User talk:Dr Colin A Ross

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Vindarten (talk) 19:35, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Conflict of interest
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 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;
 * 3) linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam); and,
 * 4) avoid breaching 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.

Follow-up
Hello Dr. Ross,

My apologies for the revert and warning, I was in a hurry. I'm now following up with some comments and advice which should help wikipedia get a better page and you be more comfortable that it is a fair representation of your life and accomplishments. I will be pointing to several policies on wikipedia, I'm sure if you review them you will see they are both reasonable and good practices.

First, no-one should write an article about themselves. It poses an obvious conflict of interest and in the occassions where it has happened and reached the public, it ended up being quite embarassing for both the individual and wikipedia. Editing by proxy is useful - individuals are often the people to know what has been written about them and can provide these sources to a non-COI editor to review and integrate. Having reverted your changes, I feel obligated to act as a proxy and will begin reviewing your page when I have a bit more time. If you are aware of some sources that may be of use, I would be most pleased if you could provide them to me. One thing that would also be helpful would be a list of scholarly publication, articles, books, and noteworthy popular items that I could integrate as a list of works.

Second, wikipedia must be based on reliable sources. This is particularly compelling for articles about living people. Wikipedia has a very low tolerance for disparaging or untrue edits on pages about actual people. Though personal web pages are of limited use, they can be used to portray the subject's perspective on things.

Third, your page would be greatly improved through a picture. Images on wikipedia must be fair use; it's a nightmare of a page, but basically the best way to get an image on a page is to take one yourself and release it under the Gnu Free Documentation License. This entails releasing it to anyone for any purpose, including commercial exploitation, in perpetuity. Sounds harsh, but anyone willing to disparage you using your image would probably have few qualms about thieving an image from a random webpage

Finally, in your edit you removed a lot of material. You'll probably be happy to know that much of it is problematic - it is coatrack prose addressing a topic other than your life and work or is non-neutral and weaselly, looking like a sneaky way of introducing criticism.

I'll try to make time to continue working on the page. Though I encourage you to suggest improvements or changes on the talk page, if you edit directly again you will almost certainly be blocked. I will do my best to address your suggestions appropriately, pointing to the appropriately policies that guide my edits. Please feel free to respond here, on my talk page or Talk:Colin A. Ross. If urgent or you want to be certain to get my attention, the best would be to use my talk page. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 23:19, 23 April 2009 (UTC)