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Hello, AkaSylvia, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking   or   or by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Also, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! Shirt58 (talk) 09:55, 25 July 2012 (UTC)Reply

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How exciting, I have a talk page!

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Yes, I am easily amused. AkaSylvia (talk) 18:25, 25 July 2012 (UTC)Reply

Writing about subjects close to you

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I see that my question has struck a nerve. ☺ To me, you were Special:Contributions/AkaSylvia. I didn't pay too much attention to your underlying identity until you wrote that. You'll find encyclopaedia writing slightly different, but some of the skill set is the same.

The above is my advice of long standing to people who write about friends, relatives, and whatnot. It's not a cast iron guarantee of avoiding trouble, because there do exist people who will jump up and down crying "COI! COI!" whatever the conflict of interest is and however assiduous one is about openly declaring it and working with others. But it greatly minimizes trouble from the majority of people. Given that there are three books and a fair amount of news coverage, I'm sure that you'll have no trouble coming up with those couple of paragraphs. Yes, propose away on Talk:Cliff Stanford. That's actually standard operating procedure. Be absolutely scrupulous in your sourcing, and in sticking only to what is publicly known and recorded.

For what it's worth, that your personal relationships are not known and reported upon by the world at large in detail is probably something that you should see as a good thing, and not a loss if a encyclopaedia, whose intent is to be verifiable and only contain publicly recorded and documented knowledge, does not contain them.

Uncle G (talk) 17:29, 26 July 2012 (UTC)Reply

  • I really appreciate the time you've put into explaining issues and unravelling the situation. I've also read the above links and I'm pretty sure I can come up with a summary that is clearly cited without controversy.

    Between you and me, I was horrified when I saw that I'd been added and considered removing the (then unsourced) mention before I came to my senses. However, I do feel strongly about one of the boys being added and not the other. I was going to suggest citations for them but there's certainly a strong argument for non-notable. Now I'm off to find out about harvardising! Thanks again. AkaSylvia (talk) 18:49, 26 July 2012 (UTC)Reply

    • Hello Sylvia: I removed the children's names. Our BLP policy advises us to be careful with personal information, and I personally don't see the need to include any such information. I left the son (not the name) since that is sometimes done here; I left you in since Uncle G seems to have a soft spot for you (though one should be wary of a man who loves citation styles too much) and I wouldn't want to get on his bad side. Happy editing, Drmies (talk) 22:53, 26 July 2012 (UTC)Reply
      • Hi Drmies. I saw your edits and they make a lot of sense to me, also neatly avoiding the conflict I was concerned about. Someone brought up that the current citation doesn't use full names, so I'd already come up with two better citations: http://va.issproxy.com/resourcecenter/publications/Corporate_Governance_Highlights/02-32.pdf and http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/nov/07/theobserver1 (although please don't re-add Connor's name as a result of the latter). Tangentially, this is a reference to Wanninkhof case which is completely unsourced although as far as I can see from a quick read, it only has minor errors. I would think a page on Tony King (convicted for the murder) including the details of the two cases would be more sensible than this page off on its own but I'm not volunteering to write that one just at the moment!

        Be wary of a man who loves citation styles too much sounds like important words to live by.

  • You can contact me by email here for private advice if you need it - I am on the Wikimedia foundation email response volunteer team, so I have been here before - but what Uncle G says is (as always) sound and if you follow his advice you won't go far wrong. Guy (Help!) 00:43, 27 July 2012 (UTC)Reply
    • Thank you! I really appreciate the offer and I will take you up on that! I'll be finishing off the draft paragraphs this weekend.