User talk:CA-Wiki-Info

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Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines for page creation, and may soon be deleted.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type   on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Where to ask a question or ask me on. Again, welcome! Excirial ( Contact me, Contribs ) 18:31, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
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Speedy deletion nomination of Covenant Academy
A tag has been placed on Covenant Academy, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G11 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page seems to be unambiguous advertising which only promotes a company, product, group, service or person and would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become an encyclopedia article. Please read the guidelines on spam as well as FAQ/Business for more information. You may also wish to consider using a Wizard to help you create articles - see the Article Wizard.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the page does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that they userfy the page or have a copy emailed to you. Excirial ( Contact me, Contribs ) 18:31, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

October 2009
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;
 * 2) participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors; and
 * 3) linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).

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. Thank you. noq (talk) 19:29, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

This account, , has been blocked indefinitely from editing Wikipedia, because your username does not meet our username policy. This block is only regarding your username&mdash;it is not a judgment of either you personally or your contributions.

Names should not be offensive, disruptive, promotional, misleading, or related to a "real-world" group or organization. Also, usernames may not end in the word "bot" unless the account is an approved bot account.

Please choose a new account name that meets our policy guidelines. However, do not create a new account if you wish to credit your existing contributions to a new name through a username change. To request a username change:
 * Add on your user talk page. You should be able to edit this talk page even though you are blocked. If not, you may wish to contact the blocking administrator by clicking on "E-mail this user" on their talk page.
 * At an administrator's discretion, you may be unblocked for 24 hours to file a request.
 * Please note that you may only request a name that is not already in use, so please check here for a list of names that have already been taken. For more information, please see Changing username.

If you feel that you were blocked in error, you may appeal this block by adding the text below, but you should read our guide to appealing blocks first. Cirt (talk) 19:50, 22 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Knowing that you will not be able to edit about Covenant Academy, which articles would you work on if the name change goes thru and you're unblocked? - Jeremy  ( v^_^v Stop... at a WHAMMY!! ) 20:07, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

None. The only reason we set this up was to establish an article about the school. Honestly this has been very frustrating. Now even the supposedly accepted article is nowhere to be found. This is quickly becoming useless.
 * Yes, under the conflict of interest guidelines, we all agree to avoid writing about ourselves or our own organizations, and Wikipedia volunteers join because they want to provide a free encyclopedia to the world, not to promote their own organizations. Of course, if you want to be a volunteer, you'll be entirely welcome, but if you only want to promote your school, you don't need to; if your school is truly notable, it's inevitable that someone outside the organization will be independently inspired to write about it. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 01:41, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

I regularly defend Wikipedia as a source of information, but it seems I may be mistaken. The article was neutral as requested. It was modeled after our neighbor school. The knowledge base of the school is held by those who are a part of it, but that expertise doesn't count it seems. You can go ahead and delete this account as it cannot be used anyway.
 * The next time you defend Wikipedia as a source of information, tell your students how even you weren't allowed to create an article without using independent sources to cite your information, and how other editors prevented you from writing about your own organization- those are the rules that keep Wikipedia so reliable. There is no way for the wikimedia software to 'delete' any account. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 16:11, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Independent doesn't translate to knowledgeable or accurate. Your policies exclude the most knowledgeable from contributing. Thus all contributions are by definition created without being able to access the source and are suspect because they are unfamiliar with the subject rather than familiar to whatever degree they are or are not associated with their subject matter. Wikipedia has been suspect because their sources were suspect. I defended them because I understood they were working to confirm the reliability of their sources. Instead it seems you are excluding the reliable sources for the unreliable. I don't know if any of my comments will make any difference, but perhaps it will spark some discussion and evaluation of your policies amongst your peers. In the meantime we'll wait for a non-expert to put inaccurate information up about the school.


