PeterNSteinmetz

Welcome!

Hello, PeterNSteinmetz, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

I noticed that one of the first articles you edited was Peter Steinmetz, which appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article. Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

To reduce the chances of your contributions being undone, you might like to draft your revised article before submission, and then ask me or another editor to proofread it. See our help page on userspace drafts for more details. If the page you created has already been deleted from Wikipedia, but you want to save the content from it to use for that draft, don't hesitate to ask anyone from this list and they will copy it to your user page.

One rule we do have in connection with conflicts of interest is that accounts used by more than one person will unfortunately be blocked from editing. Wikipedia generally does not allow editors to have usernames which imply that the account belongs to a company or corporation. If you have a username like this, you should request a change of username or create a new account. (A name that identifies the user as an individual within a given organization may be OK.)

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• The plain and simple conflict of interest guide
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{Help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Dawn Bard (talk) 22:51, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

August 2018

Hello, I'm Natureium. I noticed that you removed topically-relevant content from Peter Steinmetz. However, Wikipedia is not censored to remove content that might be considered objectionable. Please do not remove or censor information that directly relates to the subject of the article. If the content in question involves images, you have the option to configure Wikipedia to hide images that you may find offensive. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you may leave a message on my talk page. Thank you. Natureium (talk) 22:55, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

These edits are additions

The edits I just performed did not remove any objectionable content, but rather added to that content and clarified them. PeterNSteinmetz (talk) 22:59, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

These edits are additions 2

The edits I just performed did not remove any objectionable content, but rather added to that content and clarified them. PeterNSteinmetz (talk) 23:00, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

@PeterNSteinmetz: The bigger issue is that you have an obvious conflict of interest. You should not be editing an article about yourself. You are welcome to contribute on the talk page. Bradv 23:08, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi there Peter. Wikipedia (hopefully understandably) has rules around editing articles about yourself. You might want to read our simplified guide to conflict of interest which links to the simplified guide for making an edit request. As you can see there are at least three of us who are active and experienced Wikipedians who are editing the page and would be available to respond to any requests you might have. If you have questions about our conflict interest guidelines I am happy to do my best to answer them. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:17, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer on how to accomplish such edit requests per Wikipedia policy. I see the section with questionable content has been deleted. I will submit any further requests for changes through this channel. PeterNSteinmetz (talk) 23:48, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

@PeterNSteinmetz: I'm glad you found that helpful. You should be aware that the current discussion is about whether or not you meet Wikipedia's standards for who can have a page. This is called notability. There are some guides which help for certain professions including academia. If an editor believes you do not meet the notability standard they can nominate the page for deletion. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 00:12, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

The article has now been nominated for deletion. Bradv 00:54, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Wakefield 1998 Paper Fraud (December 26)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Bkissin was:  The comment the reviewer left was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.

• If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Wakefield 1998 Paper Fraud and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
• If you now believe the draft cannot meet Wikipedia's standards or do not wish to progress it further, you may request deletion. Please go to Draft:Wakefield 1998 Paper Fraud, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window, add "{{db-self}}" at the top of the draft text and click the blue "publish changes" button to save this edit.
• If you do not make any further changes to your draft, in 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
• If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the Articles for creation help desk, on the reviewer's talk page or use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

Bkissin (talk) 14:15, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Hello, PeterNSteinmetz! Having an article declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! Bkissin (talk) 14:15, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Peter, I think you need to be careful to not seek to evade this rejection by then adding your rejected content into existing articles. That's not good. It appears from this edit and onwards that you may be doing this. I don't want to see you get in trouble. We depend on secondary sources here, not primary ones. Much of your work appears to be forbidden original research based on primary sources. Any use of primary sources must be minimal, totally uncontroversial, and not replace the secondary sources used. -- BullRangifer (talk) 19:53, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the concern, however, adding the content of this draft to the existing article was suggested to me by user BKissin! My edits cite the primary sources, but are not original research. I have no idea why Wikipedia would prefer referring to secondary sources rather than primary (by which is meant original published articles, not original data or analyses.) Let's see how it goes on that Talk Page (again as suggested by user BKissin). PeterNSteinmetz (talk) 19:58, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Not as such, no. The point was that we already have an article on this. You're welcome to contribute to it, but your content read as a novel synthesis from published material. We have a page to discuss changes to the article at talk:Lancet MMR autism fraud, perhaps bring up your suggestions there? Guy (help!) 21:13, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

