Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/Hobart and William Smith Colleges/American Cinema (Spring 2023)

Guidelines for articles about films

Hi everyone. I found out about your course this evening as I was patrolling Recent changes, and I saw some edits from one of you that didn't quite meet our policies – so I thought I might could be of some assistance.

We try very hard to keep Wikipedia articles from resembling essays, especially ones that contain opinions and value judgments, as we value a neutral point of view as one of our core tenets. Articles here should not resemble an opinion piece that would be more at home in a journalism outlet than in an encyclopedia. I define encyclopedias like dictionaries, not for word meanings, but for facts worth knowing. People go to encyclopedias to gain knowledge of facts, not of the opinions held by the encyclopedia's editors.

Here on Wikipedia, we have things called WikiProjects -- they're a way of organizing editors that like to contribute to articles that relate to a topic they're interested in, and information that is pertinent to them. (They're also more than just that, but I'm keeping it simple for now.) I'm telling you that because I wanted to make you aware that there is one called WikiProject Film, which covers all film-related articles. They have a Resources page that might be useful for you. Also, in this case they have even established their own page in our Manual of Style to lay out editing guidelines that apply specifically to articles about films. So it might be good for you to familiarize yourself with what's in those pages as you prepare to make contributions to film articles here – the goal being for the edits you make to be constructive so they don't get undone by people like me who spend some time here and there as policy enforcers, keeping articles clean.

  — Garrett W. {☎ ✍} 04:21, 10 May 2023 (UTC)