User talk:Drug Equality

Welcome...

Hello, Drug Equality, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like this place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or click here to ask a question on your talk page. Again, welcome! BiologicalMe (talk) 16:47, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Pseudolaw and sources

I have reverted your most recent edits at Pseudolaw. One of the sources was a letter to the journal. Those letters do not receive the same sort of scrutiny as actual articles and are very weak sources, at best. That letter only described the construct as "quasi-legal" which is a long way from "a collection of legal-sounding but false rules that purport to be law". Annex B in the report discusses terminology and its foibles without any mention of pseudolaw. That source meets reliable source standards, but it does not directly support what you want to say. If you want to that source to discuss the construct "illegal drugs" in an article, but stretching it to be an alternate meaning for a term that does not appear is original research and is unacceptable. It is inappropriate to shoehorn material into articles where it is off-topic. If you start a sentence with "<topic> also includes", you have to ask yourself if you are really discussing another topic that is not the subject of the article.

Thank you for including "Annex B" and a page number. I had an easy time finding what you were referencing. Many editors are not that helpful. Since "pseudolaw" appeared nowhere in the entire report, I knew it didn't belong in the article, but it was specific enough to make me think of an appropriate article. (I didn't come up with anything; There is no "quasi-law" article.) There are specific formats for citing sources. Please try to use them, but don't let the technical details get in the way of contributing. Wikipedia guidelines can be a bit Byzantine. Expect to have many of your edits reverted. If that happens and you think you were right, there are talk pages for discussing your the subject and seeing how the article can be improved. Sometimes the discussion leads to article improvement in ways you won't see beforehand. In this case, please trust me that pseudolaw, as defined above, and the "illegal drugs" construct are unrelated subjects. If you have a reliable source that explicitly calls the phrase pseudolaw, I am open to revisiting the change. Because it changes the scope of the article, it would need discussion. BiologicalMe (talk) 16:47, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]