See my comments on that talk page. Ridiculous. PeterNSteinmetz (talk) 21:54, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Peter, since you have done so much work on your draft, I think it would be good for all editors to have that information at their fingertips, so to speak. Would you mind moving it so it becomes a subpage of Talk:Lancet MMR autism fraud? Moving it to Talk:Lancet MMR autism fraud/Draft:Wakefield 1998 Paper Fraud should work. Use the "move" tab at the top of Draft:Wakefield 1998 Paper Fraud. That way the history of its creation and attribution to you will stay with it. I'll make sure a link to it stays on the top of the talk page for ready reference. -- BullRangifer (talk) 06:45, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Sure, happy to help with having the research more available. Now moved to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud/Draft:Wakefield_1998_Paper_Fraud . I am also going to see if it is of interest at a RS and will advise on the talk page for the article if that happens. PeterNSteinmetz (talk) 21:30, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

A summary of certain site policies and guidelines to clarify some apparent misconceptions

• Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. All we do here is cite, summarize, and paraphrase professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources, without addition, nor commentary.
• We do not publish original thought nor original research.
• Credentials are irrelevant, noone here cares about them, we will ignore them. See Essjay controversy for why.
• Noone owns any article here, or even their edits to articles. At the top of the edit page, it says "Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone," which means that if you don't want someone to change or even remove what you add, then you need to use another site. My personal advice on this is "Write, criticize it as much as you can, rewrite it, get people to point out everything that's wrong with it, rewrite it again, get people to deface it, rewrite it to incorporate the defacement, throw it away, and repeat. When you finally write something good, forget about it and never expect credit."
• Primary sources are usually avoided to prevent original research. Secondary or tertiary sources are preferred for this reason as well.
• Not a policy or guideline, but something one would realize if they thought about but this site is really BIG and there's no reason to expect users to both be familiar with all of one's activities, nor for Editor A to be familiar with your interactions with Editor B.

Ian.thomson (talk) 22:23, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, that is quite a difference from a professionally edited encyclopedia. I trust you can see how this would be quite frustrating as a process for those of us who actually write on scientific topics professionally. It strikes me the policies here arguably prevent anything other than just copying other people’s published statements without being subject to criticism of violating this or that policy. That leaves Wikipedia as a sort of aggregator or containing statements which manage to escape the attention of someone who wants to object for one of a thousand possible policies.

As to a preference for secondary sources, in my opinion it would be better for editors to actually learn to distinguish original research from other primary sources. PeterNSteinmetz (talk) 22:50, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

I think you arrived here with unrealistic expectations, so you were set-up for disappointment. That's too bad. I remember when I arrived here, and my very first article was immediately deleted. I was pissed off! The problem was that I thought I could write an article here in the same way I had written medical articles for magazines, my website, and others' websites. Well, after a while I sort of got the hang of it. I've been here since 2003 and am still learning.

Our job description is to document the "sum total of human knowledge" as it's found in reliable sources, IOW we are ONLY aggregators. Wikipedia will always be a bit "behind the curve" in that regard, but we are nearly always ahead of the curve when it comes to accuracy and summaries of the totality of a subject.

Editors who insist on creating content based on their own ideas of how to "connect the dots" of information from primary sources end up disappointed, because WP:OR and WP:SYNTH forbid that. We like to have subject matter experts here, but even a Nobel laureate was blocked from Wikipedia because they insisted that we include their ideas, which were not published or accepted anywhere else than their own writings. They were indeed a renowned physicist, and thus a subject matter expert, but they would not submit to follow our policies and guidelines. They could not work in this collaborative environment. That was sad, but it had to happen because they just created disruption.

I hope you will tweak your expectations, just as you would approach a new board game and learn and accept the rules of the game. Leaving here will not cause any problems here, but you'd be missing out on an opportunity to contribute and learn. -- BullRangifer (talk) 02:36, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind remarks. I don't think these policies will encourage many contributions from content experts like myself because we generally don't have a lot of interest in aggregating other people's opinions -- because we are able to perform original research. It would be one thing if the more experienced editors tried to help integrate significant contributions into the Wikipedia way. But all that happened here was people looking for one of perhaps several thousand policies to revert edits as a whole.

Nonetheless, I think this confirms what I have previously said to student -- Wikipedia is a reasonably good place to start to get an overview and references. Then one needs to track down the primary sources and really think about them and synthesize them. PeterNSteinmetz (talk) 03:45, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

That is indeed one of the major reasons for using Wikipedia. It gives a quick overview of the known information on the subject. Keep in mind that there is nothing to prevent you from doing both your original research elsewhere and also helping us here. If your research is published in a RS, we might even be able to use it here. -- BullRangifer (talk) 06:12, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Appreciation

For no interesting reason, I recently encountered your contributions in Talk:Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud. Bravo. Qkxj (talk) 20:55, 20 February 2021 (UTC)