BillShurts

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I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 16:31, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Hello, I noticed your edit to the Walnut Grove, California article page referencing a tofu shop owned by the Sakai family. I am doing research on Japanese Americans in the Delta, specifically around Clarksburg and Walnut Grove. I was wondering if you had any additional reference material on this subject and the Sakai family more specifically. You can contact me at burchill at jbainc.com Sorry for the inconvenience, thank you. Jtbob (talk) 22:33, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

March 2010

Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, but when you add or change content, as you did to the article Guerrilla warfare, please cite a reliable source for the content of your edit. This is particularly important when adding or changing any facts or figures and helps maintain our policy of verifiability. Take a look at Wikipedia:Citing sources for information about how to cite sources and the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Deconstructhis (talk) 15:21, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

License tagging for File:Mildred Lager in LA.jpg

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Revert at Ghoul

Greetings, while your edits at Ghoul were interesting, they were reverted since they were largely unfootnoted, most of it was written in an essay-like format rather than encyclopedic, but mainly because they had almost nothing to do with the topic except that a cannibal incident had been described as "ghoulish". We have already noted in the lede that the term "ghoul" has been used metaphorically to refer to people delighting in the macabre, but since a person compared to a ghoul isn't really the same thing as the mythological creature, it's rather outside the scope of the discussion. Hope this clarifies, feel free to shoot me a line with any questions. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:32, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

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June 2013

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Conflict of Interest?

A simple question. I see that you have added multiple references to publications by William Shurtleff to Wikipedia articles: [1][2][3][4]. Given your username, it seems reasonable to enquire as to whether you have any connection with William Shurtleff, and if so, are you aware of the Wikipedia:Conflict of interest guidelines? AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:05, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

I'll piggy back off this since I had the same concern. I've noticed you've been adding a reference to soybean related articles by William Shurtleff, and the username BillShurts is quite close to that. If you are indeed William Shurtleff (being mindful of outing), there are a couple things to keep in mind. Firstly, you would have a conflict of interest when it comes to citing yourself (WP:SELFCITE). It is possible in select instances to cite yourself on Wikipedia, but this is generally not preferred, especially when it can be seen as promoting one's own work. It's usually better to just not cite yourself at all (I do this for my own publications too) and if what you have published is actually notable, others will reference it. I also suggest reading WP:EXPERT for guidance on working in subject matter you are close to. Overall, I especially emphasize reading WP:COI. Your edits have the tone of seeming like they are trying to promote the references on William Shurtleff. We do have policies on how much an editor can work in involved topics. Some editors do need guidance on how to deal with their own COI, so I would be happy to help, or you can post at WP:COIN for additional guidance. If you are not Shurtleff, then you should be mindful we don't use self published sources here, which most of the SoyInfo sources appear to be. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:32, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

I also wanted to add that wanting to improve Wikipedia is always extremely welcome as you demonstrated on AndyTheGrump's talk page when wanting to add helpful references. However, even good intentions can be problematic here. Two questions we ask before adding content are: 1. Is the source reliable? (WP:RS, WP:VERIFY) 2. Are the proposed content and source notable and relevant for the topic at hand? (WP:NPOV, WP:WEIGHT). It is very difficult to call a source reliable when it is self-published like the books listed on the SoyInfo webpage are. Notability (often called weight here) is difficult to gauge when when an editor is citing their own personal sources on a page, which is partly why we have the conflict of interest guideline. This is all trying to help you as an editor here and show you how to help when you have a conflict of interest in this area. While you should not add references you have written to the article, you can use that knowledge and background to find other reliable sources as you would be doing anyways in writing your own publications. Most scientists and the like I've seen editing here follow that to avoid COI problems but still exercise their expertise in their topic. I'd invite you to do the same and would be happy to help with any guidance you might need. Kingofaces43 (talk) 03:29, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

I did not realize until yesterday that an author is now allowed no cite self-published books on Wikipedia. I am very sorry and I will not do it again. I am not the least bit interested in promoting myself or even soybeans. My goal was to add extensively annotated bibliographies, which have taken 35 years to compile in our database, to Wikipedia. These books have been published on Google Books, have won a national prize for quality, are free of charge and digital ~~BillShurts

