Avlaw2011

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Avlaw2011, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
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• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
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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 {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Teapotgeorge^Talk 12:23, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Conflicts of interest

Hello Avlaw2011. If you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

1. editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
2. participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors; and
3. linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. --Orange Mike | Talk 14:18, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Hi, Avlaw2011; saw your help desk question. I'm just another volunteer contributor here, like yourself, although I've been around quite a while, and know the applicable policies quite well, as well as the "practice", ie what happens when organizations try to create articles about themselves. It's always a debacle that just wastes large amounts of time for all concerned, and the article never "sticks", i.e. it's always deleted post-haste. If your organization gets enough independent news coverage in what we call "reliable sources" then someone else, unrelated to your firm will certainly create an article about it at some point.

But that's really a two-edged sword: This is "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", first and last, and there are thousands and thousands of companies who wish they didn't have an article here; they're not permitted to delete them, of course, any more than they'd be allowed to do so re a paper encyclopedia. Did your firm get some bad press? You can be sure it'll show up here, memorialized for all eternity. ( I'm joking about the eternity part, although one can never be sure. ) If you're not the boss, I'd suggest you tell the boss there's simply no way the other volunteers here would allow a self-promotional article like you're asking about to be hosted on Wikipedia. We're all very, very good at catching such articles. They never meet our core neutrality standard, they're always in violation of around a dozen of our most basic principles and, as I said, the whole process just wastes everyones time. Sorry to be so blunt, but there's just no way that what you asked about can happen. Sorry. Best regards,  – OhioStandard (talk) 11:08, 27 May 2011 (UTC)