User talk:GloriaGVA

April 2022
Please do not add or change content, as you did at Agreement on Agriculture, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. Bbb23 (talk) 16:03, 11 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Hello, I work for this organization and am re-editing the pages to link to our official briefing notes, ministerial decisions and legal text. We are the authority on our own legal agreements and as such have decided in house to remove 3rd party references and link back directly to the WTO website for all articles referring to our work and legal texts and decisions in articles where outcomes or legal concepts are being explained. The citations have been updated to reflect this and the text of the article has been updated to reflect the structure we use on our webpage; which covers the decisions made at subsequent ministerial conferences since the inception of this agreement.
 * Many thanks. GloriaGVA (talk) 16:17, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, GloriaGVA. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on the page Agreement on Agriculture, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:


 * avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the request edit template);
 * disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Conflict of interest);
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Spam);
 * do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to 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 Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. Bbb23 (talk) 16:29, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * You must follow the instructions above. If you edit the article again, you risk being blocked.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:30, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Hello,
 * Thanks for outlining this. This article is referring to a legal agreement. I am adding links directly from the legal agreement and subsequent decisions to the page. You are welcomed to review the veracity of the additions. The aim is to add the most credible sources (legal sources) to the page and update the article to include recent developments. We have decided not to edit any opinion pieces on any pages, the additions are not containing any 'value judgements' on any articles and only update the parts covering legal concepts to make the page accurate and informative. As such, I shall make sure to declare the COI on my user page. If you have any further information on how to show the COI on the article itself please do link to this. It will be useful to show that the information on the legal text has been edited by the organization who wrote said legal text and I'm sure users will find the links to the further text (online for free) vs the pre-existing 3rd party references (which are not fully available online or are not accessible for free) helpful. Thank you again. GloriaGVA (talk) 16:46, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * But to also clarify the above, I have not been paid to contribute to these articles directly. It is just something that I thought would be helpful to do to provide the best quality content to people (especially young people) for free so have gotten permission to do this in my spare time. GloriaGVA (talk) 16:50, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I have followed the above stating my COI on my user page and the affected article. I have also stated on the talk section of the article why the edits are being made. I am more than happy for you to review these contributions as I am new to editing any advice is well received. I shall now revert back the changes for the reasons outlined in the talk section of the article (explaining legal concepts and not allowing references to legal text which is the most authoritative source does not help users). Thank you for your guidance. GloriaGVA (talk) 17:36, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * That's not the way it works. As I stated before, you cannot edit the article directly. Regardless of anything else, if you do, I will block you.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:45, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I have requested the edit in the article stating the COI in the talk tab. I have stated the COI in my user information also. I have referred to the legal text in the proposed edits. As stated above, I am new to Wiki editing to am happy to gain clarity on how it works. However, your initial reason for moderating the edit was that the sources were not reliable despite being links to the legal text which was being described in the article. So, on what basis would a source be deemed more credible than the original legal text? The rational is hard to understand. If you wish to review the edits and revert them back to those which I made after independent review I'm happy for that to be the case too. I'm most concerned about the information being updated, complete and factual so am happy to understand the necessary channels which can ensure that is the case and want to understand the process for to ensure that is the case. As of now, you haven't provided any guidance on that or on why legal text, ministerial decisions or official summaries are to be deemed as 'unreliable'. If I cannot edit this directly, could you explain the ways to get the previous edit reviewed by any third party who can verify that legal agreements are in fact the authoritative and reliable source for the legal concepts which they outline. This is something I want to dedicate more time to and hope to make meaningful resources available to more people for free so to avoid this again in future edits any guidance would be helpful.
 * Many thanks. GloriaGVA (talk) 18:05, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * You must wait for other editors to comment on your request at the article Talk page, and that may not be soon. As an aside, WP:PRIMARY sources are generally discouraged - and in many cases unacceptable - on Wikipedia articles. That's usually hard for new editors to understand, but Wikipedia's policies are not the easiest to learn.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:10, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much! Ok, I shall wait for them to comment on my request. I understand why in many instances this is the case. I see that point 3, "A primary source may be used on Wikipedia only to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge", should cover the edits I wish to propose. In the future, when requesting the edits, I shall cite this directly in the request to edit in the talk tab on the article concerned. Many thanks again for the help, I have learnt a lot! GloriaGVA (talk) 18:17, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Legal documents are rarely considered acceptable sources as they do require specialized knowledge to interpret them.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:21, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
 * The article links to books referring to the same legal texts. A user would require the same level of knowledge to understand the book about the legal text as they would the legal text it refers to. This is simply unavoidable when the Wikipedia entry is on a specialized topic. For this reason, I also made sure to link to summary articles which summarise the topic in non-technical terms but are still written by those within the organization as again the most reliable source on a WTO agreement would still be a WTO summary vs another summary. On this also ministerial decisions are also not legal documents per say, they are simply the outcome of meetings which update or clarify previous decisions and have already been referenced to in the original article. In the current edit, the section on historical context refers to the "1986 GATT Ministerial Conference" and hovering about this it explains the GATT which is a legal text also by the WTO by linking to the Wikipedia page on the legal text.
 * The Agreement on Agriculture is a legal agreement so any wiki page on it is specialised by virtue already. For example, under the existing heading export subsidies it states "The 1995 Agreement on Agriculture required developed countries to reduce export subsidies by at least 36% (by value) or by 21% (by volume) over six years", which is factually correct because this is a copy paste from the legal text. So, I'm not sure how keeping the same text of the legal agreement word for word but changing the source would change the level of specialised knowledge required to interpret them.
 * To further highlight this, in the present version of this page under the heading 'Market Access' already links back to the WTO website but this page is out of date and does not cover developments after 2002. The additions I made cover developments after this date and use the same source (the WTO website agriculture pages and summaries) for information so again I'm not sure in this specific case the re-edit made sense on the basis of citations used.
 * Same case here under the heading "Mechanisms for developing countries" under "Special Products" which already refers to the 2005 WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong which defined special products but doesn't link to the provision. My edit here was simply to state that in those special products are decided by the member state themselves and provide the direct citation to the Hong Kong decision with is already being paraphrased. There is no additional knowledge required that isn't already required to understand any other part of the article. In fact, and empirical study including modelling as well as legal text (which is a source already cited, I know because the study is by my boss who was the supervisor for the previous editor also) requires more additional knowledge than the text alone (without additional analysis) would. If lack of specialist knowledge is what deems sources acceptable or not the current edit would also be deleted for already referring (be it in secondary form in some instances) to the texts and decisions my edit did. Not sure I understand how that is avoided when writing about the Agreement on Agriculture, which again, is a legal agreement. GloriaGVA (talk) 18:57, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

Agreement on Agriculture
I've left a note on the article talk page, I'm happy to help. Please leave a message on my talk page me if you wish to proceed. Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 13:33, 19 June 2022 (UTC)