No problem. There are some intricacies to editing Wikipedia, so it's tough to bring them up without appearing bull-headed sometimes, especially when a user is new to the general rules we follow. It's true some people may try to use their own sources in a promotional way (terms like extensively annotated, X number of pictures, etc. can seem this way, see WP:PEACOCK). However, the thornier issue to deal with is that even when someone has good intentions like you do, people tend to be passionate about their own work. Having written a bit myself, I can definitely attest to that. That's why we typically don't want authors using their own sources because the author's sources and and viewpoints can come to dominate an article, which goes against WP:NPOV. It can also be hard to separate being objective about a source while being concerned that the author may be taking any issues with the sources personally.

As I've said before, I encourage you to continue editing, especially at soybean articles where you have expertise. I will point out again though that we have guidelines for what we considered reliable sources for Wikipedia at WP:RS. I highly suggest giving that a read as that is often one of the core guidelines I come back to often. Many of the qualities you mentioned about your books are not particularly relevant to whether we'd use a particular source or not. Again, I'm not trying to criticize, but just show you how we go about sourcing here. Since you apparently have plenty of experience gathering sources though, that is one area you could especially help with. We generally do not use primary sources, but tend to rely on secondary sources such as review articles. If in your writing you have come across secondary sources that for example summarize a specific aspect of the history of soybeans well, we could definitely use that. If you have any questions on how or if a particular source could be used (or issues with it) on Wikipedia, I would be more than happy to give you some guidance on how it would be addressed on your talk page or at an article talk page. I think you have a great deal you could offer as an editor here if you chose to continue editing in your topic of interest, but Wikipedia can sometimes be similar yet entirely different from the kind of scholarly writing you may be used to. Just trying to see if I can help in any fashion as editors can sometimes be easily discouraged by our sourcing guidelines. Kingofaces43 (talk) 03:55, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I really thank you for your explanation and patience. I will study Wiki's guidelines and I will continue editing, but always try to follow your guidelines. By adding books of extensively annotated bibliographic references, I hope that this will make it easier for anyone interested in a subject to see what has been published on that subject. For example, I hope you will agree that it would probably not be possible to find a commercial publisher who would be willing to publish a book on the History of Soybeans and Soyfoods in Africa. Yet Africa is a continent without a single good protein source (I lived and worked there for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer), so there is a rapidly growing interest in soy in Africa. A book such as this saves a person years of research and can lead to a gradual improvement in people's diets. I would like to think that these books do not express a particular viewpoint; they do offer in-depth information. The group of Librarians which awarded this book the Oberly Award for the best bibliography in the field of Agricultural sciences apparently agreed.

How do I ask you a question? I'll try asking it here. If you look at the Wiki entry for Mildred Lager I think you will see that there is no portrait photo of her. The one I posted of her was removed for a reason I do not understand. I own the photo, it is in the public domain, and would like to put it back. How do I do that? Please reply as if you were addressing a beginner in such matters. Thank you ~~BillShurts

I'm posting a bit here, so sorry if it's a bit much. To get in touch with me the easiest thing would be to post on my talk page if it's a new question later on and I'll automatically be alerted. For now, another option on your own page here or on an article page is to just address me with "User:Kingofaces43|Kingofaces43", but with double brackets [[ ]] in place of the quotes instead with one set on the left, and the other two brackets on the right. That will notify me on your talk page here or on an article that you mentioned my name. You will also see the correct formatting for that at the very end of this reply if you just want to copy and paste that. Just an additional formatting bit of help, but if you read the signing and indentation sections at WP:THREAD, that will show you how to format your talk page replies like I have been.

