Talk:Ellen Woodsworth

Ellen's contributions

Convention on autobiography

Hi Ellen, thanks for your firsthand input. I'd encourage a quick visit to Wikipedia:Autobiography, just fyi. Many thanks and good luck in the future.--Keefer | Talk 21:36, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Is any editing considered autobiographic ? It seems like Ellen only added items to her list of accomplishments, rather than editing the main content.

Regardless, she deserved cudos for admitting to "clarifying" things, inappropriate or not.

Addition of 25 March 2018, re: periodical mention

As you can see from the revision history, I undid the change (a single sentence) made on 25 March 2018. As I noted in my edit summary, the information in it – a mention in a local urban weekly citing her as one of "Vancouver's 30 most influential female politicians in history" – was fine and appropriate to include in the article per se. However, it was just written as if it were on a bulleted list somewhere; it wasn't even a complete sentence, and its source was not formatted as a footnote.

I didn't notice at first that the change was made (assumedly) by Ellen herself, but looking down to the end of the article as well as reviewing past revisions, it looks like she has made past additions, as noted by Keefer, above. It appears someone was cleaning them up periodically, but it looks like that stopped happening, so the end of the article is starting to look a wreck.

Proposed next steps: I'm willing to work on the extant text at the bottom to clean it up, but this approach on Ellen's part has got to stop. I don't think she knows about talk pages, or assumedly she would have seen this and taken Keefer's advice to read the autobiography guidelines, and would now understand how inappropriate it is for an article's subject to be doing anything other than correcting vandalism and overt errors. Would it be just as inappropriate for me to contact her and explain what's been going wrong here? Otherwise, it seems as if this is just going to keep happening. I would also suggest to her that she perhaps designate someone on her staff to learn about Wikipedia's etiquette and policies on Biographies of Living Persons, as well as enough usage know-how to make contributions on the talk page using the {{request edit}} template, leaving the actual inclusion to an experienced Wikipedian. I respect her work (however, don't worry about my objectivity; I don't know her or even know all that much about her; besides, I take my Wikipedia neutrality very seriously!!) but even if I didn't, I hate to see a hinky Wikipedia page not in the active process of repair. However, ultimately it's not our responsibility to pound people's doors down to tell them to stop mucking up their pages, so if it goes on, I see no problem with just deleting any new additions that are autobiographical in origin, even if perfectly formatted and sourced (which they often haven't been thus far). Please opine; I'll check back after I've finished cleaning up what's already there as best I can (it might take me a while!). – Transitive Sam (talk) 05:48, 6 April 2018 (UTC)