User talk:Alsears

June 2019
Hello, Alsears. 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. See the COI guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:


 * avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, company, organization or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the request edit template);
 * disclose your COI when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
 * do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. ElKevbo (talk) 20:30, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion
There is currently a discussion at Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident with which you may be involved. Thank you. ElKevbo (talk) 21:47, 7 June 2019 (UTC)
 * You really need to join discussion Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard. Not discussing changes is disruptive editing and can result in a block. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:34, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

New discussions and follow up messages are placed at the bottom of Talk pages
This is a quick note that I haven't deleted any of your messages on my Talk page; I just moved them to the bottom and replied there. The wiki interface is very primitive and doesn't support threaded discussion very well so we've long settled on posting new replies toward the bottom of Talk pages as our standard approach. Doing that consistently and ensuring that we indent replies is how we hold discussions using this interface; it's a surprisingly primitive interface but these practices make it kind-of work... ElKevbo (talk) 23:01, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Copyright problem on City Vision University
Content you added to the above article appears to have been copied from https://web.cityvision.edu/home/, which is not released under a compatible license. Copying text directly from a source is a violation of Wikipedia's copyright policy. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, the content had to be removed. Content you add to Wikipedia should be written in your own words. Please leave a message on my talk page if you have any questions. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 11:45, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Diannaa, I don't see a record of you making an edit to the page. Could you clarify? I'm sorry, I'm not super experienced in editing in Wikipedia.Alsears (talk) 22:43, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Some suggestions
Mr. Sears, I see you struggling with regards to the maintenance of your page, so I'm going to make a few suggestions, which you are free to take as seriously as you wish. If you have any questions, you can let me know! --Nat Gertler (talk) 23:33, 10 June 2019 (UTC) (And, of course, in the time it took me to post that, you've already weighed in on the article's deletion discussion. That's what I get for being so verbose!) --Nat Gertler (talk) 23:36, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
 * 1) Stop editing your school's page directly. As the head of the school, you not only clearly have a conflict of interest (which makes editing "strongly discouraged", you are seed as this being part of what you are paid to do, which means you are outright banned from editing the page. (There is an exception to reverting clear vandalism, but please realize that vandalism is not undoing someone's removal of information you wanted there, but more things in the YOUR SCHOOL IS SCHMUCKS! category.)
 * 2) Don't assume that that means that your page cannot be maintained. You've repeatedly tried to explain that small organizations' pages cannot be maintained if that is the case, but that's grounded in a false assumption. Those of us who edit Wikipedia regularly know that that is not the case... and I say that as someone who runs a small organization that has a Wikipedia page. If there is material there that is inaccurate, or even just some additional material you wish to be included, you can post a message on the article's Talk page (that's Talk:City Vision University) making the suggestion. As you've seen, there are a number of editors working on the page, and likely most or all of them now have your page on their "watch" list. What that means is that whenever someone edits the article or the talk page, they'll be notified, and can respond. If after a few days there is no response, try posting on the talk page of an editor that you've had good experience with, asking them to take a look.
 * 3) Realize that Wikipedia focuses not on "truth", but on verifiability. You may have some key piece of information that you want to give us, but if there isn't somewhere that the Wikipedia reader can go to double-check that claim, it probably shouldn't be in the article. Towards that end...
 * 4) Maintain your school's website. It is one of the obvious sources for non-boastful information about your school. It seems like some of the numbers you have tried to update have run into problems because there are other, older numbers on your school's website, and that site is what's being used as reference for the claims. (By the way, when I went to check some material on the website recently, my browser was telling me that your website's security certificate was out of date, making the site suspect. You may want to check if that is actually a problem, rather than something on my end, because such messages would seem likely to scare away potential students.)
 * 5) Realize that having experienced Wikipedia editors do the editing may make the page better. For example, there's some information on the page about job placements rates, sourced to a page of your school's website... which has no such information. If someone sees the claim and tries to verify it, they can't. Now it's likely that that information actually was on your website when that link got posted. Had an experienced, conscientious Wikipedia editor added that reference, they would've included the "access date", letting folks know when the reference was added and thus when the information was on your website, and someone looking now could use an Internet archiving site to check what your page said on that date, to verify that that claim was made.
 * 6) You are free to enter into the deletion discussion. If you choose to do so, be sure to lead with stating your relationship to the school, so it doesn't look like you are hiding a conflict. Try to make your arguments in terms of Wikipedia policy - and really, the key one is likely notability, by which Wikipedia really means noted. Pointing us to third-party articles about your school in significant sources would do a lot of good.
 * 7) If your school's page gets deleted, it might not be a bad thing. After all, if someone Googles your school name, the Wikipedia page will be one of the top results, and many users may click there first rather than on your school's page. Now, which would you rather they see: a Wikipedia page that you don't have control over and which is not intended to be a promotional brochure, or your school's own site, under your control, stressing whatever attractive aspects of your school you choose to stress? (Having said that, the page is not likely to end up deleted; pages for institutes of higher education rarely are.)

June 2019
Thank you for your contributions. Please mark your edits, such as your recent edits to City Vision University, as "minor" only if they are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Thank you. Nat Gertler (talk) 15:39, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Nat Gertler, sorry, I'm trying. I had assumed that just adding a reference link is minor. I will know better in the future.
 * In general, when you're adding information to a page - and a reference is a form of information - it's not minor (in our terms; I can certainly understand how that is your instinct.) Having said that, let me remind you that you should not be adding information directly to that page at all, because of conflicts. Use the article's Talk page to suggest alterations. But suggesting sources for statements would indeed be a positive action. --Nat Gertler (talk) 15:38, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

The article is being merged
Just to let you know, the deletion discussion on City Vision University has closed, the consensus was to merge it with TechMission, which will probably be done soon. TheAwesomeHwyh (talk) 01:13, 16 June 2019 (UTC)