User talk:Facts Really Count

Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, Facts Really Count. Thank you for your contributions. Here are some useful links, which have information to help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page, consult Questions, or place helpme on your talk page and ask your question there.

Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 04:35, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Conflicts of interest in Wikipedia
Hi Facts Really Count. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia. Your edits to date have all been about Courtney Stadd and have been.. extreme. I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

Hello, Facts Really Count. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, please:


 * avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your circle, your organization, its competitors, projects or products;
 * instead propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the request edit template);
 * when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or 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 for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you.

Comments and requests
Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with Courtney Stadd? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), perhaps we can talk a bit about editing Wikipedia, to give you some more orientation to how this place works. Please reply here - I am watching this page. I do understand that you feel strongly about this article, but it will help everything, if you allow me to get you oriented, so I hope you will bear with me here. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 04:37, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

RESPONSE to Jytdog
You suggested some edits I made had been “extreme” and that I may have a COI with regard to the page being edited or the person who is the subject of the page. I would be happy to discuss the changes and the reason(s) for them in any form you would like, whether in email or another forum (assuming you can help me figure out how to use it, if it’s not intuitive enough for a low-tech-level user like me!)

My interest in the page is personal, and in no way the object of any formal business or paid connection to the person, Courtney Stadd, who is the subject of the page/article in question. Courtney is a personal friend of long standing (25+years of acquaintanceship and 15 years of close friendship.) I learned from him a couple of years ago that there was a very negative Wikipedia article about him, and when I read it, I agreed it was clearly written as an attack on his character, and not from a neutral point of view, which I have subsequently learned is a Wikipedia “article of faith”. Being not very computer-savvy, but more so than Courtney, I offered to see if I could modify the article to be more fact-based and include a broader representation of his professional history and activity. I asked him to send me reference bio and material I could use in making edits or additions. He sent me that material and I eventually made a fairly comprehensive modification to the article, removing some language that was not supported by facts or sources, and documenting with references everything new I added. At some point later, someone (I assumed the original author of the article, but really have no way of knowing that) removed most of what I had added and deleted many of the changes I had made to pejorative language, which I felt violated the NPOV principle. I restored some of the changes, and went on about my business. A number of months later, in a conversation with Courtney, he asked if I had seen the article recently. I had not, and when I checked, found that it appeared to me that there had been some reversion to the negative focus of the article, and I told Courtney I would look at it again and see about making edits. I have not sought to remove the references to criminal convictions, but to ensure they were factual and did not carry innuendos or judgmental language and were documented. My purpose has been to simply expand the biographical and background information so that anyone who visited the page as result of a web-search would have access to more complete professional/biographical information. I must say I have to question the motivation of the person who originated this article, and would hope that you would be interested in ascertaining if a potential COI exists there, in terms of motivation to present only a negative view of an individual.

Frankly, I believe the article should simply be deleted, but I don’t think the Wikipedia “process” would make that either possible or likely. Hence, the action to monitor and make further edits, as seems appropriate. As a side note, at least from Courtney’s point of view as related to me, as well as my witnessing the comments of the Judge in the first case, who admonished the prosecutors greatly on their “case” and as much as said she would have not found as the jury had found if the case had been presented to her alone, there are clearly questions about the prosecutorial process in the legal matters, despite the verdict in the first case being upheld on appeal. There are also serious concerns about the legal advice and capability of his counsel, who has apparently had a history of malfeasance unknown to Courtney when he selected him as counsel. That is just undercurrent of why I feel a sense of duty as a friend and as a supporter or a fair and balanced judicial system, to spend what time I have spent in trying to ensure a “fair hearing” for Courtney in the Wiki realm. If all of that represents a conflict of interest, then I suppose I am guilty as charged. I have tried without success to plow through the myriad help files and links to try to find good guidance on these issues, but find nothing that gives me confidence in what is “right” or “wrong” except in the most extreme or obvious situations. The reversions you have made seem to clearly be reinstating language that shoes a negative bias, and I would like to understand your rationale for doing that, or discuss further why I believe that is the impact of what you have done.

