User talk:Krischik/MGTOW (Men Going their Own Way)

Sources for this article

Who wrote http://www.mgtow.com/about/? Is it WP:RS, or at least reliable? Can we trust what it's saying enough to pass it along as true? Chrisrus (talk) 17:31, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The Rules

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, so all we're supposed to do is find information in reliable sources and summarize them here.

Those who wish to make counterpoints or changes in this article should first find them or publish them elsewhere and then transfer them to the article.

This is not the place for us to define MGTOW, but to inform the reader how our sources define it.

Cite everything in such a way that the reader may most easily check whether or not the information in the article is a fair summary of the source.

Cite everything in such a way as to make it as easy as possible to understand where this information is coming from.

While you might be an expert in real life, as a Wikipedian it generally works best if we behave mechanically and restrict the conversation to what the sources do and do not say.

However, as Jimmy Wales has said, if what the sources are saying is knowably untrue, we need to stop being "transcription monkeys" and exercise editorial judgement. Nothing in the rules should be construed as excusing the knowing transfer of incorrect information into an article. It's important to get it right. Chrisrus (talk) 15:53, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Edits explained

We should make some edits.

First, we have to put the summary of the MGTOW website after the summaries of the sources whose editorial processes we know something about. Let me explain.

If we put the summary of the website first, we might qualify for speedy deletion. Someone might look at that and say, hey, this is just a summary of an authorless website written by someone whose name we don't know. They might rightly wonder how the reader is going to be able to trust anything such a website says, and point to rules and president that says that we shouldn't have articles based on websites. We would have to agree with such arguments and the article could fail. Then, it will become very difficult to start the article again.

Second, we should not start writing the same way that we start reading. Leave the intro, the lead or "lede"; that part should be written last. First we summarize the sources into the body, and then we have a look at that body and summarize that. Then, we use the summary of the body as the lead. That way, the lead becomes a brief restatement of the body. Ideally, we shouldn't have to cite anything in the lead, the body is the citation for the lead, and we cite the body to the sources.

I get most of this from WP:StandardOperatingProcedure.

There is more, but I'll pause here for an appropriate amount of time. Chrisrus (talk) 17:39, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]