User talk:Annefrance

March 2012
Welcome to Wikipedia. Please refrain from engaging in a general discussion of the topic in the article page as you did in Anne-France Goldwater. Instead, use the appropriate talk page. Please remember that talk pages are for discussion related to improving the article, not general discussion about the topic. Please refrain from doing this in the future. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you.

Hello Annefrance. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article Anne-France Goldwater, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about following reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:


 * Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
 * Be cautious about deletion discussions. Everyone is welcome to provide information about independent sources in deletion discussions, but avoid advocating for deletion of articles about your competitors.
 * Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).
 * Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 04:38, 19 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Note, regarding biographies about yourself - for guidance on how to address concerns you may have with potentially inaccurate material, please see WP:BLP. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 04:52, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

From Bearcat
Just so we're clear on what's going on here, I've explicitly removed some of the more blatant neutral point of view violations that other people have tried to add — so I'd ask you please not to see or treat me as your enemy in this matter. I do want to assure you that while a few individual editors might have had ulterior motives in contributing to the article, Wikipedia as a whole is not trying to misrepresent or disparage you — but because we rely on what media sources say about a person, if the media gets the basic facts wrong then we're going to replicate the same errors. If they call something a divorce case, for example, we're going to end up making the same mistake — because our role here is to summarize the media coverage, not to investigate whether they got stuff right or wrong. If they don't correct their errors, then we're going to be wrong too, because our job here isn't to do their fact-checking for them. And if you're involved in a controversy in which the media tells somebody else's side of the story while not giving enough attention to yours, then unfortunately we simply don't have the necessary information to properly report your version of the issue; we can only work with what the media sources say about it.

At any rate, I'd be more than happy to work with you to improve the article (within our conflict of interest rules, of course; we can't just turn the article into a rewrite of your c.v.) If you know where we can access additional sources, then by all means share it so that we can expand the article to include more balanced and/or positive content — and you're more than welcome to clarify your concerns in more depth at Talk:Anne-France Goldwater so that we can work on them. It's not really within anybody's legal, moral or ethical rights to demand that an encyclopedia not have any article about them at all — but we're more than happy to assist in resolving your concerns if the content is inaccurate. That said, I'd ask you to simply be calm and work with us in good faith, instead of being accusatory and confrontational — if we got stuff wrong, it's because the media got it wrong, not because we're purposely trying to misrepresent anything or anyone.

And also, just so you know, Wikipedia strongly discourages posting your own contact information (phone numbers, etc.) to a publicly accessible page, because the possibility does exist of people misusing that information, so I've removed the sentence containing your phone number from your post to my talk page.

Finally, and I stress that this is extremely important: Wikipedia has an explicit policy that editors may not make legal threats against Wikipedia or other editors, nor do you have a right to demand that other Wikipedia editors provide you with personally identifying information. I've added our bias tag to the article and editprotected it so that only site administrators can edit it until we resolve your concerns, and if anything that's been added to the article is libellous or slanderous in nature, we also have the ability to remove it entirely from the edit history so that nobody can see it at all. Any issues that you have with the content can be resolved through our existing processes if you work with us constructively — but you can be blocked from editing Wikipedia entirely if you try to resolve the matter through threats of legal action instead of collaboration. Bearcat (talk) 18:21, 19 March 2012 (UTC)