Talk:Diabetes Hands Foundation

Untitled
Added links from other Wikipedia articles as applicable manny (talk) 21:34, 17 August 2010 (UTC) Manuelhp42

Conflict of interest tag
Conflict of interest tag added due to this posting which shows that the article was created by sources close to the subject.  Them From  Space  09:58, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Using Wikipedia for PR purposes
(edit conflict)

This article has been created by a single purpose account and is presented as an example of how to use Wikipedia for promotional purposes in an essay by Manny: How to get a Wikipedia page for your nonprofit. That text shows some lessons learned about the Wikipedia concepts of notability and verifiability. But the article still has several other problems that very frequently occur when Wikipedia articles are written by users who are more familiar with the promotional style used in advertising and organizations' self-descriptions than with the neutral, factual style of Wikipedia (or indeed encyclopedias in general), and when users have a conflict of interest:


 * WP:NPOV: The last subsection of "Diabetes Awareness Programs" is overtly written from the organization's point of view ("we held the Making Sense of Diabetes video contest", "We sought video entries ... We produced a compilation video, showcasing ..."). But much of the rest of the article is written from their POV too, even if it is reformulated into third person speech. Also, in the description of activities, it emphasizes too often what the organization aims to achieve with them ("aims to empower people" etc.) over a concrete description of the activity itself. WP:MISSION is an essay worth reading.
 * "pioneered diabetes awareness programs such as...": Primacy claims of this nature (asserting that the organization has been the first to do something) are often made for PR purposes, but hard to prove. How do we know in each case that there hasn't been a similar project, say, in 2007 by a French organization? At the very least, Wikipedia should not repeat them without citing an independent, reliable source. See also "avoid peacock language".
 * On the other hand, the article lacks some fundamental encyclopedic facts about the organization. Where does the funding come from? What is the (approximate) size of its budget? How many paid employees does it have?
 * Citations: The reference for "Big Blue Test" does not really support the statement that this is an established event - it was published before it had even occurred the first time, and qualifies that the event would occur "If Manny Hernandez has his way". Other statements and citations could benefit from checking, too.
 * Manny has inserted numerous links to the organization's websites in the body of the article. While this might be preferable for the purpose of driving traffic to these website, it is not consistent with Wikipedia's external link guidelines.

All the statements in the article present the organization in the positive light. Has there been any criticism? I don't know (and therefore do not insert a NPOV tag concerning this question). But considering the article's provenance, it is likely that if there exists such criticism, no substantial efforts would have been made so far to cover it in the article, and that NPOV would be achieved only after other users invest time to research the topic and edit the article. For topics of minor notability, it can take a long time. This is one of the major problmes with COI editing.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 10:04, 4 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I've done some cleanup on a few general things (language, style etc), but indeed some external context is highly desirable for this article. Still written way too much from their own point of view. Nothing on budget, size, employees. Also sorely missing is the actual two social networking sites (Ning sites btw). Still a lot of improving to be done. But better than the first try, I have to admit :D —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:34, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I see that part of my points are caused by our removal of some parts because they did not have any 3rd party sources. Wouldn't some trimming + a fact template have been a bit nicer and more useful ? —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:50, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for these observations. I will address these points in the course of the day. manny (talk) 21:34, 17 August 2010 (UTC) Manuelhp42 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.254.38.187 (talk)

Edited the Diabetes Awareness Program section to remove language that could be perceived as ad advertising. Could you please let me know your thoughts on it? manny (talk) 23:03, 7 September 2010 (UTC) Manuelhp42

Instead of adding details about funding and budget, which will become dated in time, included a link to an the Guidestar nonprofit report. Guidestar is an independent third party resource that can be used to view tax returns from nonprofits and see detailed reports about their operation. manny (talk) 23:54, 7 September 2010 (UTC) Manuelhp42

Just added TuDiabetes, EsTuDiabetes and HealthSeeker subsection back under "Social Media Programs" section to provide context within which TuAnalyze would make sense. I also removed the links back to these 3 sites from the copy. I now realize that these should have not been there in the first place, based on the Wikipedia Guidelines. My apologies.manny (talk) 00:35, 8 September 2010 (UTC)Manuelhp42

Would like your advice on how to best clean up the article in order to meet NPOV guidelines. I can't help but be the President of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, but I deeply respect and understand the importance of having Wikipedia be an independent source. We have included a new Funding section, reflecting information from our Guidestar nonprofit report (Guidestar is an independent 3rd party nonprofit that makes tax returns form all nonprofits available for public view) and added a link to this page as a way to make our information as transparent as possible. Any other suggestions? I have reviewed numerous other existing nonprofit Wikipedia articles and found no useful examples.

