User talk:KenDW64

Welcome!

Hello, KenDW64, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

• Introduction and Getting started
• Contributing to Wikipedia
• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article
• Simplified Manual of Style

You may also want to take the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit The Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 03:44, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi KenDW64. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia along with my regular editing. Your edits to date were all about SunRun and were promotional. 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.

Hello, KenDW64. 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, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
• instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate 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).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. 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. 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. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with SunRun, directly or through a third party (e.g. a PR agency or the like)? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), perhaps we can talk a bit about editing Wikipedia, to give you some more orientation to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 03:47, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello, I am the new marketing manager at Sunrun. Our Wikipedia page hasn't been updated in years and was horribly out of date and missing a lot of information. I compiled the update and ran it through our legal and policy departments for approval. This is my first time editing on Wikipedia, so I appreciate the insight and willing to edit to make sure we meet Wikipedia requirements. KenDW64 (talk) 21:35, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for replying! Quick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting - when you reply to someone, you put a colon ":" in front of your comment, and the WP software converts that into an indent; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons "::" which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment. This also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread. I hope that all makes sense. And at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~~~~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages. That is how we know who said what. I know this is insanely archaic and unwieldy, but this is the software environment we have to work on. Sorry about that. Will reply on the substance in a second... Jytdog (talk)

OK, so thanks again for your forthright disclosure. So you have a COI for SunRun, as we define that in Wikipedia.

To finish the disclosure piece, would you please add the disclosure to your user page (which is User:KenDW64 - a redlink, because you haven't written anything there yet). Just something simple like: "I am the marketing manager for Sunrun and have a conflict of interest with regard to that topics related to Sunrun" would be fine. If you want to add anything else there that is relevant to what you want to do in WP feel free to add it, but please don't add anything promotional about the company (see WP:USERPAGE for guidance if you like).

I added a tag to the Sunrun article's talk page, so the disclosure is done there. Once you disclose on your user page, the disclosure piece of this will be done.

As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP. The first is disclosure. The second is a form of peer review. This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and voilà there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary - no publisher, no "editors" as that term is used in the real world. So the bias that conflicted editors tend to have, can go right into the article. Conflicted editors are also really driven to try to make the article fit with their external interest. If they edit directly, this often leads to big battles with other editors.

What we ask editors to do who have a COI and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, is:

a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft through the WP:AFC process, disclose your COI on the Talk page, and then submit the draft article for review (the AfC process sets up a nice big button for you to click when it is ready) so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and

b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:Sunrun - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.

By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. We get some great contributions that way, when conflicted editors take the time to understand what kinds of proposals are OK under the content policies. (which I will say more about, if you want).

I hope that makes sense to you.

I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where the company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content. If you are unsure, just ask at the Talk page.

Will you please agree to follow the peer review processes going forward, when you want to work on the x article or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. And if you want me to quickly go over the content policies, I can do that. Just let me know. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 03:08, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the information. I have added the disclosure piece to my user page. I'm also trying to find the beige section at the top of the Sunrun talk page but I do not see what you are referring to. I have document I can upload to discuss the proposed changes. KenDW64 (talk) 16:39, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! The box is this one:

It is there, near the bottom of the beige box at the top of the Sunrun talk page. If you click where it says "request corrections or suggest content," (in the box at the Sunrun talk page, not here!) it will set up a section for you to request an edit. Jytdog (talk) 21:38, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Formatting citations

Quick note, that there is a very easy and fast way to do in-line citations, which often also provides a link that allows readers to more easily find the source being cited.

you provided the reference: which is so much more useful than: VentureBeat, Camille Ricketts. "Sequoia Leads 55M for Sunrun Bringing Solar To A Roof Near You." June 29, 2010.

If you go look, that ref is on the web, here.

You will notice that when you are in an edit window, that up at the top there is a toolbar. On the right, it says "Cite" and there is a little triangle next to it. If you click the triangle, another menu appears below. On the left side of the new menu bar, you will see "Templates". If you select (for example) "Cite news", you can fill in the "URL" field and then if you click the little magnifying glass next to the field, the whole thing will auto-fill. Then you click the "insert" button at the bottom, and it will insert a ref like this (I changed the ref tags so it shows):

(ref) "Sequoia leads $55M for SunRun, bringing solar to a roof near you". VentureBeat. 29 June 2010. (/ref)

Now you will notice that it didn't include the author - -the autofill doesn't catch everything, every time. You want to always include the basic bibliographical info so that somebody can go find it later if the URL dies. So - author, title, publication, date, and URL are all great to include for news stories.

