Eforsund

April 2018

Please do not remove content or templates from pages on Wikipedia, as you did to William M. Branham, without giving a valid reason for the removal in the edit summary. Your content removal does not appear to be constructive and has been reverted. If you only meant to make a test edit, please use the sandbox for that. Thank you. Theroadislong (talk) 13:12, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for notifying me about this. I should have referred to the “Consensus for removing Jim Jones paragraph" section under the Talk Page and my comment there. I have now removed the paragraph and provided a valid reason. --Eforsund (talk) 17:01, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Eforsund. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the article William M. Branham, 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. We ask that you:

• avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, company, organization or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
• disclose your COI when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• do your best to comply with 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).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. You have no consensus for removing the Jim Jones paragraph and you have a conflict of interest so should not be editing the article directly. Theroadislong (talk) 15:34, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

William Branham and Jim Jone

Hello, in regards to your recent edit on the William Branham article, please review the talk page: Talk:William_M._Branham#Consensus for removing Jim Jones paragraph. There is currently no consensus to remove the paragraph, but you are welcome to voice your opinion there where this topic is being discussed. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 01:43, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Paid editing and conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Eforsund. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing.

In this diff you disclose that your occupation is "marketing manager". You were given notice of our conflict of interest guideline above, but I don't see that you responded there.

Would you please respond to the following?

Are you being paid (or do you expect to be paid) for editing Wikipedia? (Please note that disclosing this, is obligatory and not optional, per WP:PAID))

Separately, do you have any real world relationship with Branham Ministries?

I am asking, because 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. Unmanaged conflicts of interest can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies and cause disruption in the normal editing process. Managing conflict of interest well, also protects conflicted editors themselves - please see WP:Wikipedia is in the real world, and Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia for some guidance and stories about people who have brought bad press upon themselves through unmanaged conflict of interest editing.

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, which is why I am asking the two questions above. After you respond (and you can just reply below), if it is relevant I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 22:16, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

@Jytdog:

No, I am not paid in any way to edit Wikipedia. I do so because I am interested in William Branham and his ministry, and I plainly see things that are misrepresented on the WB page. Regarding my occupation as marketing manager, it has nothing to do with this topic or "Branham Ministries", as I work with marketing in the professional B2B market (business to business).

As far as “real world relationship with Branham Ministries”, I would say that I don’t have a “real world relationship with Branham Ministries”, with “real world relationship” meaning, I assume, that they are my employer. I like to listen to William Branham’s taped sermons, and although those sermons are distributed by a number of different organizations, I have found that Voice of God Recordings has the best quality and most complete list of sermons. I also try to translate William Branham’s sermons into my native Norwegian for others to enjoy, and I like to study what he said about a variety of topics. That’s about it. I hope that because I follow his teachings, it does not mean I have a COI. If so, it would seem that any Muslim could not edit Muslim topics, etc.

Thank you for stepping in on the COI accusation by theroadislong. It was a bit rude for him/her to place that on the talk page without the courtesy of asking me if I am paid or have an affiliation. It was also unprofessional. This is par for the course on how editors are treated on that page, especially by Darlig Gitarist. I don’t know if you saw the recent TBAN proposal, but it might be in your interest to check it out. He has made it almost impossible to edit. Eforsund (talk) 05:16, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for replying! Quick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting (see WP:THREAD) - when you reply to someone, you put a colon in front of your comment, which the Wikipedia software will render into an indent when you save your edit; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons in front of your comment, which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment. This also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread. I hope that all makes sense. And at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~~~~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages when you save your edit. That is how we know who said what to whom and when.

Please be aware that threading and signing are fundamental etiquette here, as basic as "please" and "thank you", and continually failing to thread and sign communicates rudeness, and eventually people may start to ignore you (see here).

Will reply on the substance in a second... Jytdog (talk) 00:37, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

OK< thanks for replying. Based on what you have wrote above (and on your contribution history, which is pretty much all about Branham), I want to make sure are aware of issues with advocacy in Wikipedia.

There are a lot of things that Wikipedia is not (see What Wikipedia is not) and one of the things WP is not, is a platform for advocacy (or preaching the gospel). Please especially see the section, WP:NOTADVOCACY. "What Wikipedia is Not" is both a policy and a "pillar" - something very essential to the very guts of this place. People come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead people to abuse Wikipedia - to hijack it from its mission of providing the world with free access to "accepted knowledge." Some people come here and try to create promotional content about their companies (classic "COI"), some come to tell everybody how bad it is to eat meat, some come to grind various political axes... we get all kinds of advocacy (COI is just a subset of it) It all comes down to violations of NOTADVOCACY. A lot of times, people don't even understand this is not OK. I try to talk with folks, to make sure they are aware of these issues.

For non-COI advocacy issues, we have three very good essays offering advice - one is WP:ADVOCACY another is WP:SPA (single purpose account, which is what your account here is), and see also WP:TENDENTIOUS which describes how advocacy editors tend to behave.

So, while I hear you that you are passionate about Branham and his message in the real world, but please do try to check that at the login page. And while you are free to edit about whatever the heck you want, please do consider broadening the scope of your editing. (I do realize that you are just getting started here, and everybody starts somewhere! Who knows where you will end up)

Changes to content (adding or deleting) need to be governed by the content policies and guidelines - namely WP:VERIFY, WP:OR, WP:NPOV, and WP:NOT and the sourcing guidelines WP:RS and WP:MEDRS.

In terms of behavior, the really key behavioral policies are WP:CONSENSUS, WP:CIVIL, WP:AGF, WP:HARASSMENT, and WP:DR, and the key guideline is WP:TPG. If you can get all that (the content and behavior policies and guidelines) under your belt, you will become truly "clueful", as we say. If that is where you want to go, of course.

But do try to aim everything you do and write in Wikipedia to further Wikipedia's mission (not your mission) and base everything you do on the spirit (not just the letter) of the content and behavior policies and guidelines. Your passions will determine what you work on, but they shouldn't guide how you work here. I hope that makes sense.

If you have questions about working in WP at any time going forward, or about anything I wrote above, please ask me. I am happy to talk. Thanks for your patience with me. Jytdog (talk) 00:41, 10 May 2018 (UTC)