Hazelsct

Wikipedia's autobiography policy

Hi,

I'm sure you're already aware of it, but just in case you're not, you might want to just make sure you're sticking within Wikipedia:Autobiography on your current run of edits. I don't think the current article has anything which would attract attention, particularly, but you may want to reconsider expanding it any further yourself. Chris Cunningham 16:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, I was not aware of this policy. I did not create this page, but discovered it after I had changed positions (from MIT to Veryst) and the page did not reflect that change, so I made that edit. This was five months after my first contribution to Wikipedia, and nine months after my change in affiliation. I have since updated the page to reflect my most recent change in employment, and expanded it, as you noticed.

Aside from the autobiography guidelines, I don't believe anything in the current version of this article violates any of Wikipedia's policies. But this begs the question: what should I do if my affiliation/information changes, and other Wikipedians don't notice the change for a significant amount of time, like nine months? Certainly such a long-standing inaccuracy is not good for Wikipedia or its readers...

Hazelsct 17:58, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah. I didn't actually notice that this page had been started afresh with the change in occupation. Wikipedia's normal procedure is to move the old page to the new location, thus ensuring that the original page history is maintained. In order to ensure that the original page author is included in the page history, I'm going to manually fix this by copying the current article contents to the old article, requesting that the ne wpage be deleted and then moving the old page to the new title. This should help future editors to realise that this page wasn't self-authored.

As for the page getting out of date, that's a danger associated with any page with relatively few eyeballs on it. With any luck, moving the page back will ensure than anyone who had missed the transition to a new title will have the page appear on their watchlists again. Chris Cunningham 18:07, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, I was not aware that it was possible to "move" pages when I started afresh this past March. This creates a minor problem of a history gap for the new content (are deleted pages kept around somewhere?). And those with the original article on watchlists should surely have noticed its replacement with a redirect at some point in the past six months.

But I agree that my neophyte errors needed correction, and that showing the original authorship is more important than maintaining history of the new content. Thank you again for your attention to this article about me.

This doesn't answer my question though: how does one request updates to a verifiably months out-of-date and inaccurate page about oneself? If nobody who knows anything about me monitors the ACP,IV(eng) page over nine months, surely nobody watches its talk page -- except of course for your own recent attention to it.

Inaccuracy aside, what about other changes? When I logged in to find your note about the autobiography policy, I had planned to add text referring to my uncle's page (also ACP,IV) copied straight from either User:Alamar2000's or User:Ceyockey's older versions of the (professor) page. This is clearly neutral and verifiable, and not even written by me; how do I request its addition? Hazelsct 13:09, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

To answer your first question: the only edits to the new page you created were by the two of us, so I don't feel we're losing a great deal of history by losing them. (they're stored in Wikipedia's RCS anyway, should they ever be required, though only administrators have direct access to them.)

To answer the second, all I can say is that Wikipedia generally works well in keeping notable biographies up to date and accurate. if you want to bring the article to the attention of the wider community, you could post on, say, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Free Software.

To answer the third, WP:IAR allows users who are obviously doing the right thing by the project to ignore the general biography guidelines in cases where the spirit of the project is being followed. I'd say you're fine adding the text from the professor page. Chris Cunningham 14:21, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the polite, constructive, and very prompt replies. I'm pressed for time right now but will make the change (noted re third question) when I can. Hazelsct 16:00, 14 October 2007 (UTC)