EMarley

Hello EMarley & Wilkommen! Welkom! Bienvenue! Benvenuti! ようこそ! Välkommen! Witamy! Bem-vindo(a)! ¡Bienvenido! Добро пожаловать! 欢迎! Basically, welcome to Wikipedia!

Deutsch | Español | Français | Italiano | Lietuvių | 한국어 | Nederlands | Polski | Português | Русский | Suomi | Svenska | Türkçe | 简体中文 | The main embassy page

Click here to respond to this message!

R. L. Hymers, Jr.

I've left an explanatory message on the talk page of the article, but I also wanted to explain personally why the text you added was removed from the article. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; you may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences.

Additionally, I believe this material is unlikely to be suitable for inclusion, even if re-written due to failing the reliable sources policy. Specifically, because this passage makes claims about the veracity of accusations made by third-parties, it runs afoul of the policy on self-published sources. If you have information that would indicate that The Biblical Evangelist is not self-published (its own website seems very clear about this though) or that Dr. Sumner is considered an expert in his field (the evidence that he is an expert would be required to come from reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy) then its possible that the material could be reconsidered.

I apologize for giving you so much to take in at one time - Wikipedia can be an odd place when you first get started - please feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions about this or any other policies on Wikipedia. Shell ^babelfish 21:04, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:DrHymerswithDrLin.jpg

File Copyright problem

Thank you for uploading File:DrHymerswithDrLin.jpg. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. Skier Dude (talk) 06:29, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:TimothyLin 2.jpg

File Copyright problem

Thank you for uploading File:TimothyLin 2.jpg. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. ZooFari 04:50, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:DrHymerswithDrLin.jpg

File Copyright problem

Thank you for uploading File:DrHymerswithDrLin.jpg. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. ZooFari 04:14, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

File permission problem with File:TimothyLin 2.jpg

File Copyright problem

Thanks for uploading File:TimothyLin 2.jpg. I noticed that while you provided a valid copyright licensing tag, there is no proof that the creator of the file agreed to license it under the given license.

If you created this media entirely yourself but have previously published it elsewhere (especially online), please either

• make a note permitting reuse under the CC-BY-SA or another acceptable free license (see this list) at the site of the original publication; or
• Send an email from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-enwikimedia.org, stating your ownership of the material and your intention to publish it under a free license. You can find a sample permission letter here.

If you did not create it entirely yourself, please ask the person who created the file to take one of the two steps listed above, or if the owner of the file has already given their permission to you via email, please forward that email to permissions-enwikimedia.org.

If you believe the media meets the criteria at Wikipedia:Non-free content, use a tag such as {{non-free fair use in|article name}} or one of the other tags listed at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags#Fair use, and add a rationale justifying the file's use on the article or articles where it is included. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have provided evidence that their copyright owners have agreed to license their works under the tags you supplied, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link. Files lacking evidence of permission may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. ww2censor (talk) 17:43, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:DrHymerswithDrLin.jpg

Thank you for uploading File:DrHymerswithDrLin.jpg. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. ww2censor (talk) 04:41, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

File source and copyright licensing problem with File:TimothyLin 2.jpg

File Copyright problem

Thanks for uploading File:TimothyLin 2.jpg. I noticed that the file's description page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is unclear. If you did not create this file yourself, you will need to specify the owner of the copyright. If you obtained it from a website, then a link to the website from which it was taken, together with a restatement of that website's terms of use of its content, is usually sufficient information. However, if the copyright holder is different from the website's publisher, their copyright should also be acknowledged.

