Jonaohm

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Jonaohm. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the page St. Joseph's Indian School, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest 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 conflict of interest 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 which forms all or part of work 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. Thank you. - CorbieV ^☊ ☼ 18:44, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Good afternoon Corbie,

I want to thank you for the note regarding my proposed updates and corrections to the St. Joseph’s Indian School Wikipedia page. Indeed, I am affiliated with St. Joseph’s Indian School, working in the newly-developed corporate communications department. This is the first time St. Joseph’s has had this kind of position, and I am working on telling our story correctly and to the best of my ability. Wikipedia edits are new to me, and I am trying to navigate the system and move forward.

However, it is a pressing matter because the Wikipedia page is a wholly inaccurate and, I believe, biased view of our school. I am looking for the best way to correct this. I’ve taken the time to review the citations you have provided and would like to understand the best path forward. In order to do so, I do have some specific questions.

If I – or anyone at the school – am not allowed to correct the errors and biased point of view, who would you suggest is allowed? I know of others who have complained about the page, including local college historians and others. Are people like this allowed and will they be given the ability to do so?

While CNN did do a ‘story’ on St. Joseph’s, we did send a formal written response to correct its many inaccuracies. In fairness, I believe this should be included not as a tit-for-tat response but as a balanced view of what happened. Not all news stories are accurate, and schools such as ours are at the mercy of media who come in with preconceived ideas. I believe Wiki’s mission is to tell the truth and St. Joseph’s deserves this much.

There are legitimate reasons St. Joseph’s doesn’t participate in the Better Business Bureau (BBB) rankings. As you may know, the BBB was established by advertising and marketing firms to provide value to their clients – the focus is on promoting their members. At St. Joseph’s, we use the Council on Accreditation to review us. Their focus is on organizations that specifically provide services to children and families. They take the time to measure us against similar organizations, conducting a thorough on-site review that includes interviews with students, families and staff. We believe this review is better, more thorough and focused on the work we do. We’ve publicly answered questions on this many times (including on our website).

I am confused by the copyright area. The page lists a book, Voices of Indian Children, which I have not been able to locate, yet it lists St. Joseph’s Indian School as the author. I can’t find anyone at St. Joseph’s who knows anything about this book (that we supposedly wrote) nor can I find any trace of how anyone at Wikipedia contacted us to discuss use of our (supposedly) copyrighted material.

Finally, how do we confront the bias we find on the page? There is clearly a negative bias against St. Joseph’s that is unreasonable, and that I believe Wikipedia needs to help us address. Wikipedia was started to crowdsource information in a fair and democratic fashion. However, as we seek to correct the record, I can’t help but feel the deck is stacked against us. I hope that you can help St. Joseph’s tell an honest story.

Jonaohm (talk) 20:16, 13 June 2019 (UTC) Jona Ohm

April 2019

Your addition to St. Joseph's Indian School has been removed in whole or in part, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without evidence of permission from the copyright holder. If you are the copyright holder, please read Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials for more information on uploading your material to Wikipedia. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted material, including text or images from print publications or from other websites, without an appropriate and verifiable license. All such contributions will be deleted. You may use external websites or publications as a source of information, but not as a source of content, such as sentences or images—you must write using your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously and persistent violators of our copyright policy will be blocked from editing. See Wikipedia:Copying text from other sources for more information. - CorbieV ^☊ ☼ 18:45, 26 April 2019 (UTC)