User talk:Geography&historyofworld

Welcome!

Hello, Geography&historyofworld, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! AshLin (talk) 16:01, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reverting your edits on Nation State

Hi there,

Your edits to Nation state while energetic and large were unreferenced, unencyclopaedic and in some cases just wrong, hence my reversion of your edits. But dont let that discourage you. If you have the energy to write so much as a newbie, I am sure you would have the confidence and staying power to stay in Wikipedia long enough to learm the ropes.

It is always ambitious for a new editor to start making major edits. I would recommend you to start small. It would be a good idea to read some of the pages mentioned in my welcome message above at the start of each editing session and then add just one or two facts in that session duly referenced, each time. As you gain experience, you will realise how an encyclopaedia should be like, and you will improve your style, your judgement, knowledge and also learn knew techniques and skills. If you need help or guidance, feel free to ask by leaving me a message on my talk page. Be sure to add ~~~~~ at the end of your message which will automatically add your name, links to your user page, your user talk page and also the date and time just like what I have at the end of these two posts of mine.

Happy editing. AshLin (talk) 16:12, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hello there,

Thank you for informing me that this user id is not just a person but that it represents a class teacher from Indiana with student editors. I am very happy to meet you. I am from India, so we have a very small commonality. :-)

It is all the more important that you get to know the ropes before you dig deep into editing otherwise your students may get discouraged by repeated reversion. Please do get your students and yourself to read all these introductory pages first and then re-add the material one fact at a time carefully referenced. You will have to be judicious in adding only encyclopaediac facts and not opinions. If you teach them this incremental editing, I am sure that your students will learn good habits and craft good articles. (more follows later, after my dinner :-)) AshLin (talk) 16:46, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, you need to be a wikipedia editor in your own regard. You can't provide a good experience to your students if you are yourself in the learning stage. Once there, you need to teach Wikipedia editing and the necessary values to them. Your present manner of putting up paragraphs done by your students is not "meaningful contribution" by them. They need to have the richer experience of participating themselves.

Secondly, You need to filter the content you need to add very carefully. Children's assignments are not appropriate for a direct copy-paste to Wikipedia. You need to teach them to add single facts, one at a time. The fact should be written into the appropriate place in the article, referenced and That is how articles are built up in a crowd-sourced collaboration. Here is a single edit of mine to a related article, National power. In this edit, I added an image to Nation state which had none at all at first, which I followed up by adding four more. By small contributions a large article can be built up.

I would recommend a simpler article than a socio-political concept such as Nation-state. Its a concept I use while teaching post-grads in defense and strategic studies or international relations. The Wikipedia article is not in good shape. There are too many examples (to which your children added more) and not all the examples in the article are well referenced and correctly nuanced. It needs to be taken apart, lots of the dross removed and recrafted - not a place where I recommend your adding large batches of text.

Articles such as nation-state are also likely to be highly policed - you see how quickly I caught on to your edits. Beginning on sleepy, obscure articles where nobdy is interested or cares much is a good place to begin. Otherwise, sooner or later your edits may be reverted or, just as bad, vanish when someone rewrite the article.

Perhaps you may like to create an article about your village or community. Or if it already exists, add material to the existing article. You may find it, or even better, not find it, in one of these places :

Your students can then go about collecting facts (with references) about your village/township and add them to your article. Your town already features in Wikipedia? No problem, get them to find out which is the best written article about any town in Wikipedia, see how it is written and build up your own town's article to that standard.

Anyway, I shall cease policing Nation state and your edits to it but be warned - someone will come and oneday excise great chunks of less appropriate material, and such things tend to happen sooner than later.

Anyway, a very happy wikipeding experience to you all, greetings from Pune, Maharashtra, India. AshLin (talk) 18:02, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, since your hands are pretty much tied up at the moment, I am helping out in another way. I took up Egypt and rewrote it as I would normally do. I have done it in a number of passes.

Pass 1 - rewrote your article on Egypt. (See here). (Green shows added text, red shows deleted text in the left box and amended text in the right box.)
Pass 2 - Here I have changed a badly crafed reference to a good wikipedia reference format. The rest of your references are for you all to do.
Pass 3 - Here I converted suitable words to wikilinks by locating their concerned articles and linking them using Wikipedia syntax.
Pass 4 - Here, the fact on the UAR had a {{cn}} tag which gives a "citation needed" superscript, such as this - ^{[citation needed]}, added to it. This means the fact lacks an authoritative reference and can be deleted if not replaced over a period of time. I located such a reference on the web through Google books and added it to the article, properly formatted in a cite:book template.
Pass 5 - Finally, to end my edit session, I added a suitable image to the article.

This is how Wikipedia editing is normally done. You may like to show these steps to your students. AshLin (talk) 19:24, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Your recent edits

Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you must sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 18:27, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Could you please get in touch with me?

For lack of other means to contact you, I would appreciate if you would be so kind as to leave me a short note to let me know if we could exchange some ideas and information about your and your class most commendable effort here on Wikipedia. Discussion pages can be used, but you are very welcome to use my e-mail address, shown on my user page: vam@fct.unl.pt

Sincerely,

Virgilio A. P. Machado

vapmachado ^talk.cw 22:47, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]