using the same words as in the original source. It is a tricky balance to get right, but what I tend to do is write out the original, then write my new version, and make sure when I compare the two that they are as different as they can be, given that they need to express the same idea. Occasionally, of course, you reach points where the original wording seems like the only way of expressing the idea, so in those cases I use direct quotes to make sure it is clear to the reader where I got it from.

Anyway, if you need any help let me know, and in saying that I found some problems, I should also make clear that you did some good work formatting and cleaning up the article as well. :) - Bilby (talk) 13:17, 9 December 2012 (UTC)