As well as adding the source, we also need to know the terms of the license that the copyright holder has published the file under, usually done by adding a licensing tag. If you created/took the picture, audio, or video then the {{GFDL-self}} tag can be used to release it under the GFDL. If you believe the media meets the criteria at Wikipedia:Non-free content, use a tag such as {{non-free fair use in|article name}} or one of the other tags listed at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags#Fair use. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their source and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link. Unsourced and untagged files may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If the file is copyrighted under a non-free license (per Wikipedia:Fair use) then the file will be deleted 48 hours after 04:44, 11 November 2009 (UTC). If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. ww2censor (talk) 04:44, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Timothy Lin

I hear what you are saying, and as a worshiping Christian myself I'm definitely sympathetic to your wanting to word it as closely to Dr. Lin's own probable description as possible. However, without a direct quote (and accompanying citation), you and I (the Wikipedians) are speaking on behalf of the encyclopedia. We therefore have to maintain as neutral a voice as possible, and phrases like "he came under conviction and confessed his sins in detail" are not appropriate. If you have a quote from something he has written, perhaps you can find a way to work that in (although I'm not sure the confessing of sins in detail is that important to an encyclopedic article) using the direct quote and citing the reference. I don't want to get into an edit war with you, so I'll ask you to find some way to make it NPOV yourself. Thanks for understanding! Mitchell k dwyer (talk) 06:00, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, words like "small" are relative. In some communities a church with a membership of eighty might be considered quite large. In Wikipedia, we try to present the facts and allow the reader to interpret for him- or herself whether or not something is "surprising," "ironic," or even "small." Providing the number 80 is good. Interpreting it as "small" is non-neutral. Similarly, claiming that a church has "experienced revival" is not a religiously neutral approach. Again, provide the facts (membership grew to ______ within five years, for example) and let others interpret it as they wish. If someone of note interpreted it as "experiencing revival," then by all means quote that person so a reader will know from whose point of view a revival has been experienced. I am sure that if we work together in the spirit of Wikipedia, we can arrive at a quality article about Dr. Lin that provides the important information and is in line with the community's agreed-upon guidelines for neutrality. Mitchell k dwyer (talk) 06:10, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

It is now six days later. I got a little bit impatient and went ahead and made some changes myself. As you can see, I wikified it some (that is, I linked this article to some other articles and took out explanatory phrases that then became redundant), made some of it more NPOV, and tidied up some of the grammar and punctuation. Please don't just replace my edits with what you already had, as you did the last time. If you disagree with my interpretation and implementation of Wikipedia practices, by all means, let's talk about it here. We should be able to come to a reasonable compromise. Mitchell k dwyer (talk) 00:46, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the note on my talk page. I will address your concerns and questions one at a time.

• You asked if I "work for Wikipedia directly." If you are asking me whether I'm a paid editor, the answer is no, just as it is with thousands and thousands of others who edit Wikipedia. If you are asking me if I consider myself part of the community that strives to make Wikipedia useful in a manner that encourages collaboration, compromise, and democracy, then the answer is yes. I am just a person like you, someone who values the open, free nature of Wikipedia as an important source of information on the Internet. There are people with specific agendas who only want to communicate a specific idea without concern for already-established practices and sensibilities on Wikipedia; these people don't care about neutrality or collaboration or community—they see Wikipedia as a way to promote their agendas. You probably aren't one of those people, or you would have simply gotten into an edit war with me. It encourages me that we are having this discussion.

• You say, "Some of us are incensed that you have removed the essence of Dr. Lin's religious experience, and we will not put up with it." I would like to know who "some of us" are, please. Are they people who wish to evangelize? If so, there are many places for that on the Internet, but Wikipedia is not one of them. Are they people who wish to communicate the facts of Dr. Lin's life so that others might know something about him? Then by all means, ask them to register for Wikipedia accounts, as you have, and encourage them to get in on this discussion as we work toward making the article a quality biography. As for the essence of his religious experience, I can tell you as a fellow believer who has experienced the redeeming grace of Christ's blood: it has no place in a religiously neutral article. If Dr. Lin has written something about his experience, that is by all means relevant (probably), and you should quote him. Something like, "Lin described the experience as ..." would work fine. However, without a quote or a citation, you are making WIKIPEDIA say that he experienced it, and Wikipedia wasn't there. Neither, I would venture to guess, were you, and even if you were, you wouldn't be in a position to describe what was happening to him internally.

