Johnenyc

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Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 17:45, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

hi Johnenyc. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my everyday editing about health and medicine. Based on your edit note here, and your edits to date you have been directly the editing the article about yourself. 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, Johnenyc. 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.

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step, which you have done. The second is what I call "peer review". 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 to do who have a COI and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, 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. You can make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:X - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.

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 a 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 the article about you, or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 17:51, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for this explanation. Was not aware of these rules. Only joined last couple of days because was unhappy with what was being entered on the Wikipedia page about me. I did not have anything to do with John Mulholland (director), which was put together by another individual. I will refrain from doing anything on the page. In fact, perhaps I should simply delete my user account, no?

Or, should I restore the graf to what it was earlier today, before I edited? For some reason, some of the visitors seem to believe that my sexuality -- I am gay -- is integral to my writing and directing and belongs on my bio page. I don't know, perhaps they are correct. I hesitate to include it because it skewers google and search engines. Gayness leaps to the top of the listings, and it is bunched with gay porn.

I do understand why I should not be in a position to edit material about me. Please feel free to restore the page to include the information about my gay sexuality, if that is a way a way around this. For the record, all the info in the graf you removed is true. These were two subjects which I was very sorry not to have tackled, and I will admit that my "intimacy with gay sexual practices" certainly played a role in my interest. Fortunately, I have a second chance with the Harlem Renaissance doc, which I have back in play with initial financing in hand. johnenyc talk

Hi, thanks for your gracious reply. And I really mean that - humans being human, people react to my trying to open a discussion with them in every way you can imagine, and often with indignation. So thanks. You are very, very welcome in Wikipedia, and there is no need for you to delete your account or go away at all. You could be very helpful, if you want to participate - not only on the article about you, but other topics about which you are knowledgeable or interested. Wikipedia is a big place!

I do understand what you write, about how the Wikipedia article about you affects things like google results. I hear you.

If I may, I would like to explain a bit about how Wikipedia actually works. There are some non-intuitive things about editing here, that I can zip through ~pretty~ quickly....

The first, is that our mission is to produce articles that provide readers with accepted knowledge, and to do that as a community that anyone can be a part of. That's the mission. As you can imagine, if this place had no norms, it would be a Mad Max kind of world interpersonally, and content would be a slagheap (the quality is really bad in parts, despite our best efforts). But over the past 15 years the community has developed a whole slew of norms, via loads of discussion. One of the first, is that we decide things by consensus. That decision itself, is recorded here: WP:CONSENSUS. (there is a whole forest of things, in "Wikipedia space" - pages in Wikipedia that start with "Wikipedia:AAAA" or for short, "WP:AAAA". WP:CONSENSUS is different from Consensus. See?) And when we decide things by consensus, that is not just local, but includes meta-discussions that have happened in the past. Those are the norms. We call them policies and guidelines. There are policies and guidelines that govern content, and separate ones that govern behavior. Here is very quick rundown:

WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing)
WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down to the sources you bring!)
WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content and WP:MEDRS defines what reliable sourcing is for content about health
WP:NPOV and the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what most folks think -- it doesn't mean "fair and balanced" - it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references.
WP:BLP - this is a policy specifically about articles about living people. We are very careful about these articles, since issues of legal liability can arise for WP, and because people have very strong feelings about other people (and about public descriptions of themselves). "Really careful" means that the above policies and guidelines are really strictly enforced. I reckon this one will be of special interest to you.

In terms of behavior, the key norms are:

WP:CONSENSUS - already discussed
WP:CIVIL - basically, be nice. This is not about being nicey nice, it is really about not being a jerk and having that get in the way of getting things done. We want to get things done here - get content written and maintained and not get hung up on interpersonal disputes. So just try to avoid doing things that create unproductive friction.
WP:AGF - assume good faith about other editors. Try to focus on content, not contributor. Don't personalize it when content disputes arise. (the anonymity here can breed all kinds of paranoia)
WP:HARASSMENT - really, don't be a jerk and follow people around, bothering them. And do not try to figure out who people are in the real world. Privacy is strictly protected by the WP:OUTING part of this policy.
WP:DR - if you get into an argument with someone. Try to work it. If you cannot, then use one of the methods here to get wider input.
WP:TPG - this is about how to talk to other editors on Talk pages, like this one, or the one in the article about you: Talk:John Mulholland (director)

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.

I know that was a lot of information, but hopefully it is digestable enough.

I am hoping you may have some answers about questions I raised at Talk:John Mulholland (director), and I hope you have time to weigh in there. You are probably the best person to answer them as you probably are aware of what has been written about you, and where! Jytdog (talk) 18:39, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

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