User talk:Cathsoci

Adbusters edits
Welcome to Wikipedia and thank you for your efforts. I am concerned, however, at your various expansions to Adbusters as falling outside content guidelines as expressed by WP:NPOV, WP:What Wikipedia is not and WP:Soapbox and other similar materials. Your line-cites are admirable in their thoroughness and general conformity to WP:MOS but the resulting content is reading like a blurb for the magazine, and also seems to be being used to advance the POV of the magazine. Wikipedia articles are not meant to be free advertising/promotional space. I don't know if you work for or with Adbusters, but please bear in mind also WP:COI. The following is an email I sent last night to editor@adbusters.org and info@adbusters.org which elaborates on this further: I have been noticing additions to your group's Wikipedia page and it concerns me that you are flouting numerous guidelines concerning format, tone and purpose. Wikipedia is not a soapbox and should not be used as such, it is anti-advertising which I would expect you to respect but your page reads like advertising both for your magazine and also for your agenda; please desist from edits as per WP:COI (type that in the Wikpedia search window - basically it refers to a policy whereby members of an organization should not be contributing to or editing articles about that organization) unless any of your contributors/members/subscribers adhere STRICTLY to WP:NPOV, WP:Soapbox, WP:NOT and are familiarized with WP:MOS and other basic Wikipedia guidelines.  You can expect the article to be trimmed of a lot of its rhetorical content; it's not encyclopedic in tone and reads like a press release for your group. This is no more appropriate for your group than it is for a political party or political bio or corporate article.  Wikipedia also has a guidelines called WP:Be welcoming and another called WP:Assume good faith. I am maybe not as welcoming as I should be, but I'm tired of being confronted by "campaign articles" and having to clean them up and try and bring them towards Wikipedia content guidelines, when I could so much be better using my (considerable and prolific) energies fixing/expanding history, geography, community and historical-bio articles, and patrolling poiltical party and corporate materials for THEIR considerable efforts to use Wikipedia for THEIR promotion. But I AM assuming good faith in thinking that perhaps you and your supporters/staff/contributors who have been expanding the article are unaware of Wikipedia's various guidlines as named above. Wikipedia volunteer editors and wikiproject contributors have enough to do in the way of patrolling information management than cleaning up an article about an organization dedicated to deconstructing information control.  Please educate yourself about the purpose of Wikipedia. Perhaps, even, an article about the various ways everyone from envirnomental campaigns to First Nations to other governments to political parties to individuals of all stripes seem to be taking courses in how to manipulate Wikipedia for their own ends; it's a very large topic and a growing concern. As an active Wikipedian, though, I'm honour-bound not to write it; Wikipedia controversies are not generally taken to the press directly, unless the press breaks them in some way (unfortuatnely usually for trivial matters rather than more serious ones).  Again, please realized that a Wikipedia page about your organization is not and should not be written as a piece of promotional material for your ideas and your publication. It must be written objectively, and ideally should be "hands off" by any of your staff. some exceptions to WP:COI when, as with first nations and small communities and family histories, the contirbuting individuals may be the only ones with relevant facts/corrections. But rheotrical tone and any taint of "POV" is strictly forbidden and will utlimately be removed; please don't make us all more work by putting in even more than is already the case. Clean up your own house before criticizing big media for THEIR abuses, basically....  Sincerely, and in good faith and lover-of-truth fellowship Thank you for your time and hopefully-shared concerns about maintaining Wikipedia's neutrality, which is core to its vitality and survival as a user-contributed encyclopedia.Skookum1 (talk) 15:36, 9 April 2009 (UTC)