User talk:Bro Cope

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The Wikipedia Tutorial is a good place to start learning about Wikipedia. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on. By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and discussion pages using four tildes, like this: &#126;&#126;&#126;&#126; (the software will replace them with your signature and the date). Again, welcome!  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive' 02:09, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Conflict-of-interest
If you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:
 * 1) editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
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Please familiarize yourself with relevant 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 conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. For more details about what, exactly, constitutes a conflict of interest, please see our conflict of interest guidelines. -  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive' 23:06, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Notice
I have begun a discussion of your edits here. I hope that we can reach an accommodation on this issue. You are free to edit Wikipedia, but it is bad form to add or change information about yourself. ---  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive' 23:38, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Welcome to our humble project
Hello Bro! (Or should I just say Mr. Cope?) I just wanted to briefly explain what is meant by a "conflict of interest" in Wikipedia, how that applies to what you edit, and reassure you somewhat about what is being claimed about you.

Firstly, I want to personally welcome you, Wikipedia is a project full of hobbyists with relatively few "experts". More often as not, an article on a subject like particle accelerators is edited by a 12-year-old kid rather than by a trained physicist. The way Wikipedia works, that's actually not a big problem, because this project is meant to be a collection of information, not a source of it. That 12-year-old I mentioned may not know a quark from a boson, but if he finds information in a published research paper written by a notable and respected scientist then he can add information to the article from that paper and reference it. In that way, we can verify the accuracy of the information that he added. At the same time, when we do have experts that is even better because those experts will better know where to find the best sources and the best way to use them to improve articles.

One thing that experts (and in fact any editor) should be careful not to do is to add original research. That means information drawn from their own knowledge and experience. All information should be traced back to a reliable source, or at the very least any controversial information that might be objected to by another editor should be sourced.

Another reason why sources are necessary is to ensure notability of the subject of an article. I might think that my neighbor's dog is interesting, because he knows many tricks and has a really strange marking on his back. But even though this is the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", not every subject is notable enough to have an article. There are different ways to determine whether or not a subject is notable, depending on what that subject might be, but the most basic criteria is that significant coverage must be shown in reliable sources. If my neighbor's dog foiled a bank robbery and ended up on the front page of the New York Times, then maybe he really is notable enough for his own article. I could use that news article to establish that notability as well as to verify the accuracy of the bank robbery story.

Often times people might come into Wikipedia with the intent to create an article about themselves, or their relative, or the company they work for. Or they may find such an article already here and object to its content and wish to change it. Sometimes they just want to link to a web site they own, or in your case to include themselves in a list in an article. When that happens there is a conflict of interest (or COI for short). The COI isn't in itself a violation of any rules at Wikipedia, but when a COI is identified it can lead to suspicion and draw attention to the person. For example, if you edit your company's article, maybe you just want to add information about an important new invention that would improve the article. But maybe you really want to advertise your company to make it more profitable. Maybe you were even paid to do so. If that is the case, then you would not be here to actually improve the article, you would be considered to have ulterior motives that aren't compatible with the project.

I hope that you understand that when people say that you have a conflict of interest, it's not meant as an insult or an accusation. It is only identifying what might potentially become a problem. An editor with a COI who contributes positively to the project, is willing to work with other editors in a civil manner, and avoids breaking the rules is perfectly welcome. Sometimes, though, even when you have the best intentions you can't help but edit an article in a biased manner, it's an unconscious thing. In those cases you are generally asked to only contribute to the talk page of the article, where you can make suggestions to other editors about how to edit it rather than doing it yourself. There are many articles where an editor who is too closely tied to the subject is asked to only contribute in that way, and yet they are still able to address concerns in the article and make positive changes indirectly.

The particular concern that has been expressed about your editing is that you've added yourself to a list of campus preachers, which can be seen as an attempt at self-promotion. A link to your web site was also included, which promotes the web site as well. After you did so, another editor objected and removed it. You reverted that change to reinsert the information. A different editor removed the information, and you put it back again. It was removed again, and restored again. This kind of behavior is called an "edit war" and should be avoided (in truth, RepublicanJacobite was also edit-warring). When two or more editors disagree on the content that disagreement should be discussed and resolved on the talk page of the article rather than having the back-and-forth changes (often an administrator will revoke editing privileges from one or more editors in such a situation to stop the edit war). The other editor should have asked you to discuss matters at the talk page of the article, but they didn't which was a mistake. However, you did eventually talk things out on the talk page, but unfortunately in an aggressive manner, and you also chose to insult the other editors. Generally there isn't much tolerance for that kind of behavior, this project is a collaboration and for that collaboration to work everyone needs to treat each other with respect, even people who they disagree with.

I would suggest that you make an attempt to understand why people are objecting to your inclusion in the list. There is a very good chance you can change their minds. If you know of some coverage of yourself in a published source; a newspaper, a magazine, a book, that could be referenced then there's a good chance that it can be allowed. But the manner in which you are trying to get it done isn't going to work. It's very likely that eventually you will get blocked from editing the encyclopedia. I'd like to avoid that if at all possible.

Because this encyclopedia welcomes anyone who wants to edit we get every kind of person imaginable. We have editors from all walks of life and various beliefs. A number of editors are people of faith, so please don't assume that everyone here is going to be automatically biased against you. Civil behavior and a good, reasoned argument will go far here. Since you are a preacher I can only assume that you have a gift in communicating with others, if you use that gift in a less aggressive manner you might get people to appreciate your point of view. If you have any questions please let me know on my talk page, I'm open to whatever you have to say without prejudice. Thank you. --  At am a  頭 08:43, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

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'''I object to the editors, who by the evidence of the content of their writings, manifest a bias and a loathing of the things we preachers do. They speak not on the basis of having talked to one of us and investigated so as to understand the principles and methods we use. Instead they speak out of pure ignorance, and then cloak it in pseudo scholar babble. I have studied the phenomenon of preaching for 32 years, and there is no one in the country that knows more about the subject than I. Now that would be self-serving if it were not true.'''

'''But has even one of the editors of the stuff you put up as neutral coverage ever even spoken to a preacher, or is everything they write based solely on their total ignorance of what and why we do what we do? A scholar will present both sides of a subject. That never happens on Wiki. This Wiki thing is a joke as far as a serious scholarly attempt at accumulating information. You want us to use citation, but will not accept our original research. Face it there is no original research out there except for us. No one else is interested. All there is is biased diatribes. We are the only ones researching it. And we can't use any of what we have found. In striving to have a valuable resource, you have filtered out one fact, and it will be your downfall. When it comes to the subject of God, we are in the midst of a spiritual warfare. You allow those who hate God to suppress those who love God, and try to justify it as scholarship.''' Bro Cope (talk) 03:44, 27 November 2009 (UTC)