Jsollowa

Welcome

Jennifer,

This is a copy of the message I left at your English Wikipedia account.

Welcome to Wikipedia! I am one of the Online Ambassadors that will be working with your class. We are available to help you with questions on editing Wikipedia and interacting with other Wikipedians. We will also be reviewing your work and offering suggestions. You can contact me by leaving a message on my talk page, User talk:Donald Albury. You can also send me an e-mail by going to my user page (User:Donald Albury) or my talk page and clicking on "E-mail this user". Most days I am on-line several times during the day, so I should be able to respond within a few hours. I will also at times be on IRC as "dalbury". Remember, if you leave a message or comment on a talk page (either a user's talk page or an article talk page), to sign your comment with four tildes (~~~~). -- Donald Albury (talk) 18:36, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Nice work!

Good suggestions for how to improve Nancy Drew! Awadewit (talk) 23:09, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Barbie resources

Hi Jsollowa, You'll see the beginning of some Children's Museum resources listed here. Note that previously I'd mentioned that the museum's Barbie exhibit was closing in September. Well, it's now been reopened by popular demand. I'm not sure how long it's set to stay up this time, so you may want to get in quickly to get some great notes from many of the labels in the exhibit. The labels can be used as a source, as long as they're not the only source. I will also check with our curators to see if they have any interesting resources. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks! HstryQT (talk) 15:58, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Your changes so far

Hello! You've done quite some work on Barbie; great job. Just a few pointers:

• You haven't logged in for the most recent of your edits (I assume they were you). The history shows that many changes have been made by a logged-out user. Do remember to log in!
• Be very careful about keeping the text neutral. At the moment some of it sounds like you are singing the praises of Barbie. We are here to present facts, and only the facts. Watch out for emotive words like "hours of enjoyment" (That particular sentence could just become "Barbie was built so that children who liked to play with paper dolls would have a longer lasting doll" or similar, omitting all the positively-hued description.) Likewise, is the fact that Barbie's creator struggled against a "domesticated gender role" really something that argues against the concern that Barbie may be a negative influence? If it is the opinion of a scholar, cite that scholar or say something like "some experts view Barbie as..." rather than imposing it as fact on the reader.
• References- you've got the right idea, but here's how it works:

Let's say I have a paragraph with two references used repeatedly. In the edit window, this would look like

I am editing Wikipedia.<ref name=me>Sonia, "A History of Me". Wikipedia Publishing, 2005.</ref> I really like the Simple English Wikipedia.<ref name=me/> This Wikipedia is written in Simple English so that more people can understand it.<ref name=simple>"Wikipedia:Simple English Wikipedia". Accessed at http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia on November 14, 2011.</ref>

And it would show up as

I am editing Wikipedia. I really like the Simple English Wikipedia. This Wikipedia is written in Simple English so that more people can understand it.

In summary, to use a reference, add its details inside the main body of the text, with <ref> and </ref> on either side. If you wish to use a reference more than once, name it in the first instance (<ref name=blah> then </ref> as usual), and from then on you can just use <ref name=blah/> (don't forget the slash at the end!) to mean the same thing. Then, all you will need to do in the References section at the bottom is add {{Reflist}}, and the refs will show up:

Whew! I'm sorry for the huge wall of text. Hopefully some of it makes sense! Do feel free to email me or leave a message on my talk page if you have any questions. Cheers! sonia♫ 23:06, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Also As you can see, I made some of these changes myself. I hope that this helps you to see how the ref tag works. If you're using an entire book as a source, then you should really put a page number. Where in this book did you get this information? For a web page or an article, it's reasonable to expect the reader to find the exact quotation himself (and in the case of hypertext, there are no page numbers, but we can search it electronically), but it's not really reasonable to expect someone to read an entire book to verify one claim. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:33, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

And I'm glad to see that you want to include sources that are generally positive about Barbie and the role that the doll can play in making girls happy and giving them career options in addition to voices that are critical about the doll--that's the whole purpose of NPOV! —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:35, 14 November 2011 (UTC)