User talk:BethNewcomb

AfC notification: Draft:Paul H. Irving has a new comment
 I've left a comment on your Articles for Creation submission, which can be viewed at Draft:Paul H. Irving. Thanks!  DGG ( talk ) 01:05, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

Working in Wikipedia as a paid editor
Hi Beth. Thanks for disclosing that you work in PR for USC Davis School of Gerontology. I am also pinging your colleague User:OrliBelman.

By way of introduction, I spend time working on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing, which is mostly about health and medicine. I am not an administrator.

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. Unmanaged conflicts of interest can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies and cause disruption in the normal editing process. Managing conflict of interest well, also protects conflicted editors and their employers themselves - please see WP:Wikipedia is in the real world, and Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia for some guidance and stories about people who have brought bad press upon themselves through unmanaged conflict of interest editing.

As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step, which each of you have done. Thanks for being straightforward about that.

The second 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 of editors who have a COI or who are paid, 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 with the Template:Connected contributor (paid) tag, 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
 * (i) disclose at the Talk page of the article with the Template:Connected contributor (paid) tag, putting it at the bottom of the beige box at the top of the page; and
 * (ii) propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. Just open a new section on the talk page, put the proposed content there formatted just as you would if you were adding it directly to the article, and just below the header (at the top of the editing window) place the  tag to flag it for other editors to review.  In general it should be relatively short so that it is not too much review at once.  Sometimes editors propose complete rewrites, providing a link to their sandbox for example.  This is OK to do but please be aware that it is lot more for volunteers to process and will probably take longer.

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. (There are good faith paid editors here, who have signed and follow the Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms, and there are "black hat" paid editors here who lie about what they do and really harm Wikipedia).

But understanding the mission, and the policies and guidelines through which we realize the mission, is very important! There are a whole slew of policies and guidelines that govern content and behavior here in Wikipedia. Please see User:Jytdog/How for an overview of what Wikipedia is and is not (we are not a directory or a place to promote anything), and for an overview of the content and behavior policies and guidelines. Learning and following these is very important, and takes time. Please be aware that you have created a Wikipedia account, and this makes you a Wikipedian - you are obligated to pursue Wikipedia's mission first and foremost when you work here, and you are obligated to edit according to the policies and guidelines. Editing Wikipedia is a privilege that is freely offered to all, but the community restricts or completely takes that privilege away from people who will not edit and behave as Wikipedians.

I hope that makes sense to you.

I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where a company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, disclose that you are a paid editor in the edit note, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content. If you are not sure if something is uncontroversial, please ask at the Talk page.

Will you please agree to learn and follow the content and behavioral policies and guidelines, and to follow the peer review processes going forward when you want to work on the XXX article or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss.

Since you both edit about health, and about longevity, I am posting a couple of additional notes below -- one that provides orientation to editing about health in Wikipedia and the other of which makes you aware of an administrative situation here, regarding longevity. (I will post both of those, on each of your talk pages) Jytdog (talk) 18:07, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Welcome from WP:MED
Welcome to Wikipedia! We have compiled some guidance for new healthcare editors:
 * 1) Please keep the mission of Wikipedia in mind. We provide the public with accepted knowledge, working in a community.
 * 2) We do that by finding high quality secondary sources and summarizing what they say, giving WP:WEIGHT as they do.  Please do not try to build content by synthesizing content based on primary sources.
 * 3) Please use high-quality, recent, secondary sources for medical content (see WP:MEDRS; for the difference between primary and secondary sources, see the WP:MEDDEF section.) High-quality sources include review articles (which are not the same as peer-reviewed), position statements from nationally and internationally recognized bodies (like CDC, WHO, FDA), and major medical textbooks. Lower-quality sources are typically removed. Please beware of predatory publishers – check the publishers of articles (especially open source articles) at Beall's list.
 * 4) The ordering of sections typically follows the instructions at WP:MEDMOS. The section above the table of contents is called the WP:LEAD. It summarizes the body. Do not add anything to the lead that is not in the body. Style is covered in MEDMOS as well; we avoid the word "patient" for example.
 * 5) We don't use terms like "currently", "recently," "now", or "today". See WP:RELTIME.
 * 6) More generally see WP:MEDHOW, which gives great tips for editing about health -- for example, it provides a way to format citations quickly and easily
 * 7) Citation details are important:
 * 8) *Be sure cite the PMID for journal articles and ISBN for books
 * 9) *Please include page numbers when referencing a book or long journal article, and please format citations consistently within an article.
 * 10) *Do not use URLs from your university library that have "proxy" in them: the rest of the world cannot see them.
 * 11) *Reference tags generally go after punctuation, not before; there is no preceding space.
 * 12) We use very few capital letters (see WP:MOSCAPS) and very little bolding. Only the first word of a heading is usually capitalized.
 * 13) Common terms are not usually wikilinked; nor are years, dates, or names of countries and major cities. Avoid overlinking!\
 * 14) Never copy and paste from sources; we run detection software on new edits.
 * 15) Talk to us! Wikipedia works by collaboration at articles and user talkpages.

Once again, welcome, and thank you for joining us! Please share these guidelines with other new editors.

– the WikiProject Medicine team Jytdog (talk) 18:07, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

References and formatting citations
This provides a bit more guidance about MEDRS and MEDHOW, mentioned above... Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia. Remember that when adding content about health, please only use high-quality reliable sources as references. We typically use review articles, major textbooks and position statements of national or international organizations (There are several kinds of sources that discuss health: here is how the community classifies them and uses them). WP:MEDHOW walks you through editing step by step. A list of resources to help edit health content can be found here. The edit box has a built-in citation tool to easily format references based on the PMID or ISBN.


 * 1) While editing any article or a wikipage, on the top of the edit window you will see a toolbar which says "cite" click on it
 * 2) Then click on "templates",
 * 3) Choose the most appropriate template and fill in the details beside a magnifying glass followed by clicking said button,

We also provide style advice about the structure and content of medicine-related encyclopedia articles. The welcome page is another good place to learn about editing the encyclopedia. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a note. Jytdog (talk) 18:10, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Notice of discretionary sanctions
Jytdog (talk) 18:09, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Paul H. Irving


Hello, BethNewcomb. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Paul H. Irving".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply and remove the, , or  code.

If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. JMHamo (talk) 21:35, 20 July 2019 (UTC)