• You say, "Surely such experiences appear in encylopedic form, regarding figures like John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards and others. Dr. Lin was a major religious figure in the Chinese church, and his basic religious experiences ought to be as printable as John Wesley's words, "I felt my heart strangely warmed," his most famous statement concerning his personal conversion." I'm glad you mention Wesley. Have you read the Wikipedia article about him? Can you see how it strives to maintain religiously neutral language? I did a quick read and found a few questionable lines (I'm not sure it's neutral to call Methodism a "highly successful" movement), but in general it strives to be a quality article. Notice the inclusion of the quote you mention, but notice also that it is written as a direct quote and its source is cited. Take a look at that article's talk page, and you'll see that even that article is only rated C-quality by Wikipedia's standards, and it's enormously better than this one, which is still in its infancey. Also, notice that article's history page. You'll see that something like a hundred different editors have collaborated over the past seven years to get it up to that C-class rating. Putting together a quality article takes time and it takes lots of collaboration.

• You say, "It is not unencyclopedic to describe a religious man's personal experience with God, unless the encyclopedias are becoming completely atheistic!" It all depends on the purpose of the encyclopedia. Because one of Wikipedia's foundational tenets is neutrality, it is indeed not appropriate to describe, from the encyclopedia's perspective, a man's personal experience with God. A neutral encyclopedia neither believes nor disbelieves in God; it neither believes or disbelieves in the conversion experience; it doesn't consider a church with 80 members to be big nor small. All it does is state the facts, because facts can generally be agreed-upon. If John Wesley said, "I felt my heart strangely warmed," it is a confirmable fact that he said it, but that is the way it must be worded: that he said it. Wikipedia neither believes nor disbelieves that he actually experienced a strange warming of the heart. Does this make sense now?

• You say, "Please contact our attorney, Mr. Osher, at josher@bollaw.com." I'm curious about why you think this is a legal matter. I will not be contacting your attourney, Mr. Osher, but he is welcome to contact me. onebadscrivener --+[at]+-- gmail ---#[dot]#--- you know the rest.

• Finally, if you are interested in working together to make this a good article according to Wikipedia's standards, let me know what you'd like to change and how it should be changed. You've been very non-specific in your communication. I'm just trying to help; I have no vested interested whatsoever in Dr. Lin and in fact question his notability for inclusion for Wikipedia, but I'm pretty open-minded about that.

Thanks for the discussion! Mitchell k dwyer (talk) 23:20, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I have reverted your changes as it, again, restores a WP:COPYVIO. I had previously rewritten the article to prevent a WP:COPYVIO, but this did not seem satisfactory to yourself for whatever reason. That is fine. You can rewrite it if you like. But it is against Wikipedia policy to copy and paste from any other source. I don't want to get into an editing war but this is what it is becoming. Caorongjin (talk) 22:20, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

File:TimothyLin 2.jpg and File:DrHymerswithDrLin.jpg: evidence of information submitted to Wikipedia

You note that "Copyright and permission information has been submitted to Wikipedia". However, there is no indication of this on the file details beyond this statement?

Did you receive an OTSR ticket number? If so, could you please make a note of this on the file's description - then I can contact the OTSR team to verify this - they will also put up an official OTSR tag, with a link which only they can provide.

If you are unsure how to connect the OTSR ticket number to the file, contact me (either here or on my talk page) and I will guide you along the way - all you need to do is provide the OTSR ticket number, and I can do the rest!