Facts Really Count (talk) 21:05, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply! Lots there.  Keeping things simple and not discussing content yet for now.
 * OK. So you are a friend of the subject, and came to Wikipedia to represent him. In Wikipedia, this constitutes a conflict of interest.  Your "interest" in your friend and his reputation is what brought you here, and is much stronger than your interest in Wikipedia, and its actual policies and guidelines, which it seems pretty clear you have not taken the time to really learn about yet.  I am not saying that to criticize you in any way - just to illuminate that there is an actual conflict of interests here.  As a Wikipedia, you -- you -- are responsible to the mission of WP and to edit according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.   I just want you and I to be clear on the baseline here.   This kind of clarity is really useful on a lot of levels.   If you would please acknowledge that you have a COI with regard to Courtney, I will then do two things.  I'll tell you what we look for conflicted editors to do, and I will try to get you quickly oriented to how Wikipedia actually works, so that you can be effective in advocating for the kinds of changes you want to see.  Making arguments that are not based on the policies and guidelines here, is a waste of your time and the community's time.   I hope that makes sense to you.....    in any case, I look forward to your reply.  Jytdog (talk) 22:37, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick response. I readily acknowledge that, as you have explained the Wikipedia "rules of engagement," I clearly have a conflict of interest in making editorial changes to the article in question due to my long-standing friendship with Courtney. I look forward to any clarification or advice or direction you can provide to ensure a fair, balanced and accurate presentation of Courtney's professional activity is what Wikipedia presents to its users. As a frequent "user" of Wikipedia, I certainly agree with its broader mission to provide information in an objective and well-sourced manner, beyond my personal interest in this particular article, so would be glad to receive guidance for that purpose as well. Thanks again.

Facts Really Count (talk)
 * Thanks for making the disclosure. So you have a COI for Courtney, as we define that in Wikipedia.


 * To finish the disclosure piece, would you please add the disclosure to your user page (which is User:Facts Really Count. Just something simple like: "Courtney Stadd is a friend and I have to Wikipedia to work on the article about him: I have a conflict of interest with regard to that topic"  would be fine.  If you want to add anything else there that is relevant to what you want to do in WP feel free to add it, but please don't add anything promotional about the company (see WP:USERPAGE for guidance if you like).


 * I added a tag to the top of the Talk:Courtney Stadd page, so the disclosure is done there so that editors working on the article are aware. Once you disclose on your user page, the disclosure piece of this will be done.


 * As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP.  The first is disclosure.  The second is what I call "peer review".  This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense.  In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and viola there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done.  No intermediary - no publisher, no "editors" as that term is used in the real world.


 * What we ask editors to do who have a COI and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, is a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft, disclose your COI on the Talk page using the appropriate template, and then submit the draft article through the WP:AFC process so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and  b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself.  You can make the edit request easily -  and provide notice to the community of your request -  by using the "edit request" function here.  I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:Courtney Stadd -  there is a link at "click here" in that section right by the big exclamation point --  if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.


 * By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. We get some great contributions that way, when conflicted editors take the time to understand what kinds of proposals are OK under the content policies. (which I will say more about in the next round, and then we will be done here!).


 * I hope that makes sense to you.


 * I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update very simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about a company's address - nothing more complex than that) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content.


 * Will you please agree to follow the peer review processes going forward, when you want to work on the article about Courtney or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. And as I said, when this step is done I will quickly go over the content policies so you have that under your belt. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 01:42, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the guidance and clarification you have provided, and walking me through the basic processes and relevant guidelines regarding COI and conflicted editing of an article. I agree to follow the edit request and peer review process you outlined when proposing any future edits to the Stadd article, or any other article where my COI is relevant, or where a further COI must be declared. Thank you again!

Facts Really Count (talk) 06:31, 19 April 2016 (UTC)