When you are in the template, after you "autofill", you can manually add things that are missing before you click "insert". Doing that here, you end up with:

(ref) RIcketts, Camille (29 June 2010). "Sequoia leads $55M for SunRun, bringing solar to a roof near you". VentureBeat. (/ref)

That takes about 10 seconds. As you can see there are templates for books, news, and websites, as well as journal articles, and each template has at least one field that you can use to autofill the rest. The autofill isn't perfect and I usually have to manually fix some things before I click "insert" but it generally works great and saves a bunch of time. Jytdog (talk) 18:04, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

How Wikipedia works

The basics of WP are covered in the links in the "welcome" message I left you, which you have not reviewed, based on your two proposed edits so far.

This is a narrative I created to help get people oriented to how this place works, and to the key policies and guidelines. It is as brief as I can make it... Hopefully you will read this and follow it in your next proposal, should you want to keep at it.

The first thing, is that our mission is to produce articles that provide readers with encyclopedia content that summarize accepted knowledge, and to do that as a community that anyone can be a part of. That's the mission. As you can imagine, if this place had no norms, it would be a Mad Max kind of world interpersonally, and content would be a slag heap (the quality is really bad in parts, despite our best efforts). But over the past 15 years the community has developed a whole slew of norms, via lots of discussion. One of the first, is that we decide things by consensus. That decision itself, is recorded here: WP:CONSENSUS, which is one of our "policies". And when we decide things by consensus, that is not just local in space and time, but includes meta-discussions that have happened in the past. The results of those past meta-discussions are the norms that we follow now. We call them policies and guidelines - and these documents all reside in "Wikipedia space" (There is a whole forest of documents in "Wikipedia space" - pages in Wikipedia that start with "Wikipedia:AAAA" or for short, "WP:AAAA". WP:CONSENSUS is different from Consensus.)

People have tried to define Wikipedia - is it a democracy, an anarchy, secret cabal? In fact it is a clue-ocracy (that link is to a very short and important text).

There are policies and guidelines that govern content, and separate ones that govern behavior. Here is a very quick rundown:

Content policies and guidelines

• WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing. You will also find discussion of how WP is not a catalog, not a how-to manual, not a vehicle for promotion, etc. Please do read WP:NOT, and especially the WP:PROMO section)
• WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
• WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down to the sources you bring!) Please note that writing content that interprets a source, and then citing the source you interpreted is not OK. Content in Wikipedia summarizes sources, it doesn't interpret sources. (this is discussed in WP:OR)
• WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content and WP:MEDRS defines what reliable sourcing is for content about health. We strongly prefer independent, secondary sources. Non-independent primary sources can be used but sparingly and with no interpretation.
• WP:NPOV -- the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what most folks think -- it doesn't mean "fair and balanced" - it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would generally give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. Of course if that drug was important because it killed a lot of people, not having 90% of it be about the side effects would not be neutral) We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references. If you use independent, secondary, reliable sources, and summarize them accurately, using neutral language, you will meet the requirement of NPOV. Please also note that having nothing negative in an article means that it is unlikely to meet NPOV - nothing in the world has no negatives.
• WP:BLP - this is a policy specifically covering discussion about living people anywhere in WP. We are very careful about such content (which means enforcing the policies and guidelines above rigorously), since issues of legal liability can arise for WP, and people have very strong feelings about other people, and about public descriptions of themselves.
• WP:NOTABILITY - this is a policy that defines whether or not an article about X, should exist. What this comes down to is defined in WP:Golden rule - which is basically, are there enough independent sources about X, with which to build a decent article.
• WP:DELETION discusses how we get rid of articles that fail notability.