Also, when you guys feel we've complied as needed with the guidelines, what is the process for the removal of the the tags on the page about notability, close connection and advertising? manny (talk) 00:35, 8 September 2010 (UTC)Manuelhp42


 * I have reverted your removal of the tags that had been added by Themfromspace. While some of the points described above were addressed (e.g. you added a sentence about funding), the concerns expressed in the tags had not been fully resolved, as should be obvious from Davide101's subsequent edit in case of the advert tag (see also my first point above); as for notability, see WP:GNG.
 * Your expression of respect for Wikipedia's values is appreciated (likewise, I am sure Wikipedians respect the charitable goals of your organization). But it would be more convincing if you weren't constantly violating the recommendations at WP:COI. True, you can't help being the organization's president, but you certainly can help making edits that promote it on Wikipedia (also in other articles, e.g. ).
 * Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:14, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

@HaeB: Thanks for taking the time to share these points. Here's what I have done:

1) To address your point in connection with WP:GNG, I have included many more references, trying to stick to the General Notability Guideline: "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article." All the references I have included have covered DHF or one of our programs significantly. All have been reliable sources independent from us.

2) I have to respectfully disagree with your observation about the fact that adding a link back to our article from the Health Informatics article was a promotion alone. We at DHF do work in Health Informatics through our TuAnalyze application, which we developed in collaboration with Children's Hospital Boston. This application and the direction it is taking has been compared with the work conducted by PatientsLikeMe (they have a Wikipedia page) and was referenced in one of the new references I included in the article (http://www.iftf.org/node/3598) by a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank focused on analyzing future trends, with over 40 years of existence.

3) Could you explain why the advert tag under Diabetes awareness programs was put back in? I interpreted your comment as finding that Davide101's edit helped correct this. If it's not the case, I would appreciate your help pointing out how you still feel this tag is still warranted for that section, after all attempts to address it.

I don't want to say goodnight for today until I share something that I feel has affected the way this article has been treated compared to many other articles that (in all honesty) don't seem to be remotely as scrutinized. I realize the fact that I wrote the blog post you alluded to, explaining how to get a Wikipedia page for your nonprofit, is largely responsible for this. I'd like to point out the following: 1) My whole goal with the blog post was to precisely show other nonprofits the importance of complying with Wikipedia's guidelines in order to save themselves, Wikipedia (and you guys, as editors) much valued time, energy and resources. 2) I don't believe I was encouraging behavior on the part of other nonprofits that violated the Wikipedia guidelines. If you feel I was, or you feel that I missed something important from the article, I truly would appreciate if you can point it out: I think everyone would benefit from having a better understanding about this matter.

I respect where you are coming from and I will continue to work with you as long as you see it fit, to get the article to meet all Wikipedia guidelines. I would appreciate if you can continue to help me too, as I take care of your comments, add new references, etc. so we can get to a point where the article meets your expectations. When it does, I am sure I will have learned a lot more about Wikipedia and will do my best to share the lessons learned with the nonprofit community.

manny (talk) 08:18, 19 September 2010 (UTC)


