Stevepep

Welcome!

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

I noticed that one of the first articles you edited was One Institute, 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.

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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, visit the Teahouse, 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! Nat Gertler (talk) 16:43, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Hi Nat! Thank you for your message.

The Wikipedia page for One Institute (formerly named One, Inc and One Archives Foundation) was very outdated and had some errors in it. That included the name of the old organization, which had not been used in many years. My attempt was to approach all of the edits and contributions as strictly fact-based entries, definitely trying to be completely neutral and objective with the edits. Is there anything else I need to do to help with transparency or with the edits? Happy to do whatever else is needed, since I am new to being a Wikipedia editor.

Thank you!

(Stevepep (talk) 20:28, 14 July 2024 (UTC));

Steve,

I will suggest that you review our best practices for editors with close associations. For the nickel version, if you have a strong relationship to an organization, you should not be directly editing that organization's articles (nor references to the organization in other articles.) Instead, you should be using the Talk pages of the articles to make suggestions of edits for others to make (while identifying your conflicted status), so non-conflicted editors can make the judgment more in line with Wikipedia's point of view of what is appropriate. I'm sure you strove to do a good and honest effort with your edits, but you brought with you your own perspective on what is important. Is the current organization the more important thing, or are people more likely to be looking for information on the pre-split organization and its important magazine publishing work? You are also apt to create things that are hype-laden; phrases like "The institutional history of the One Institute reveals a set of complex, overlapping and groundbreaking activities that provided a wide variety of pioneering services to LGBTQ+ Americans".

You also added much material while not only not adding sources, but actually deleting sources that were already used in the article. Wikipedia is very dependent on using sources for material. The primary reason is that we want the information on Wikipedia to be verifiable -- we don't want people to have to trust what Wikipedia says, we want to offer them ways to check. A strong secondary reason is that we rely on reliable, third-party sources to tell us what's worth covering in the article. An organization may think that their current and upcoming projects are the most vital thing they've ever done, but we rely on the views of others.

I appreciate your desire to see Wikipedia more accurately reflect the organization as it currently stands. However, I suspect you can guess the sort of thing we have to deal with from organizations that you might not view as so beneficial or benign -- the fight against allowing certain organizations to define themselves as, say, "defenders of the family". I appreciate the knowledge that you bring, but I hope you understand why we need to discourage that sort of editing.

If you have any further questions, I should see them if you respoind to them in response to this message, or if you post them to User_talk:NatGertler. And do have a fine day! -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:27, 14 July 2024 (UTC)