SchmidtRJ

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Hello, SchmidtRJ, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion 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 {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! jonkerz♠ 17:28, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

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WP:COI

Please read and follow. Best Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:58, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Conflict of interest and username issues

Hi SchmidtRJ. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with regular editing. Your edits to date are pretty much all about adding links to botanical-dermatology-database.info. The mainpage of that website says it is copyrighted by Richard J. Schmidt PhD.

With respect to the WP:USERNAME policy, specifically WP:IMPERSONATE, would you please review that section and take one of the actions advised there? If you don't we may need to soft-block this account until the issue can be resolved. Thanks.

If you do happen to be the real world Richard J. Schmidt PhD , 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. This is a separate but possibly related issue to the one above.

Hello, SchmidtRJ. 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. 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 COI 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 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.

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. Unmanaged conflicts of interest can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies and cause disruption in the normal editing process. Managing conflict of interest well, also protects conflicted editors themselves - please see WP:Wikipedia is in the real world, and Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia for some guidance and stories about people who have brought bad press upon themselves through unmanaged conflict of interest editing.

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 (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. As mentioned above, you are editing here under the name of a real world person, and once we resolve the IMPERSONATE issues, that will be somewhat resolved, but we would still need you to explicitly declare your relationship with the website, if there is one. Would you please disclose any such relationship?

After you respond (and you can just reply below), I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 23:00, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi Doc James and Jytdog. I appreciate your concerns regarding conflict of interest and username issues.

Yes, SchmidtRJ and Richard J. Schmidt PhD are one and the same person. So, impersonation is not an issue. And clearly, where I add links to BoDD - Botanical Dermatology Database when editing Wikipedia pages, I can understand why an apparent conflict of interest may arise.

If you are able to check my editing history, you will see that the first such edits were made to links to BoDD that others had already provided on Wikipedia pages, but which had become "broken" when I moved BoDD from its original Cardiff University home (http://bodd.cf.ac.uk/ dating back to 1994) to a new domain. It was not a big step for me to then add new links to further BoDD pages where the content of those BoDD page clearly complements and extends the information that a reader can find on particular Wikipedia pages.

The content of BoDD is purely academic and fully referenced (insofar as this is possible) to peer-reviewed medico-scientific articles. Where an opinion is provided in the text, it will typically be an opinion on the [poor] quality of the original source of a piece of information. I have long been carrying out peer-review of manuscripts submitted for publication, in particular for the journal Contact Dermatitis (see https://publons.com/a/1182748/)

Because BoDD is not unlike Wikipedia in its origin and purpose (i.e. it is an encyclopedia; it is not a commercial venture; and access to the information contained therein is not restricted), BoDD is actually truly an extension of Wikipedia. Indeed, as I ponder its future when I finally become unable to continue work on the project, I wonder whether BoDD might somehow be taken over by Wikipedia and opened up to online editing by Wikipedians?

However, having declared the academic purpose of the BoDD project, I am nevertheless aware that my editing of Wikipedia pages with the objective only of adding a link to BoDD can be construed as "editing for the purpose of ... promoting ... " BoDD. The alternative would be for me simply to incorporate the information in BoDD into relevant Wikipedia pages. And that brings the discussion back to the idea in the paragraph above that BoDD might somehow be absorbed by Wikipedia ...

Visitors to BoDD will also see that it shows Google ads. And yes, I do earn some ad-related income from this "monetisation" of the website. This income amounts to, literally, pennies (not pounds) a week. It is hardly enough to pay for a memory stick on which to store a backup of the database! The only reason I continue with Google ads is because this provides me with a simple means by which to monitor traffic to the BoDD website. As I'm sure will also be the experience of Wikipedia, internet users are increasingly using social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) rather than Wikipedia or BoDD as their primary sources of non-commercial information. Either way, it would be absurd to categorise BoDD as a commercial project on the basis simply that it shows Google ads.

Those who have read about the BoDD project in the American Journal of Contact Dermatitis (https://journals.lww.com/dermatitis/Abstract/2001/03000/The_Botanical_Dermatology_Database.10.aspx) might also point out that there is (or was) a plan to publish the content of the BoDD database as the 2nd edition of the Botanical Dermatology textbook of which it is a derivative work. Perhaps this also renders the BoDD project a commercial enterprise? I have in recent years come to recognise that this is an unrealistic objective when considering the amount of information I have collected and the amount of information I have yet to incorporate into BoDD.

So, what exactly do I need to do to avoid the "wrath of Wikipedia" in the context that I'm not sure that there is necessarily a "conflict of interest" in simply adding links to Wikipedia that point to another open access encyclopedia that extends / supplements the information provided in that Wikipedia page? And would there be a way to have Wikipedia "absorb" BoDD at some point in the future? SchmidtRJ (talk) 22:08, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

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