User talk:Doloresflower

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent contributions seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes. Wikipedia does not allow advertising in articles. For more information on this, see If you still have questions, there is a new contributor's help page, or you can write   below this message along with a question and someone will be along to answer it shortly. You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia. I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! --TeaDrinker 00:27, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
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corporations and advertising on wikipedia
hi. I'm a newly registered person, and I felt strange to receive a message telling me that I may be guilty of advertising. It seems funny. I wonder if this is because I added the site cruise junkie dot com to the Carnival Cruise Line website? I can tell you that I don't have any affiliation with cruise junkie (or with Carnival), but Ross Klein, who edits the site also has published several books, critically well-received, about the cruise industry and carnival in particular. As far as I know, cruise junkie does not sell any product or take any money. It is not a pay-to-view site. I added Ross Klein's site because it is informative, and it does contain information that is relevant to Carnival and cruise ships in general. I thought that Klein's site is also somewhat in the middle on the controversy concerning Carnival. There is also a site from the British Charity War on Want who has a sweat ships campaign....I did not add this because I thought that Carnival itself would probably erase any negative contribution like that from "it's" site, but the British Charity, and Ross Klein, and Kristoffer Garin, a writer for Harper's and New York journalist, and John Bowe who wrote a book called Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy have all named Carnival in particular for its use of debt peonage labor, or people who have gone into debt for thousands of dollars in order to procure a job on Carnival, so they cannot quit without financially ruining their families beyond what anyone in the first world can imagine. Anyway, these all very credible sources allege that Carnival uses this, so-to-speak, slave labor to power its ships. So I don't quite know, as an average person, why this controversy shouldn't be included on their website. Is a corporate website protected by Wikipedia in ways I don't quite understand? I guess I am interested in the editing process and whether a corporation should be exempt from controversy, unlike, say, an individual on Wikipedia. (There are many controversies sited under the names of people on Wikipedia.)

thank-you, Doloresflower 08:44, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the note and welcome to Wikipedia. I apologize if my message seemed accusatory; new users who begin by adding external links are often promoting their own site.  A few things caught my attention with that link in particular: adding it to the top of the list, the site was run by one person, and it was not narrowly tailored to the Carnival Cruise Line specifically.  Perhaps I was working too fast and missed the value of the site.  Certainly Wikipedia does not forbid coverage of controversies which might cast the subject in a negative light.  In fact, so long as the controversy is well sourced, notable, and reported on (rather than taking a side), such information is strongly encouraged to be included in the article itself, not just relegated to external links.  Carnival, ideally, should not be editing its own article (per conflict of interest guidline), and certainly has no official say in how it is presented (so long as the criticism is well sourced and neutrally written).
 * I'm afraid the controversy is a new one to me, but I would be happy to help integrating something into the article itself with regard to this controversy. I will go ahead and restore the link, but let me know if there is more I can do.  Best wishes, --TeaDrinker 17:29, 17 October 2007 (UTC)