User talk:Allysonbaughman

Welcome!
Hello, Allysonbaughman, 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 Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Blythwood (talk) 19:43, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Editing Wikipedia - message
Hello, thanks for re-registering! As I see you work for Harvard, it would probably be best to avoid editing on topics that could be considered promoting your institute - but if there's some mistake that you need to correct or something it would be best to file a formal disclosure of your connection if you have to make any further edits on topics related to Harvard or to people you know so people are aware of the situation. I've put a full automated explanation of this below. Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions and I'll try my best to help, or put you in touch with someone else who can! Blythwood (talk) 19:51, 8 June 2016 (UTC) Hello, Allysonbaughman. 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.

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion
This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident in which you may be involved. Thank you. Blythwood (talk) 16:37, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

June 2016
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Alicia Yamin has been reverted. Your edit here to Alicia Yamin was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline. The external link(s) you added or changed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezeA2UfCHTw) is/are on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. If the external link you inserted or changed was to a media file (e.g. a sound or video file) on an external server, then note that linking to such files may be subject to Wikipedia's copyright policy, as well as other parts of our external links guideline. If the information you linked to is indeed in violation of copyright, then such information should not be linked to. Please consider using our upload facility to upload a suitable media file, or consider linking to the original. If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 17:23, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Conflict of interest
Hi Allyson. Really - there is such a thing as "conflict of interest" - academics are very aware of this issue. If you are not, please talk to your boss and let her know that folks in Wikipedia that there are COI issues with what you are doing here.

I can explain to you how we manage COI in Wikipedia, but I can't do that if you won't reply, and so far you have not written anything on a "Talk" page in Wikipedia. Would you please reply here, and I can walk you through COI management here?

Thanks Jytdog (talk) 18:31, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi Jytdog,

Thanks so much for your communication. I am new to Wikipedia and trying to figure it out. I was given specific text by the person to use and I have explained to them that users are free to make changes to the page, however, they seem to want specific language. I am not sure what to do. Is there a way to keep the majority of the text and also avoid a COI?

Thanks for your advice.

Allysonbaughman (talk) 19:34, 20 June 2016 (UTC)


 * If other editors add and amend the text, so that it conveys the information desired (and for which sources exist, I assume), then that editing process would counter any conflict of interest. The key point is that the subject cannot be presumed to be unbiased about themselves. If they intend to have specific text about themselves, this isn't the website for them. But specific facts, written and documented by others? That we can do. The important bit about Wikipedia is that it's collaborative - we can't lock down the text just because it came from a particular editor. UltraExactZZ Said~ Did 20:09, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

This makes sense. Thank you.

20:22, 20 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi Allyson, thanks for replying. COI management has two steps in Wikipedia.  The first step is for you to disclose it.  So if you would add something to your Userpage (here: User:Allysonbaughman) like: "I work for Alicia Yamin‎ and have a conflict of interest in Wikipedia with regard to content describing her."  that would take care of the disclosure.   The second step 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:X -  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 -- and I hope you do!)


 * Does that make sense? Jytdog (talk) 20:20, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Hi Allyson. I think the other commenters have covered most of it, but WP:OWN is a manual that explains this - once an article has been posted, anyone can edit it and anyone can improve it. As discussed above, if Ms. Yamin wishes for a change in the article, she or you can request this on the article talk page. Although this would be an extreme resort, if she really does not accept a non self-authored text and she now wishes for the article to be deleted, while it's not guaranteed she would probably be able to request that the article be deleted, as discussed here. To do this she should contact the Wikimedia Foundation directly. Blythwood (talk) 20:25, 20 June 2016 (UTC)