 * But writing about yourself is suspect. How does anyone know that what is written is accurate without external references. The conflict of interest article covers why it is considered to be a bad thing. noq (talk) 19:21, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I've spent the last month or so dealing with MonaVie. That company's employees are constantly removing and changing information, because they want the article to reflect well on that company, even though the company is running a complete scam. They created an article hoping it would be an ad, but instead, the article tells everyone who searches for the company all about how they're misleading their customers and employees. If there's an article about your school, anyone can add to it. If one of your teachers gets fired for molesting a child, or your principal embezzles funds, that'll get added to the article, and it'll be there forever, because it can be cited by the newspaper articles. Your students will vandalize the article routinely, adding 'funny' information about their least favorite teachers, and since no one but you is watching this article, you'll have to check it and clean up the vandalism every day. When you lose interest and forget, or when you leave that school to go work somewhere else, the article will still be there. Since no one outside your school was interested enough to write or work on an article, no one will be looking at it but students, who will add nonsense to it. And it'll still always be the first hit for people who search Google for your school. It might even come up higher in search engines than your school's own web page. People searching for your school will find whatever negative but sourced information is in it, and the vandalism of your students, first. Trust me: lots of organizations think they want Wikipedia to have an article about them, but in general, they ultimately regret it. If you think we should rewrite our rules completely, throwing out two of our most most basic guiding principles, you can join Wikipedia as a private volunteer, learn to understand why we have the rules we do, see them in action and what happens when they're not followed, and then start a conversation in the appropriate place. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 19:33, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. Your points are well taken, but there still seems to be some disconnect in that the base source is not legitimate. I'll think about this and discuss with my peers. Thank you for your patience in dealing with me.


 * If your peers are skeptical, just show them this, which is the version of First Flight High School that was active before some more experienced editors noticed it and cleaned it up. It's not good, but it's certainly not the worst school article I've seen; it's just the one closest to the top of my watchlist. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 20:13, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

All this is proving is that Wikipedia is not a reliable resource and justifying teachers' directives to not use it because it isn't accurate or trustworthy. This goes to my point that you deny the authoritative reference of the base source but open it up to non-authoritative sources. This has been the bad press for Wikipedia. Their has to be a way to reconcile authoritative knowledge and conflict of interest. It seems to me that the ones that should be blocked are those who do not have a basis for authority by either position or citation. That apparently is what some of your competitors have begun to work on. If they succeed in building a large enough knowledge base then Wikipedia may just fall away into obscurity. I hope it doesn't as you have gathered a large database, but it is always under suspicion and therefore not useful as a research tool. At this point how can I promote/defend Wikipedia as a resource? By your own policies I can't.


 * You should approach Wikipedia as a potential source - but not trust it entirely based on the current version of the article. Look for good citations and follow them up. Wikipedia itself does not claim to be a reliable source - there are explicit guidelines that you do not use other articles to establish notability. Once notability is established via third party sources, you can quote and reference primary sources where appropriate. Also, check the article history and see what changes have been made over time - are any particular claims being pushed repeatedly? Do they have references? If there are no or few references then trust it less than an article that you have followed the references up on. noq (talk) 21:14, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
 * You'll have to decide for yourself whether to use Wikipedia or not; I can hardly advise you. Students should only be advised to use it if they can also be taught how to check the sources and use their own judgement to verify information in articles.  As far as I know, Wikipedia doesn't have any real competitors right now.  Conservapedia is rapidly devolving into self-parody, and Citizendium has too few users to even begin to rival Wikipedia's scope.  Encyclopedia Britannica is our only real competitor, but I think that their scope is so different from ours that there's plenty of room for us both.  -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 02:26, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
 * As for using the school's statements about itself as the only source of information, let me ask you as a fellow educator: think of the last ten students who were in trouble with you. They are the best qualified to know accurate information about their own actions; how many of them did you find were reliable reporters of that accurate information?  :)   If I used MonaVie's web site as the only source of information for that article, readers would think that the company was providing good jobs and enormous health boosts (they don't).  That's why we require independent information.   -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 02:33, 29 October 2009 (UTC)