User:Dandelionz

Conflict of Interest Disclosures Occasionally I write and edit wikipedia (WP) articles on historical and living people (mainly architects and designers) who I have researched, interviewed, explained and/or promoted in other publications (online and/or printed). I want to provide these contributions to WP when it seems I have unique, relevant knowledge of subjects of existing wiki items; also when it seems to me that WP will not obtain that information from another potential editor. Below I list cases which the WP community is welcome to review and debate. I would appreciate clear guidance on preferred strategies to resolve each article to satisfactory WP standards, not only objections to perceived breaches of WP policies.

1. Douglas Burrage Snelling. This is a substantial summary of my PhD research about Snelling (1916-85), which I uploaded to correct inaccuracies and lack of information in a small stub that was created by another WP user with obviously limited knowledge of Snelling. There is considerable controversy about Snelling and my research on him – which I have deliberately not explained in the WP context but which is generally clarified in blog posts on the non-commercial website I set up at douglas-snelling.com (which is being e-archived at the National Library of Australia). My WP article included references to various external sources about Snelling, including the entries I wrote on him (by invitation) at the Australian Encyclopedia of Architecture and the Australian Dictionary of Biography. I am now contracted in the UK to publish a book updating my PhD thesis for Snelling's birth centenary in 2016. I suggest that this book should be added to the WP list of Snelling references but presumably this will not be done other than by me? There is no other expert (currently) with enough interest in/knowledge of Snelling to update his WP entry in a reliable and comprehensive manner.

2. Luigi Rosselli. Various concerns about the existing entry on this living Sydney architect have been formally placed by WP admin at the top of the article, inviting WP users to improve it. Obviously the architect needs help to get his entry into an acceptable format, and I have agreed, for a professional fee, to edit the article – based on recent research of the architect's archives for a guest essay in the catalog to his recent exhibition of drawings, and using my broader research and experience as a writer and editor about Australian architecture since the 1980s. Again, I do not think there are other experts on Rosselli who would be likely to fix the problems that WP has identified with this site. Yesterday (24 June) I began to edit the Rosselli site but this has caused concerns from and deletions by other WP editors concerned that I have a conflict of interest. The question now asked of WP administrators and colleague editors is how should Luigi Rosselli, as the subject of this article, proceed to fix WP's notes of concern about what is already published? Who else might be available, on what arrangements, to help him satisfy all the relevant WP policies and protocols? Again, I believe that some of my own publications on Rosselli should be included in the list of references – but it seems apparent that this can be considered self-promotion, with the inference being that such references are of no value to WP readers. (I disagree generally with that train of logic – noting that many academic experts do list their own prior publications when writing on their topics of special expertise ... deciding that self-promotion is more useful to their readers than self-censorship.)

Dandelionz (talk) 03:39, 25 June 2015 (UTC)