User talk:Aharlan

References in Army Geospatial Center
Hi, Aharlan. Thank you for your interest in Army Geospatial Center. It appears that you are attempting to change the citations to keep up to date with internal changes within AGC. That's an understandable motive, but not how Wikipedia works. The documents that are used as citations clearly list Spillman's name as the POC and therefore as responsible for their content. Until a successor posts new documents with a new POC, the citations should remain.

The AGC article is problematical in its citations, to start with, since there are few that originate from outside the organization to talk about it. See WP:SECONDARY. If the article were about a private company, those citations would be dis-allowed within Wikipedia as self-serving.

Before we get into an edit war, I thought it appropriate to discuss this matter with you. I'll monitor this page for further discussion. In the meantime, I will revert your good-faith deletions of the author name, Spillman, for the time-being until updated source material is available. Sincerely, User:HopsonRoad 04:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Please note that I reverted your recent edit, for the reasons above, plus the author's name is still clearly spelled out on the document linked to—clearly a public document with no privacy issues. Probably the agency should update the document and change the authorship, but it apparently has not done so. Not a Wikipedia problem. User:HopsonRoad 23:09, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

I created the content, I can delete it. The person in question requested it be removed. If you have any affiliation with AGC I recommend that you talk with said person. By the way, at least if you revert, correct the formatt of the references, and I will later consider all my options, including removing the entire page or removing the names off the Fact sheets (which is a better option--I agree.


 * Thank you for your reply, Aharlan. Actually, I wondered if you were affiliated with AGC. I'm not affiliated, either. I wouldn't agree with deleting pertinent, public-domain material simply because its author requested it. However, I sense that here the material is no longer pertinent, so it should be deleted and replaced with pertinent material. If the link isn't pertinent, the agency should take it off its website.


 * What would help the article, in a manner consistent with Wikipedia policies, would be to find as much material as possible about the agency written by sources outside the agency (news articles, etc.). I know that, in contributing to the CRREL article, this is difficult. What I did there, whenever possible, was to use citations that may have had CRREL authors, but often had non-CRREL authors and were usually peer-reviewed. This helped the article seem less like a brochure on behalf of the agency and more a neutral article about the agency. Remember, also, that anyone can contribute to any article, according to Wikipedia principles, so none of us "owns" an article.


 * Thank you again, for your work. User:HopsonRoad 14:05, 11 November 2011 (UTC)