User talk:ChristalCao

Welcome!

Hello, ChristalCao, 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) 18:45, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Response

Hi - I wanted to respond on your talk page. I have the following notes:

• I saw that you used Wikipedia as a source, however Wikipedia is not seen as a reliable source and cannot source itself.

• You also used studies as a source. Studies are seen as primary sources for any claims or theories put forth by its authors, who typically were also the ones who ran the study. In order to use this, it needs to be accompanied by a secondary, independent source that covers the study. There are multiple reasons for this. The first is verification, as the publisher doesn't actually verify all of the findings in the study - they look over it to ensure that there are no glaring issues that would invalidate the study. It doesn't mean that the work is verified to be correct or even that they agree with the findings. A secondary source is needed for this, as the writer will be able to provide commentary on the study and verify the findings in one way or another.

Studies are also fairly limited in scope out of necessity, as they're unable to survey all of the people or get truly exhaustive data sets. As such, the study's findings are only really valid for the people or the data that they were able to collect. This means that the study's findings may differ if they were to have chosen different people (particularly those from a different area or socioeconomic status) or a different data set. As such, the secondary source would help put the study's findings in context with other findings that deal with the same topic. This can be especially important when it comes to research that was conducted many years ago.

• Make sure that you are only summarizing content from the source material and that you are not creating original research. For example, citing the amount of location a store is OK, but comparing the amount of stores to another company's amounts of locations can potentially be original research depending on how the section is phrased. Also make sure that you're careful to avoid subjective statements such as saying that one company is smarter than the other. If you're citing something from a source, make sure that things like this are attributed.

I'm also a little leery of a subsection that would compare the successes of the two companies. This is something that can be seen as original research fairly easily. There's also the concern that this would put too much undue weight on these two specific companies. There are a lot of different fast food chains in China, such as Mister Donut, Juewei Duck Neck, and other chains that you can see here. I think that it would be better to include information about these other chains in the article, to be honest. KFC is definitely popular in China, as is McDonalds, but it's important to represent these other chains as well - even if only in a couple of paragraphs listing the various chains. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:58, 3 April 2019 (UTC)