User talk:Bcdavies

Steve Morgan (businessman)
Hi Beverley. Thanks for the email. Your email is a little confusing as you claim all your changes were reverted when most of the substance of them remains intact. Most of what you were reverted on were style issues and the inclusion of details about entities that Mr Morgan had worked on rather than being information directly about him.

Nevertheless your edits have been problematic and while we're not intentionally trying to misrepresent Mr Morgan your approach to making changes is running up against several issues and the article is likely to be edited further since it is out of compliance with several of our guidelines.

I'll try to explain the issues here as well as cover the best way for you to approach correcting the problems you see.

For a start as Mr. Morgan's PA you are engaging in paid editing on his behalf. It probably hasn't occurred to you that for Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, paid editing by the subject of an article is itself problematic. Editorial integrity requires a certain distance between the writer and the subject. We do however encourage the use of the talk page to raise issues (more on this shortly). (Caveat: There are a couple of exceptions to this for instance it is always OK to remove unverified - i.e. assertions that do not have references - incorrect information from the article page. If you do this please make it clear in the edit summary that that is what you are doing.)

Encyclopedia articles are not Who's Who entries - we don't ask the subject how they would like to be represented. We try to cover the significant encyclopedic parts of a person's life. Our intention is to be accurate - we really appreciate notification of mistakes we've made. The Steve Morgan article ought to be based on what we call reliable sources that verify the assertions in the article. It currently doesn't (and didn't before you edited) do this well.

(Note: your offer to confirm information for us by phone is kind but not useful to Wikipedia - we do not rely on original research. From Wikipedia's perspective an editor claiming to have had a phone call with a representative of the subject is not sufficient as verification.  As a tertiary source we rely on previously published information.  So the sorts of sources we're looking for are books, newspaper articles etc. that can be considered reliable (as a very general example this means The Times rather than The Star).  Mr Morgan's own website could be used for very basic biographical details but is not appropriate for most claims especially ones about being first largest best etc.)

We also try to keep a neutral tone - our policy on this is that we represent the respected opinions of experts in the field. For a biography like this it means representing the facts about My. Morgan that have received significant notice from others. It isn't about what Mr. Morgan thinks is important in his life, it's about what others have found to be significant enough to publish on.

In short: We are interested in the information being correct - but we are not interested in hosting a PR piece for Mr Morgan.

I will start a thread on the talk page suggesting stubbing the article until we get further sources.

So what can you do? You can make suggestions on the talk page. Your knowledge of Mr. Morgan's life could be very useful for editors and really help improve the article. Your suggestions for content changes are more likely to be taken on board if you can provide the sort of sources I mention above. If serious issues remain there are other channels - we have a conflict of interest noticeboard where editors can ask for help as well as general dispute resolution processes.

If Mr Morgan's concerns become legal or you remain dissatisfied with on-Wiki responses then you should contact the Foundation.

Hope this explains some of what's been happening and what you can do to that will help make the article right. If you have any questions please feel free to leave a message at the bottom of my talk page. You can also type Helpme (with the curly brackets) here along with your query and an experienced editor will be along shortly to try and help out. -- SiobhanHansa 11:27, 21 August 2008 (UTC)