Philot789

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Philot789. 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 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, colleagues, company, organization, clients, or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{request edit}} template);
• disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#How to disclose a COI);
• avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam#External link spamming);
• do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to 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 Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. MrOllie (talk) 00:09, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

I do not see a violation to the COI guidelines:

"Using material you have written or published is allowed within reason, but only if it is relevant, conforms to the content policies, including WP:SELFPUB, and is not excessive. Citations should be in the third person and should not place undue emphasis on your work. You will be permanently identified in the page history as the person who added the citation to your own work. When in doubt, defer to the community's opinion: propose the edit on the article's talk page and allow others to review it. However, adding numerous references to work published by yourself and none by other researchers is considered to be a form of spamming."

That is, the key question is whether my edits are relevant for the article. Thus, I would very much appreciate if you can explain your reasons why to consider them as irrelevant. Philot789 (talk) 05:49, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

and is not excessive - When all you are doing on Wikipedia is inserting references to yourself, that is excessive. MrOllie (talk) 11:48, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Sure. For your information, I have created a new account, because my old one expired and I could not restore my password (because it was associated with an old email address). So, these were not my only edits, but I am also not very active in editing the pages.

Moreover, "not excessive" probably refers to the article itself, so adding one relevant reference is clearly not excessive. Even if you consider both edits, you will see that they are covering completely different subjects. Of course, if you have any reasons against the edits in a sense that they are not relevant or adding useful information to the article, I would love to discuss it ;-)

Let me add one further point. I fully agree that not just any study published anywhere or even self-published should be added. In this case, both references are journal articles in the leading journals of their fields (top 2 journal!). They were published almost a year ago, so I would not consider adding the relevant results as spamming to the wiki page. Moreover, the content was well embedded in the articles adding useful information, which was missing before. You also noticed that I am completely transparent with my user name, e-mail address, etc. I am quite disappointed that this transparency led to changes (with the accusation of a COI). Even though the COI guidelines clearly state that it is allowed. As I said if there are there are points why my edits are irrelevant or un-useful, I would be happy to discuss. Philot789 (talk) 12:15, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

The kind of motivated reasoning displayed here is exactly why we discourage conflicted editors from writing about themselves. If you would like to add mentions of yourself and/or your work, please propose such edits on article talk pages from now on instead of making the addition yourself. MrOllie (talk) 12:20, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

What motivation should I have to make these edits other than to contribute to the community? The same applies to any publication of research results. Why should I do it if I don't want to contribute to science? Philot789 (talk) 12:23, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

If you're here to contribute to the community, as a subject matter expert you are no doubt familiar with a range of sources of diverse authorship. Please cite some of the ones that you didn't have a hand in writing. Or, use the talk page, which is the best practice for COI editors on Wikipedia. MrOllie (talk) 12:33, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Sure, fully agree, but there is no COI according to the guidelines. But, anyway, let's not discuss this in further details. When I have time I would add some further, very interesting sources to these articles. There are some good review articles that would certainly enrich the pages. Philot789 (talk) 12:49, 16 October 2022 (UTC)