In terms of behavior, the key norms are:

• WP:CONSENSUS - already discussed
• WP:CIVIL - basically, be nice. This is not about being nicey nice, it is really about not being a jerk and having that get in the way of getting things done. We want to get things done here - get content written and maintained and not get hung up on interpersonal disputes. So just try to avoid doing things that create unproductive friction.
• WP:AGF - assume good faith about other editors. Try to focus on content, not contributor. Don't personalize it when content disputes arise. (the anonymity here can breed all kinds of paranoia)
• WP:HARASSMENT - really, don't be a jerk and follow people around, bothering them. And do not try to figure out who people are in the real world. Privacy is strictly protected by the WP:OUTING part of this policy.
• WP:DR - if you get into an content dispute with someone, try to work it out on the article Talk page. Don't WP:EDITWAR. If you cannot work it out locally, then use one of the methods here to get wider input. There are many - it never has to come down to two people arguing. There are instructions here too, about what to do if someone is behaving badly, in your view. Try to keep content disputes separate from behavior disputes. Many of the big messes that happen in Wikipedia arise from these getting mixed up.
• WP:COI and WP:PAID which I discussed way above already. This is about preserving the integrity of WP. A closely related issue is WP:ADVOCACY; COI is just a subset of advocacy. People who come to Wikipedia with a conflict of interest or who some here to advocate for something, tend to include unsourced or badly sourced content that fails NPOV. (Their goal is not to create encyclopedic content, but to add marketing or other forms of advocacy to Wikipedia)
• WP:TPG - this is about how to talk to other editors on Talk pages, like this one, or say Talk:Electronic cigarette aerosol and e-liquid. At article talk pages, basically be concise, discuss content not contributors, and base discussion on the sources in light of policies and guidelines, not just your opinions or feelings. At user talk pages things are more open, but that is the relevant place to go if you want to discuss someone's behavior or talk about general WP stuff - like this whole post.

If you can get all that (the content and behavior policies and guidelines) under your belt, you will become truly "clueful", as we say. If that is where you want to go, of course. I know that was a lot of information, but hopefully it is digestable enough.

If at some point you want to create an article, here is what to do.

1. look for independent sources that comply with WP:MEDRS for anything related to health, and WP:RS for everything else, that give serious discussion to the topic, not just passing mentions. Start with great sources.
2. Look at the sources you found, and see if you have enough per WP:Golden rule to even go forward. If you don't, you can stop right there.
3. Read the sources you found, and identify the main and minor themes to guide you with regard to WP:WEIGHT - be wary of distortions in weight due to WP:RECENTISM
4. Go look at manual of style guideline created by the relevant WikiProject, to guide the sectioning and other style matters (you can look at articles on similar topics but be ginger b/c WP has lots of bad content) - create an outline. (For example, for biographies, the relevant project is WP:WikiProject Biography) (For example, for companies, the relevant project is Wikipedia:WikiProject_Companies/Guidelines)
5. Create the article following the process described at articles for creation for your first few articles.
6. Start writing the body, based only on what is in the sources you have, and provide an inline citation for each sentence as you go.
7. Make sure you write in neutral language. The most rigorous way to do this is to use no adjectives at your first go-round and add them back only as needed.
8. When you are done, write the lead and add infobox, external links, categories, etc
9. Consider adding banners to the Talk page, joining the draft article to relevant Wikiprojects, which will help attract editors who are interested and knowledgeable to help work on the article. If you have a COI for the article, note it there.
10. The completed work should have nothing unsourced (because the sources drove everything you wrote, not prior knowledge or personal experiences or what the client wanted; there is no original research nor WP:PROMO in it.
11. Submit your article for review by clicking the "submit your draft" button that was set up when you created the article. You will get responses from reviewers, and you can work with them to do whatever is needed to get the article ready to be published.

There you go! Let me know if you have questions about any of that

Again that was a lot, but the goal is to get you somewhat oriented. Jytdog (talk) 18:43, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

?

As discussed above, please don't edit the Sunrun article directly. If you continue trying to remove negative content as you did here and here you will end up indefinitely blocked. There is no need for this kind of drama. Thanks.Jytdog (talk) 00:27, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

• Would you please use the article talk page and discuss your objections to the current content? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 23:00, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Added discussion in Talk section to discuss Controversy section. KenDW64 (talk) 18:11, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Not productive

So your approach to Wikipedia is not productive.

You really have three choices.

1. continue as you have been, which will ~probably~ lead to you being indefinitely blocked
2. change your approach, actually aiming somewhere in the neighborhood of encyclopedic content
3. hire a paid editor, who - on your dime - will teach you what will fly and what will not fly in Wikipedia. There is a list of PR companies that understand WP at Wikipedia:Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms and fwiw Mary Gaulke who is listed there is very good. Also FacultiesIntact who is not listed there but is also good. Jytdog (talk) 23:19, 23 May 2017 (UTC)