Dennis liotta

Welcome to Wikipedia, Dennis liotta. Thank you for your contributions. Here are some useful links, which have information to help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

• Helpful assay for subject matter experts who are new to Wikipedia: WP:EXPERT
• Introduction
• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Contributing to Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• How to write a great article
• Editor's index to Wikipedia

Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that should automatically produce your username and the date after your post.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page, consult Wikipedia:Questions, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there.

Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 21:23, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Username

Hi Dennis. Your account name, is the name of a notable person. Please note that we have a policy on usernames, and part of it forbids impersonating someone. I am not saying that you are, but please be aware of it. The overall policy is here: WP:USERNAME. The part discussing the pros and cons of using your real name is WP:REALNAME and the part forbidding impersonations is WP:IMPERSONATE. Jytdog (talk) 21:26, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Dennis. I generally edit about health/medicine/drugs, and I also work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia. Your first edits were about litigation in which Dennis Liotta was involved. Assuming you are him, I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

Hello, Dennis liotta. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your circle, your organization, its competitors, projects or products;
• instead propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you.

Comments and requests

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest;; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. You have apparently disclosed that you are Dennis Liotta in your username, and I am taking that as face value.

Please be aware when you are approaching content, where you have a conflict of interest with regard to your real world activities.

When you do, please follow Wikipedia's peer review process, instead of editing directly. This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and viola there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary - no publisher, no editors.

What we ask editors who want to work on content where their COI is relevant to do, is a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft, disclose your COI on the Talk page using the appropriate template, and then submit the draft article through the WP:AFC process so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself.

By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. I hope that makes sense to you.

I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where the company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content.

Will you please agree to follow the peer review processes going forward, when you want to work on content where you have external interests? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 21:32, 27 February 2016 (UTC)