On commercial publishers, keep in mind we don't need to rely on just that. Scientific journal articles, extension publications, etc. are some of the many sources we can pull from. I'd have to look through your books, but it's pretty likely there are secondary sources we could pull from there which you would be free to add since they aren't your own source. The main potential issue I see with your books even if someone else referenced them here is that they are self published (see WP:SPS. Self-published sources are a huge gray zone because on one end we have source from blogs, etc. that we almost can never use, while some we can use if they can from an expert whose work in the relevant field has been published by reliable third-party publications. It's very tricky to gauge expertise, and I'm honestly not too sure on whether or not your sources pass that requirement when I did some searching on Google through third party sources. There may be room for your sources where an editor not affiliated with you or the Soyinfo Center could reference them on Wikipedia, but that's hard for me to gauge right now. I'm going to ask the folks over at WP:COIN how to move forward on this one as they are much more experienced with dealing with the nuances of conflicts on interest and how to work with them in articles. I posted a summary here [5], and those folks will read over what we've discussed here and recommend what the best course of action is since we are in a bit of a gray zone.

As for the picture, I'm honestly in a similar boat of not knowing much about uploading them. I know copyrights and permissions need to be declared in a certain way before uploading, but I've never uploaded a picture myself. I mainly stick to text. The tutorial is at WP:UPI for future reference which I still need to try out someday. It looks like you uploaded at least two files, and one I cannot find that is supposed to be from 1953, but I did find the one you uploaded from 1918 [6] If you want to use that one, you can insert it in the article with "File:Mildred Lager in 1918.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Mildred Lager in 1918" again with brackets [[ ]] in place of quote marks. If you want to upload the 1953 image, make sure the licensing information you see from your other image here [7] is the same. The only guess I have as to why the file was deleted was because it had a non-descriptive name (1953-79979a.jpg). If you name it as Mildred Lager in 1953 or something similar, it should be fine this time around. Kingofaces43 (talk) 06:15, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

I saw the posting on this at COIN. Bill, some of your books themselves have no citations. I understand that you are trying to do a good thing in the world (really I do!) but from my perspective some of them are not reliable. I was also bummed to see that you added "The oldest evidence of soy milk production is from China where a kitchen scene proving use of soy milk was incised on a stone slab dated around AD 25–225" to the soy milk article and sourced that to the [History of Soymilk and Dairy-like Soymilk Products history of soymilk on your website and that information is not there.' i checked your expanded version and it isn't there either. Not good. Everything in Wikipedia needs to be sourced, to reliable sources per the policy, WP:VERIFY. And we don't allow original research to be published in Wikipedia; this is also policy. This is essential to the integrity of Wikipedia. Please stop citing your books and website, and please do not add unsourced content to Wikipedia. Thanks. All that said, you clearly know a ton about soy and to the extent you can deploy that knowledge -- and especially your knowledge of reliable sources for content, you could be an immensely valuable contributor here. But please avoid citing your own books and please do not promote them (like this where you added direct mention of your book in the article text!) Not saying you are doing that for money; it appears to as much or more an issue of WP:ADVOCACY which is closely related. a harder issue for Wikipedia, actually. thanks, for wanting to improve the encylopedia! Jytdog (talk) 20:46, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Question for Jytdog read your posting with real interest and wanted to reply to you right away. I have never done this before. I apologize for the delay. I tried several ways but none seemed to work. Would you please tell me how in a clear

and simple manner. Thank you BillShurts (talk) 23:42, 26 October 2014 (UTC)BillShurts

It's a little difficult to know who you're replying to Bill. If you were replying to Jytdog, you can put three ::: symbols at the start of a paragraph (basically just one more : than the person you are replying to used) to indicate a reply. If you are referring to the picture, I found a simpler version for uploading pictures (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard). I should note though that for Mildred Lager's page, you need to add sources indicating she was a notable person in some way. This would mean sources other than your books or Soyinfo in this case indicating she was a pioneer in specific fields and what she did to achieve that. Otherwise anyone could nominate the article for deletion (see the tag at the top). I won't do so now, but to prevent that, you should look for sources that describe her. We read a source and add content based on that at Wikipedia rather than adding content and finding a source that fits the content, so if you can't find sources indicating she was notable, that would indicate Wikipedia shouldn't have an article about her (read the very beginning of WP:N for more info on this). Kingofaces43 (talk) 03:51, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

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