User talk:Octomom8
Welcome![edit]
Hello, Octomom8, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Adam 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. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:28, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
Octomom8, you are invited to the Teahouse![edit]
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Hi Octomom8! Thanks for contributing to Wikipedia. We hope to see you there!
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Romani children[edit]
Hi, Octomom8. I see you've put a considerable amount of work into your draft. Articles relating to european politics and/or ethnicity can be tricky, so I recommend two major changes (they're not as much work as you'd expect). I don't see too many "Children by ethnicity" articles, even for groups forced into diaspora. That's only to say that lacking a closer comparison, I've tried to compare this article to Hispanic and Latino Americans and Irish Americans (just to pick two) to get a sense of where we'd like to be.
- A Wikipedia article cannot advocate for a subject, even by way of emphasizing certain sources or focusing on certain elements in the text. Take a look at the Play subsection. It begins with a quote which the text of the article says supports an unrelated study. That's a good way to enliven the text a bit, but for an encyclopedia to make the connection between the two is a bit much. Many sections of the article rely on Recognizing Difference, which I assume is a critical source but is also used to support a number of claims about the subject like "Romani tend to learn verbal and non-verbal cues from adults at an earlier age than infants of other cultures". That's a claim which requires some scrutiny and multiple sources before I would want to put it in the encyclopedia. Likewise "Evidence suggests that some Romani as young as five or six years old are able to differentiate between high and low quality metals for sale as scrap and have the ability to identify and clean spare mechanical parts" That's either a trivial claim--"some" could be pretty tiny as a fraction of all Romani children--or a bold claim I'd want to see more evidence of. The draft has a number of what seem to be exceptional claims throughout, all pointed toward the specialness of Romani children.
- Similarly, the introduction should be re-written to be an executive summary of the contents of the article. That way a reader who clicks on the link can either satisfy a shallow need for info quickly or gauge interest before reading the rest of the article. You can see this style guide (you don't have to read it all, just take a peek) for some ideas on how to do that.
- I mentioned this wasn't as much work as you might think. Try deleting some of the bolder claims or claims which don't serve a central role to the section they're in and rely only on one source. Look especially for those which are a more particular version of a claim made elsewhere; those you can move the citation to the general claim and delete the particular. Remember, even if you edit mercilessly, you can get the old version of your work back instantly. I think you'll be able to make the tone of the article more neutral and make the article more concise without headache.
- I suggest you remove the 21st century issues section. I think you've done a good job covering how each element has evolved relative to education, adolescence, etc. That section doesn't do too much for the rest of the article.
Thanks again for the work you've done so far. Please let me know if you need some more help or have more questions. Also send me a note before you move this into the mainspace--I'm still not sure what the title should be. What do you think it should be? Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:03, 20 April 2016 (UTC)