Talk:McCree Harris

Moved page

Hi! I wanted to let you know that I moved this to the userspace so you could have more time to work on this. Offhand the article has several issues that could have resulted in this being deleted if it was left live, so working in the draftspace gives this topic the best chance of survival in the long run. One of the things about editing live is that the expectation is that the article will be complete or nearly complete as soon as it's live and will have notability firmly established straight away - something that is hard to do when you're creating this from scratch as a group project.

I do have some notes:

• The article was tagged as having an essay-like tone, which I do agree with. Be careful of writing in a narrative, as an encyclopedia article is expected to be more direct and almost even blunt. For example, the following sentence would be fine in an essay but not as much on Wikipedia:

"McCree Harris was not only a social studies teacher at the all-black Monroe High School, but she was a political activist leader. "

This is something that would be better phrased as follows:

"McCree Harris (born 1934, died 2000) was an African American educator and political activist leader. Harris worked at the all-black Monroe High School, where she taught social studies."

This gets the same point across in Wikipedia's writing style. Also, avoid terms like "took flight", as these are seen as too casual and may not be immediately understandable to readers who may not be as familiar with English slang.

• Also be extremely careful of tone. This goes into the essay issue a bit, but I also really wanted to emphasize this. The article must be written in a neutral fashion - in other words, the reader should not be able to tell what the author's personal viewpoint is on the person or topic. An example of a sentence that was written in a non-neutral fashion is this one:

"She preached to her students to stand up for themselves against rigid race roles; and when she stepped outside of the classroom, she led by example."

This is written in a fairly praising tone and while her actions are absolutely amazing, the article still needs to be neutral. Something like this is better:

"Harris advocated against rigid race roles and encouraged her students to take part in boycotts and sit-ins."

This gets the point across more succinctly and also includes the students. Also, make sure that you avoid things like "bring her vision to life", as this is also non-neutral.

• I'm slightly confused as to why the church is really mentioned in such depth here. While there's certainly merit in mentioning the church, there's no true need to go into this much depth - especially since the church went on the NHR because of its overall ties to the Albany Movement rather than its ties to Harris in specific. This is a subject that would be more appropriate in the main article for the Albany Movement - although I will say that it needs to be edited for tone and essay-like content as well.

• I'm also concerned about whether or not Harris is independently notable outside of the movement. Many of the sources seem to be about the movement in general and are unlikely to focus specifically on Harris - what you need here are sources that specifically focus on Harris and are in-depth, meaning that she's not just mentioned in passing or via a quote or two. Be extremely careful with this, as notability is not automatically inherited by her being a part of a notable movement or associated with notable people. The infobox does mention that she won an award, however a search shows that it was given to her by the Albany Past Presidents Sertoma Club. Wikipedia tends to be pretty discerning with awards, to the point where most awards are considered to be non-notable on here and only a very small portion are the types of award that would show complete notability on just the award alone. These awards tend to be globally recognizable things like the Nobel Prize or the Heisman Trophy. Sometimes awards can give partial notability (ie, contribute to notability like a source would) but you would have to show coverage to justify this award being major. Many local awards aren't considered to be major enough unless the organization giving them out is fairly notable themselves. Awards are pretty tricky things, to be honest - it's why I usually don't rely on them when I make articles myself. I hope that none of this comes across as too harsh - it's just that these really stood out and I'm concerned about the article getting deleted if the notability isn't established. It's really difficult to show notability for individual people, especially when they're best known for being part of a larger movement.

I hope that this helps out! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:48, 28 November 2017 (UTC)