User talk:Chasclifton

Your recent edits to Chas S. Clifton
If you have a close connection to 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 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;
 * 3) linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam);
 * and you must always:
 * 1) avoid breaching relevant policies and guidelines, especially neutral point of view, verifiability, and autobiography.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have conflict of interest, please see Business' FAQ. For more details about what constitutes a conflict of interest, please see Conflict of Interest. Pigman ☿ 04:21, 25 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Being loosely familiar with your writing, I do indeed expect you are familiar with encyclopedic tone and content. It's more a heads-up kind of thing for you about Wikipedia. As you might know, Wikipedia attracts more than its share of self-promoters eager to use it to advance themselves and/or their causes. Please explore the links in the welcome message at the top of this talk page. There are links to some of the most important points and policies of Wikipedia. My advice to you would be to try to keep in mind that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, not a primary or secondary one. Plain listings of your publications are unlikely to be challenged but any personal data should always have been published elsewhere. This falls under the No Original Research policy. Also, Wikipedia has no way of knowing whether you are you just because you registered an account under this name. Anyone could do that so if anyone doubts who you are, don't take it personally. It's an involved process if you actually want to provide proof of your identity to the Wikimedia Foundation in order to correct severely incorrect info on the bio article on you. Also be aware that any editor can change the info at any time. Outright vandalism is usually caught swiftly and corrected but if a Wikipedia editor (especially an experienced one) challenges and removes info you've put in, the onus of proof is on the editor who wants to insert info, not the editor removing info. Then reliable and verifiable sources need to be provided.


 * This is more advice than I usual give to newcomers but I really don't want you to fall afoul of policy. Autobiographies are particularly sticky areas because people don't like to see negative info about themselves. (I doubt you have had a hatchet job published on you so this is unlikely to be an issue.) Wikipedia's goal is verifiability, not truth.


 * Anyway, if you have any questions or need help, please don't hesitate to drop a line on my talk page. My watchlist and interests here range wider than the Neopagan articles but I'll try to keep an eye on the article about you. Cheers, 23:32, 25 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Typically, info contained in a Wikipedia (WP) article has been published elsewhere. If there has been an interview with the subject (you), that can be mined for data. Footnotes would provide sources for particular info. Right now I wouldn't worry too much about the specifics. I've added two new sections: Notes and References. Notes will be for footnotes, References will be for places providing less specific sources for the content of this WP article. Under Refs, I've put a link to the page on the CSU-Pueblo website showing that you worked there. Some of this is described in the WP Manual of Style I think. Footnotes are usually inserted inline. The Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism article might be a good one for you to look at for how the code works for footnotes. Go into edit mode for that article and you'll see how there are tags around some info. When the page is displayed, these are automatically put into the References section as footnotes. (There's some flexibility about these section names and the section content. My current setup on the Chas S. Clifton article is just a suggestion.


 * My suggestion would be to provide links to articles with substantial info about you in the Refs section. As I said, I find interviews rich sources for such info. The article is about Chas Clifton, and only partially about about his books and writings, so sources should be focused to that end. Not that reviews of the books aren't good sources; they are. Reviews particularly show why the author's written work is important and notable. You may want to take a look at WP's biographical notability guidelines. If your article is challenged as to whether you are, in fact, notable enough by WP standards, this is what people refer to for guidance. If you've won any awards, this should go in the article. Just because you've written a bunch of books and articles doesn't necessarily make you notable by WP standards. This can be hard to understand. A CV or a resume is not the same as notability. This is a little scattered but let me know if you need more info. Cheers, Pigman' ☿ 01:08, 26 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Sure, adding those is great. Sources don't necessarily need to be online but it is helpful for other editors to see the material themselves if possible. Because WP's manual of style frowns on inline use of external links, I've turned them into footnotes instead. I've currently left them expanded on lines but they can be collapsed by taking out the line breaks. Just don't delete the lines between the fields or the empty fields or it will fail. There are templates for almost any kind of citation: web, book, magazine, journal, etc. Format is generally flexible but should be consistent throughout any given article. Try WP:CITE for some links but most any major citation style is acceptable. The Citing sources will probably tell you more than you want to know. Cheers, Pigman ☿ 03:44, 27 May 2008 (UTC)