Hello ShaqSmith and welcome to Wikipedia! It appears you are participating in a class project. We encourage you to read our instructions for students. Your instructor may wish to add your class to our list of school and university projects and s/he may want to read these instructions for teachers. For more help about educational projects using Wikipedia, see our classroom coordination project.
Here are some other pages that you might find helpful:
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place ((helpme))
before the question.
Before you create an article, make sure you understand what kind of articles are accepted here. Remember: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and while many topics are encyclopedic, some things are not.
It is highly recommend that you place this text: ((EducationalAssignment))
on the discussion page of any articles you are working on as part of your Wikipedia-related course assignment. This will let other editors know this article is a subject of an educational assignment and should be treated accordingly.
We hope you like it here and encourage you to stay even after your assignment is finished!
Nikkimaria (talk) 13:28, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Good job, please try to give me a WP:DIFF of that edit. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 15:58, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Good job starting with expanding the article ([1]). You should add more inline citations, you want to have all paragraphs, and preferably all sentences, referenced. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:31, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I noticed you put Food power up for WP:GAR. That process is used to delist articles that have already been granted Good Article status but that the nominator believes don't deserve that status. I've removed that tag from the article talk. I think you were trying to nominate the article for GA status - see WP:GAN for instructions on how to do this. Cheers, Nikkimaria (talk) 13:40, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! We welcome and appreciate your contributions, such as Food power, but we regretfully cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from either web sites or printed material. This article appears to be a copy from http://rac.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/30/3/31 http://books.google.com/books?id=mJSKMpfvENEC&dq=The+consumerist+bargain+%28cornucopia+without+consequences%29+looked+momentarily+shaky&source=gbs_navlinks_s, and therefore a copyright violation. The copyrighted text has been or will soon be deleted. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with our copyright policy. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators are liable to be blocked from editing.
If you believe that the article is not a copyright violation, or if you have permission from the copyright holder to release the content freely under allowance license, then you should do one of the following:
It may also be necessary for the text be modified to have an encyclopedic tone and to follow Wikipedia article layout. For more information on Wikipedia's policies, see Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.
If you would like to begin working on a new version of the article you may do so at this temporary page. Leave a note at Talk:Food power saying you have done so and an administrator will move the new article into place once the issue is resolved. Thank you, and please feel welcome to continue contributing to Wikipedia. Happy editing! Moonriddengirl (talk) 22:47, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Hi. I'm glancing at the first paragraph, and I think it may be helpful to you to review a bit what it means to rewrite it completely in your own words. The danger here is that you will not create new content that you are legally entitled to licensed, but instead a "derivative work"—one that is still under copyright of the original.
Take, for example, the following: "Food power implies a foreign policy motivation rather than a financial or humanitarian motivation to export activities." This was part of the former opening paragraph of the article, and it was taken verbatim from [5]. What you've got now, "Food power suggests a foreign policy interest rather than financial and humanitarian", is a close paraphrase of that sentence. You've cut out a few words and substituted some, but you haven't completely rewritten it in your own language.
This is a tricky skill to master, I'm afraid.
For the sake of demonstration, take the former lead of the article, duplicated in that same source:
In international relations, food power is the act of withholding or making available agricultural commodities for export or aid by an exporting nation or group of nations for the purpose of influencing the actions of another country or group of countries. Food power implies a foreign policy motivation rather than a financial or humanitarian motivation to export activities.
What I would do here is try to identify what's essential. Then I'd look at those essential elements and see what I can do about stating them differently. I might say this:
Food power in international politics is the use of agriculture as a means of political control whereby one nation or group of nations offers or withholds commodities from another nation or group of nations in order to manipulate behavior.
(If you like any of that, you're welcome to use it. Wikipedia usually requires attribution of its contributors, but I'm happy to release it freely to you.)
This is a lot easier when you are dealing with large chunks of text. Taking two sentences, finding the essential, and then finding an entirely new way to convey the essential is hard.
Looking at the next section, the source says, "One of the most controversial aspects of the international politics of food has been the question of “food power”—the hypothetical international power advantage enjoyed by food-exporting nations over food-importing nations." (The article used to say this, too.) Again, a sentence like "Food power is one of the most controversial aspects of international politics" is only minimally altered from the source; it's basically an abridgment which is another form of derivative work.
Let's look at the old section and see what we can do with the information there to create a new work:
There are four nations in the world that export enough agriculture to exert this hypothetical "food power": the United States (U.S.), Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.[1] Forced to rely on these nations in times of shortage, food-importing countries may face food crises if needed supplies are withheld. But while political leaders in food-importing countries have expressed misgivings over their dependence,[1] food-exporting nations generally do not withhold food, as agricultural producers in these nations press their governments to continue to export.[2]
Again, working with larger chunks of text is far easier than rewriting a single sentence. If you can look at an overall passage, comprehend its key points, and put it in a completely different way (except as you need to use quotes), you can create usable content. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 00:17, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
<blockquote>...</blockquote>
HTML tags, or ((quotation)) or ((quote)) can be used." I recommend using the blockquote pair, unless you're up to the challenge of reading how to do the templates. You put one blockquote in front of and the other behind the text to be quoted, and it automatically indents. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:32, 4 December 2009 (UTC)←Hi. I'll run it through my mechanical detector. I'm not sure if I have time to do a full review today, because this can take me more than an hour, and I have limited time on Wikipedia this weekend. I'll let you know if the mechanical detector finds anything. Meanwhile, if you have access to Peter Wallensteen, "Scarce Goods as Political Weapons: The Case of Food", Journal of Peace Research, 1976, Vol. 13 yourself, I think you'd do very well to glance at the material sourced to it. I suspect if there are any remaining problems, that's where they will be. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 11:45, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
It's difficult for me to assess the importance of the material in the overall context of the article, since I have not researched the material myself. One question I would ask is the degree to which Food Aid and Food Power inter-relate. The article doesn't really make that clear. If Food Power is defined as a manipulative use of food resources to control the behavior of a government, is Food Aid connected?
This would suggest it is. I don't know if this is mentioned elsewhere in the article. I have evaluated it for copyright issues, but not closely read its content. :)
Perhaps you might consider if you decide to retain the section abbreviating it. You might start by defining Food Aid and relating how Food Power and Food Aid interrelate. (As in that case, motivations for actual assistance are mixed with political needs.) I also think that this raises some interesting issues about how recipient countries respond to Food Aid from fear of Food Power ploys. (You may find other interesting articles at [6]. Some of them would probably require a visit to your library, unless you have good online access through your school.)
Forgetting the context of the article, just as an exercise in finding important points, I would identify some of the important points of the existing section on Food Aid as:
If you decide you need this information in the article, you might look at these points and see if you can express them in your own words.
You might want to talk to your instructor or your project teammates to get some feedback on the overall development of the section. I'm unsure of the parameters of your assignment and wouldn't wish to either steer you in the wrong direction or become overly involved in a way that your instructor might not prefer. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:49, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You may also click on the signature button
located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 18:27, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Sorry if that was a little rude. The content is excellent, but there must also be compliance to the WP:MOS. I hope you will continue to contribute to Wikipedia. Reywas92Talk 22:03, 15 December 2009 (UTC)