If you have not received an OTSR ticket number, then could you please tell me how you provided the information to Wikipedia? If it was by e-mail, which address did you send the permission to? Again, once I know this, I can contact the OTSR team and see what we can do.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards, -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 00:11, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

• I noticed that you have not edited on Wikipedia since I left my message. However, if within a few days you have not edited, or you have not responded to this message, I will seek deletion of the image, as there is no evidence (other than your note itself) that we have permission from the copyright owner to use the image. -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 09:49, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

• I will respond to the message you left at my talk page later today (I'm on my way out at the moment) - and I will leave you a talkback here when I have done so. -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 09:29, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

• Thank you for your message on my talk page. I will respond here, as it's easier to keep this conversation together!

Firstly, I am disappointed that you appear to have lied to us - you clearly put a message on the image saying that Copyright and permission information had been submitted to Wikipedia - and yet, it appears that such information has not in fact been submitted. However, I will assume that this is merely a slip-up on your part - I know how easy it can be to think you've done something, and then forget to do it!

• I apologise for this. Your attorney has confirmed that they had contacted the WMF on the 13th November. -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 08:42, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Secondly, I will not be contacting your attorney. I do not feel that it is my job (as an editor) to contact your attorney to seek confirmation on this issue. In fact, I would be very surprised if your attorney would give out such information to a stranger - as I (in common with almost every other editor on Wikipedia) do not have a wikipedia.org/wikimedia.org e-mail address, there is no way for Jeremy O. Osher of Boren,Osher & Luftman to confirm that I have any connection with the WikiMedia Foundation, who deals with copyright issues.

As I have been very specifically asking about the copyright information about the File:TimothyLin 2.jpg and File:DrHymerswithDrLin.jpg, I am disappointed that you have so far failed to inform me (or from what I can see, anyone else) about the permissions received: I have seen the captions on the two pictures, so accordingly, I am contacting the Church and Robert Hymers, to receive the permission as per our guidelines.

I am puzzled by your statement that your attorney "is putting finishing touches on the copyright and permission issue" - what exactly is he doing? If you are not the copyright owner of the two pictures, I am unsure what exactly Mr Osher is doing - could you possibly be a bit more specific?

Finally, with regard to the article: some parts of it do not appear to be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV). The purpose of Wikipedia is to provide unbiased, neutral information about a subject: this article does not totally meet that criteria. I see that Mitchell k dwyer has been communicating with you about the article and the importance of a NPOV. May I politely suggest that you read what he has been saying - it fits in with the policies that we have in place on Wikipedia.

If you have any other questions or comments, please feel free to leave a response on this page (I will see when you have made a reply here). Regards, -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 21:44, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

• Your attorney has contacted me. As I have verified that it is indeed the attorney named (using WHOIS to verify that the IP used to e-mail is indeed at his place of work), I have forwarded his e-mail to the WikiMedia Foundation OTRS team, who deal with copyright issues such as this. Please note that the OTRS team are volunteers, so it can take several days for the issue to be sorted out. However, I will leave a notice on the two pictures confirming the OTRS have been contacted. Regards, -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 08:42, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

• Incidently, from the messages that I have received from your attorney, it appears that you are Dr Robert L. Hymers, Jr. May I politely suggest that you read the Guidelines on Conflict of Interest? Although not forbidden, editing the article about yourself is strongly discouraged, as it can be very hard to write in a neutral manner! My advice to you would be to declare your identity on the article's talk page, and suggest changed to the R. L. Hymers, Jr. article there.

Remaining neutral in a subject which is close to you can be difficult - as you have found with the Timothy Lin article! Giving suggestions to other editors (for example, Mitchell k dwyer) about improvements to the article allows neutral editors to consider what you are saying, and if they agree, to add the information from a neutral point of view. Regards, -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 08:49, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:TimothyLin 2.jpg

Thank you for uploading File:TimothyLin 2.jpg. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. Skier Dude (talk) 00:37, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

The email was not received since, I nominated the image for deletion for lacking evidence of permission. Regards Hekerui (talk) 19:53, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

• The permission has been received by the OTSR team, and acted upon: there is now a note on the file explaining that permission has been received to use the image -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 12:44, 15 June 2010 (UTC)