 * 1) You have a problem Manny, that many other organizations share. You don't exist long enough to have been significantly and independently reported about. This is not a thing you can help. It is a side effect of the gap that is created by requiring references for articles in Wikipedia, and not being the most important/popular organization/topic in the world. You can clearly see the effect of a problem like this in almost every section of this article. It only lists things that are reported on the website of the organization itself, or in announcements of the products online. There is no "review" or analysis for instance, which basically turns it into a "product listing". When we ask for independent verifiable and reliable sources, we are looking for scientific papers, reviews in healthcare magazines or the New York Times. Things like that (think tanks are probably not a really good source either per WP:CRYSTAL). And try as you will, such are elements that you cannot "yet" produce. It is not your fault, you cannot help it. You are in an "evolutionary" phase of your organization where you basically always will have trouble fulfilling many of Wikipedia's demands for articles. (Which is part of why we caution people of young organizations from trying to create articles in the first place)
 * 2) You may not have intended it as self promotion, but it comes across as such. Compare the following: "The DHF uses health informatics." vs. "Health informatics, such as used by the DHF". You are an organization that uses health informatics, you are not an example organization for the topic Health informatics. There is a big difference. In the latter example, you are promoting (intentional or not) that you are a prime example of health informatics. We don't want that. Usually on topic pages of "Health informatics", we allow only very few (2 or 3) widely accepted examples of such an industry and preferable, only if so named as examples by widely recognized sources. The biggest problem is often that if there is even 1 such example, people will start adding to it, and before we know it, you have gigantic list, and that is not what the article is for. Health informatics should EXPLAIN health informatics and not be a "list of health informatics programs". While the health informatics is a terrible article already, there is no reason to add to it in this way any further. Background on the subject would be much more useful and actually required before we go into "unimportant" details such as lists of examples.
 * 3) The advert tag is there basically due to my points in 1. It's mostly a product listing. It repeats your own website. It is not yet the information article it should be. The changes by Davide101 did improve much of this, but stylistically it still isn't quite there yet.


 * Your article was under heavy scrutiny, because you invited scrutiny, by blogging about it. If you "promote" something like this, more eyes will pick up on it, because we want to make sure that you are not misrepresenting Wikipedia. Many other topics won't get half as much scrutiny, simply because less people will read it and thus less people will take it up as an example. So where normally, we would probably have been satisfied if it just followed the most important policies, trusting time would take care of getting things to follow all the policies and guidelines, now we are "speeding up" our review of and feedback on all those policies and guidelines.
 * I don't think you misrepresented or gave bad advise. At most you failed to communicate that "being allowed to stay on wikipedia" is not a final goal. Getting reviewed, corrected, copy-edited etc, is a long term process, and until points (article warning templates) are addressed, the article will remain a work in progress. My biggest advice for articles like this (small topics) is to look at the article of a big topic in the same field, an article that is more thoroughly developed. Such an article will often show you the "goal", the framework you could say, for what editors are going to be working towards. (So in cases like this, I'd probably look at International Committee of the Red Cross and International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement for instance).
 * For individual editors, I advice to work in multiple articles for a month or two. Get the "feeling" for the community as you will. Put a few articles about things that interest you on your watchlist and follow their progress. Make spelling corrections and other small changes to those articles and listen to feedback. It will help you to become a better writer and a better editor. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:40, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Thanks for taking the time to compose such a detailed response. My comments about it:

1) I understand your point. I had been considering all sources we included in the article to be relevant, but I see that we should make more emphasis on scientific sources too (we have a couple of articles that have been written in scientific publications referring to us - I will make sure to include those in place of some of the current references) :)

2) Thanks for clarifying with such a great example!

3) This also helps understand. We will continue to refine the article and incorporate more elements that differentiate it from the web site, as you describe. This is also very good to understand.

I will follow the advice you've given me about consulting with Red Cross-type articles. I admit my investigation was limited to the diabetes nonprofit space, but this is a good recommendation.

I have picked up my editing of other articles, which I never should have stopped doing: most of the content I've edited/written about in the past (though nowhere as extensively as any of you guys) was focused on music (Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Trent Reznor, etc.) which is a huge thing for me. I will make a point to be more consistent with this. manny (talk) 00:46, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

I have done a number of edits, removing elements from the section on Diabetes Awareness programs, trying to neutralize it more. manny (talk) 06:34, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

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Needs cleanup
this needs to be gone through carefully. for example several of the refs are by the founder but this is not obvious due to the crappy citations. Still shot through with promotional claims. Unclear if it will reach N once we weed out non-independent sourcing. Jytdog (talk) 07:34, 15 June 2018 (UTC)