User talk:Elrx

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, Elrx. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about in the article Celixir, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:


 * avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
 * instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the request edit template);
 * when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
 * exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you. Theroadislong (talk) 07:57, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion
There is currently a discussion at Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident with which you may be involved. Thank you. SamHolt6 (talk) 20:07, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Working in Wikipedia with a conflict of interest
This is a note to you and you fellow interns, (per your note here), User:Bkoohy, User:Willjol27, and User:Zsdftb.

I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing, which is about health and medicine, and generally within the scope of WikiProject Medicine.

You all don't seem to understand the mission of Wikipedia and I would like to explain it to you.

1) The mission of the volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, is to provide knowledge to the world for free. Not to be social media, not to be a place to find consumer information, not to be a directory.    But rather -  a place where readers can find summaries of the knowledge that humanity has achieved.    An encyclopedia.

2) Wikipedia is like a national forest. It is a miracle created by millions of hours of volunteer work.   It is far from perfect - due to its open and decentralized nature, there are gaps in places, too much detail in others, and even bad content in places - but it is remarkably full of good content, that conveys what we (humans) know.  This is why so many people read it.  Its a natural resource for the whole world.

3) These volunteers have built a system of "policies and guidelines" that guide their work. The system boils down to:  Aim for the mission - summarizing what humanity knows.  Use high quality, independent references.   When you write, summarize what these sources say (keep what you know or think or feel out of it) and cite them.   If other people disagree with you, talk with them to work it out.  There is a lot of detail to all that, but those are the basics.   That is how Wikipedia was created and is maintained.

4) But just like there are people who dump garbage in national forests, there are people who abuse Wikipedia. This happens, and Wikipedia is vulnerable to it, due to its open nature.   Some of that abuse is from misunderstanding, but some of it is intentional.  The biggest abuse is people who try to use Wikipedia not to share what humanity knows, but to promote some idea or company or product or person.  When you come across marketing content while reading a Wikipedia article, it is as jarring and disappointing as walking on a path in a national forest and seeing a pile of garbage somebody has dumped there.  Volunteers clean that up as soon as they find it, but this is a constant problem. It is a bad thing that hurts everybody.

5) If you want to have a page in Wikipedia, please think about why. Is there knowledge about your company that can help people? Some problem you solved (and that the business press wrote about) that business students or entrepreneurs could learn from? Or some mistake you made that others could learn from?   If all you want to do is use Wikipedia to raise brand awareness or get the word out about something, this is not what Wikipedia is for.   People might tell you this is what Wikipedia is for, but they are wrong.  Please don't abuse the common good that is Wikipedia for promotional purposes.

I have a lot more detail about what Wikipedia is and how it works, at User:Jytdog/How. Please read that as well - it includes information about what you should do if you sit down and try to write a Wikipedia article.

Each of you should also add the following to your own user pages (each a redlink, because you haven't written anything on it -- User:Elrx, User:Bkoohy, User:Willjol27, and User:Zsdftb): "I am an intern for Celixir, and have a conflict of interest with regard to that company and its products". Would you please do that?

The page you all have drafted is not OK. I have moved it to draft space and you can work on there (it is at Draft:Celixir) I have disclosed your conflict of interest on its talk page. Please also read WP:MEDHOW. If you have any questions, you can ask me here, or at the talk page of the draft article.

Best regards Jytdog (talk) 05:58, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Hey Jytdog,
 * I completely understand your point of view, and will begin rewriting the article so that it is in line with what is expected. I would really appreciate it if you could point out where the biggest issues with the page currently lie, and I will get to work on addressing them.
 * I apologise if the page came across as marketing or trying to raise brand awareness, that's not the intent of the page.


 * Thank you zsdftb —Preceding undated comment added 07:56, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your note. Please feel free to improve the draft - it isn't hopeless it is just far from ready to be part of the encyclopedia.   I do hope all four of you will consider working more broadly in Wikipedia!  This place needs smart, industrious people to keep it clean and improve it too. Jytdog (talk) 08:44, 6 August 2017 (UTC)