Bgarren

I have noticed you have editing a series of articles that appear to be promotionally edited of started over the years. Can you please explain your interaction with these articles, and if you had professional incentive to make your edits? Holypod (talk) 03:01, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Holypod, checking the user's contribution history, he seems to have worked on only one article, and on that one he made improvements.SinceI have access as an admin, I also checked deleted contributions--there aren't any. Since I have oversight permission as an arbitrator, I was also able to check for suppressed contributions-- there weren't any of these either. Possibly you have this editor confused with somebody else. (though possibly there was also editing under another username that you identified, but I didn't) I'd appreciate an explanation. DGG ( talk ) 23:26, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

User:DGG Okay. One of the users I asked did, in fact, have a conflict of interest that they have now disclosed. It appears that I have been following a dead-end trail, of articles that were started and then updated with somewhat promotional edits after a while. I have now run out of steam for the moment on this, especially as my use of AFD was mistaken and I do not want to cause more harm than good. Holypod (talk) 17:27, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Your addition to Patrick M. McCarthy (surgeon) has been removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without permission from the copyright holder. If you are the copyright holder, please read Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials for more information on uploading your material to Wikipedia. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted material, including text or images from print publications or from other websites, without an appropriate and verifiable license. All such contributions will be deleted. You may use external websites or publications as a source of information, but not as a source of content, such as sentences or images—you must write using your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. —Cryptic 14:58, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I am very confused by all these messages. I am making changes to this page on behalf of Northwestern and Dr. McCarthy. 1008, CST — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.20.108.41 (talk) 15:09, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry that you've experienced confusion. I noticed that you just reinserted material that appeared to be copied and pasted from a website about Dr. McCarthy. To keep it straightforward, don't copy and paste anything into Wikipedia. Almost all material from websites and other published sources is presumed to be copyrighted already, so the same wording cannot be used on Wikipedia. Our WP contributions summarize the available reliable sources (in neutral language). EricEnfermero (Talk) 21:53, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

bgarren: I wrote the copy, the copy is not copyrighted and the copy is used for Dr. McCarthy on these type of platforms. What if I did not copy and paste the copy and instead just typed it in to Wikipedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.20.108.41 (talk) 21:59, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

At the bottom: "©2016 by Northwestern Medicine® and Northwestern Memorial HealthCare. Northwestern Medicine® is a trademark of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, used by Northwestern University". And that doesn't even matter anyway: anything anybody writes, almost anywhere in the world, is automatically copyrighted under the Berne Convention and unusable here unless explicitly released into the public domain or under a suitable free license. That copyright notice hasn't been required in the U.S. since 1989. The steps outlined at Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials, linked above, aren't a formality; they're an absolute requirement to use this material.

And we wouldn't want to use it anyway. The text there is biased toward promotion of Dr. McCarthy (as is, of course, to be expected). We already have sourced, neutral biographical text in his article here, despite your attempt to remove it and replace it with an exhaustive list of manuscripts, which is inappropriate for an encyclopedia article.

Since you've stated you're working on behalf of NWU, you should read our Conflict of Interest guideline (or at least the simplified version) before making any further edits. In particular, you've been editing in violation of Wikimedia's Terms of Use, to wit §4.7: Paid contributions without disclosure, which describes locations where you must make this statement. This user talk page is not one of them. —Cryptic 15:30, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Recent edits to Patrick M. McCarthy (surgeon)

Hello. I noticed that you made an edit to a biography of a living person (Patrick M. McCarthy (surgeon)), but that you didn't support your changes with a citation to a reliable source. Wikipedia has a strict policy concerning how we write about living people, so please help us keep such articles accurate. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you! Materialscientist (talk) 09:08, 7 June 2016 (UTC)