User talk:Cfschreiber

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, Cfschreiber. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you have an external relationship with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article Current Issues in Education, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about ensuring their edits are verified by reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:


 * Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
 * Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).
 * Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies. Note that Wikipedia's terms of use require disclosure of your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. Randykitty (talk) 12:25, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks and Request for Clarification
First, thanks again, Randykitty! Your comment makes a lot of sense, and I'm glad to see the high standard to which you hold Wikipedia entries. Obviously, I am the Executive Editor of Current Issues in Education and I did not try to hide that. Accordingly, I have now started my user page and added that information. So, I fully acknowledge a close connection to the subject, which is obviously seen as a conflict of interest. It seems that edits were made by Editors in the past and this was not flagged by anyone, so I assumed the factual information I posted was helpful, rather than an issue. My apologies for not checking on this assumption by looking into Wikipedia's policies in more detail.

Nonetheless, I think that the information I provided met the standard of neutral point of view, "which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view). Listing the names of past editors, information about copyright and publication frequency, and providing more detail about the journal's history summarize my major edits, I think. None of these edits contained opinions, but I acknowledge that more references to our website could be provided. I doubt there is another source for this information and this absence of other sources for the information is of course a concern in the eyes of a neutral viewer. So, if that is the issue/one of the issues, then the edits you made are understandable and I will not edit.

Another issue that appears to apply is the lack of frequent referencing to our website, where all of the information I added can be found. If the referencing was not appropriate according to Wikipedia's standards or if I am simply the wrong person to make any changes on this page, I fully understand that. The former can be fixed, the latter not. So, if referencing was the issue here then I hope I can improve my understanding of what is okay and what isn't. I will work through what's okay and what isn't a bit more in the next days, but working with a peer-reviewed academic journal, I think I understand and am familiar with the issues you point out.

Another question that probably goes to the major issue with my edits of the CIE Wikipedia entry concerns the question of what is a reliable, verifiable source, in this case the difference between "published" material on CIE's website vs. material that is simply found on our website. It appears to me then that citing editorials from our website is thus legitimate, but other information that is not part of the official process is not considered an appropriate source of information (please correct me if I am wrong). I have chosen not to write editorials for our journal despite my status of Executive Editor (and before, when I was working with a Co-Editor) because we as the journal have felt for a while that given our publishing format, published editorials are not making a meaningful contribution to our issues. Instead, we "publish" an annual report and now also "editorials" on our website. To play devil's advocate: If we were to publish editorials in our issues and would simply list the basic factual information I added to the Wikipedia entry (which is already on our website) and it would be published as part of one of our issues, it would count as a valid reference by Wikipedia standards, correct? I do not want to do that and will not do that because I believe that facts and history can be provided accurately outside of this format. So, if that is the problem here then I prefer to have a relatively blank and limited Wikipedia article that satisfies Wikipedia's standards.

This to me though raises the question of the neutrality of a published editorial that is officially part of an issue vs. information provided by the journal that is not a "published" part of an issue. In other words, one type of source meets the Wikipedia standard of verifiability, while the other source doesn't, when I don't see either one meeting the standard "that information that is included must have been published by someone other than yourself (or your company)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BFAQ#RULES

Again, your comments were very helpful and I fully admit my relationship to CIE. If my editing of the CIE Wikipedia page brings more trouble then it is best for me and future CIE Editors not to make such edits. Your understanding of Wikipedia's workings is much better than mine, so I appreciate your help here. I hope that my comments sufficiently illuminate what I see as issues concerning verifiability of information. I would love additional clarification concerning the questions and issues I raised above. This is particularly so as I see the edits I made as factual and absent of opinions, while fully acknowledging that I failed to explicitly state my conflict of interest and also should have provided more references to our website, where all of the information I provided can be found. Again, the verifiability of information may be the main issue here and that would be an issue that cannot easily be overcome. However, I believe (again, my understanding might be to basic) that when making my edits, I followed at least these two of your three suggestions: Concerning the third comment, I believe that I exercised great caution, but I acknowledge that I did not point out my conflict of interest on my user page.
 * '''Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
 * '''Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).

Thank you!

Cfschreiber (talk) 22:58, 5 June 2015 (UTC)