User talk:AlexLambright

Welcome!

Hello, AlexLambright, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:27, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Video game journalism

Hi! I wanted to come in and give you a little bit of a head's up on the article. This article is held under discretionary sanctions because it's seen as part of a controversial topic, namely Gamergate. What this ultimately means is that the article will likely be under more scrutiny than many other articles and as such, any changes, additions, or whatnot need to be done carefully. Make sure that your writing is neutral and that the sourcing is the best possible source for the claim you're going to be adding. (IE, avoid sources that are self-published and/or may have a strong bias) Ideally your sources would be things like scholarly or academic works, but I know that sometimes coverage may only be in media sources like IGN and so on. The [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games |video game WikiProject]] (a group of people devoted to improving coverage on video game related topics) has an awesome list of outlets that are and aren't considered to be reliable sources, which will definitely be helpful here. The WikiProject is a good place to turn to if you have any questions about video game related sourcing and the like. You can of course still ask me any questions (bring it on!) but it's also nice to have another place to turn to, if needed.

So far your edit to the page doesn't look to be problematic, but definitely proceed with caution. I strongly recommend that you post on the article's talk page and give a general overview of what your plans are for the article, as this will give any page watchers a general head's up on things. I don't anticipate any true issues, however if you are planning on editing anything Gamergate related you will definitely want to post to the talk page first and also potentially the video game WikiProject, as this is seen as a high profile, controversial topic on Wikipedia. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:50, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

• I wanted to check back in with you. I saw that you made some major edits to the page, however there were a few things that gave me a little pause.

1. The first is sourcing - be very careful with sourcing as not all sources are considered to be reliable on Wikipedia. Places like 'Better Games, Better Gamers' would be seen as a self-published blog, as there's no evidence that the site has editorial oversight or would have been routinely cited in very reliable sources as an authoritative reliable source. I don't see where they've received any notice at all, so I wouldn't use it as a source at all on Wikipedia. It's not that they're necessarily wrong, but since there's no editorial oversight and I can't see where they're widely considered as an authoritative source by reliable sources we can't guarantee that they're not.
2. The second is the emphasis placed on a study, as studies should not be highlighted unless they have enough secondary coverage to verify any of the claims made in the research and to show that they're notable enough to mention. The reason for this is that studies are primary sources for whatever data is created. While studies published in an academic/scholarly journal and done by trustworthy academics in a major institution aren't likely to be faulty, there's never a 100% guarantee. This is why coverage is so important, as this helps show that the information is legitimate. Another issue with studies is that in many cases there are multiple studies that approach the same subject, so choosing one over the other could be seen as cherry picking to show a certain viewpoint - even if this wasn't the case. The secondary coverage helps with this as well. On a side note, another issue with studies is that their participant pool is extremely limited. Even if they try to get as wide a variety of participants as possible, the research is really only applicable to those specific participants. This means that the study should not be used as a broad example of YouTube video game review personalities.

For example, the study interviewed 11 people who operate Swedish video game journalism sites. Their insights and experiences may not be applicable for all Swedish people in the same field - especially as only one female journalist was interviewed. It's not a stretch to say that their experiences probably differ from say, American or British video game journalists in subtle but important ways. Also something to take into consideration is that they haven't interviewed any YouTube people, so that could also impact their findings. Essentially, the study sample shouldn't be seen as representative of all people who participate in video game journalism and the study definitely shouldn't be used to make blanket statements like "Another way in which alternative journalism is de-legitimized is through the use of persona in game reviews", as this is based on a theory posed by the study's authors. I've removed this from the article as a result. I did look to see if there was any coverage of the study but didn't find anything - the study was written in 2016 and it can take many years sometimes for people to really cover or cite journal articles, so this isn't entirely surprising.

The reason why I'm emphasizing this so much is that video game journalism is a fairly controversial topic on Wikipedia and as such, it has to be approached very carefully. The sourcing has to be the best possible sourcing and everything has to be written neutrally, without it sounding persuasive. The usability of studies as sources is probably one of the biggest differences between writing for Wikipedia and well, generally most other places, so it's not something that you would really be expected to have known beforehand necessarily. Our training module on editing medical and science topics covers this - you weren't assigned this, so I wanted to make it available to you. While it deals with medical topics, its stance on sourcing applies to pretty much any area of Wikipedia.

Don't let any of this get you down - it's just that video game journalism is one of those uber sensitive areas on Wikipedia. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:14, 5 April 2018 (UTC)