Bwfrier

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Happy editing! Kj cheetham (talk) 16:30, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your note, KJ. I've used Wikipedia for many years, but only occasionally edited an article, mainly for lack of clarity. However, I am trying to get some of my more eminent law colleagues to take Wikipedia more seriously. Bwfrier (talk) 20:03, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, and apologies I didn't notice the dates of some of your earlier contributions. Getting others to take Wikipedia more seriously is certainly a worthwhile goal. Can you confirm though if Mark D. West is one of your collegues? Given this is a potential conflict of interest (WP:COI). -Kj cheetham (talk) 09:47, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

I hope I am not in violation of Wikipedia's COI rules, which are, unfortunately, rather vague. Mark West, currently Dean of the Michigan Law School, is not technically my colleague anymore, since I retired last year; I thus have no formal connection as a supervisor. He is a good friend, however, and I also believed that he, as an extremely distinguished scholar and the Dean of a world-renowned law school, deserved much more than the stub of his previous entry. He did not ask me to do this and I acted entirely as a volunteer, but I did obtain some information from him, as well as his photo (where the main issue was copyright). Bwfrier (talk) 14:22, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Bwfrier. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on the page Mark D. West, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:

• avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization, clients, or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{request edit}} template);
• disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#How to disclose a COI);
• avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam#External link spamming);
• do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. See Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. The above is mostly boilerplate, but from my point of view the main thing is being transparent and non-promotional, which you have been. I'll add a note to the article talk page, but I certainly agree Mark West is notable! Any information added must be verifiable from published sources though, rather than word-of-mouth. Kj cheetham (talk) 14:40, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Referencing

On another note, for referencing it's better to be more specific than for example "17. "Problem Solving Initiative," Michigan.law.umich.edu.", as it makes it hard to verify facts. The cite web template is best to use for webpage references, as can link direct to the page and add other metadata if required such as dates, author, publisher, etc. I've just turned ref 4 into a cite web template, and also linked to the Internet Archive as the original page was no longer available. -Kj cheetham (talk) 14:55, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I will try to follow that advice. I'll see if I can find some other instances where correction would improve things. Bwfrier (talk) 15:00, 23 June 2023 (UTC)