User talk:Ajhartley

Welcome to Wikipedia
Hi Aj, and welcome to Wikipedia.

I noticed your edits to the A. J. Hartley article and saw that your user name suggests that you may be affiliated with the subject of the article. In that regard you may find it helpful to peruse Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest guideline. Note that having a conflict of interest does not preclude you from editing the article (and this message is not intended to suggest that there was something wrong with those edits), but it does subject you to an increased onus to ensure that such edits maintain the Neutral Point of View policy and avoid even the appearance of bias or self-promotion. The best way is often to declare the conflict of interest on your user page (simply because this signals to other editors on the project that there is nothing underhanded going on, and that you are being upfront about any such conflict), but this is strictly optional: Wikipedia has a strict policy of protecting editors' privacy, and this in turn precludes any form of pressure to "out" oneself (revealing real-world identity or identifying information). Another measure to avoid actual or perceived neutrality issues is to be scrupulous in adhering to Wikipedia's policy of Verifiability: make sure any fact introduced in the article is cited to a reliable secondary source (primarily one unaffiliated with the subject of the article). For instance, one way to handle an article about oneself on Wikipedia might be to provide links to newspaper or journal articles on the article's talk page (one could even there include suggested text to add to the article). This allows other editors (who are unaffiliated with the article's subject) to add cited information to the article, and avoids any perception of a bias from a conflict of interest. It would in this scenario be perfectly appropriate to, when providing links to articles in some way critical or inaccurate, to also provide a link to a rebuttal or corrections (to balance a negative review of a book with one that is positive, say).

Again, welcome to Wikipedia, and I hope you find the above helpful. If I can be of any assistance (Wikipedia has more than its fair share of odd technical, cultural, and policy quirks; orienting oneself can be both tedious and time-consuming), please feel free to leave me a message. You can do this by clicking on the “(talk)” link after the username in my signature below, which will take you to my user talk page where you can leave a message using either the “Edit” or “New section” buttons (which should be visible at the top of the page). Alternatively, you can respond immediately below this message—on your user talk page—and I will probably see it. The difference between the two is that when you leave a message on my user talk page, I will be notified by the Wikipedia software the next time I visit the site (like you should have been, by the bright orange bar, when I left this message); if you leave a message here, on your user talk page, I will have to remember to check it for new messages, but it has the advantage of keeping replies with the message they are in response to. Practice on which way to do it is not fixed, and you should feel free to use whichever seems most logical and convenient to you. --Xover (talk) 11:38, 14 July 2011 (UTC)