User talk:Hershel Parker

If you have a close connection to some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, 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 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 you must always:
 * 1) avoid breaching relevant policies and guidelines, especially neutral point of view, verifiability, and autobiography.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have conflict of interest, please see Business' FAQ. For more details about what constitutes a conflict of interest, please see Conflict of Interest. Thank you. Your scholarship is without question and I am not even in the same galaxy as you are in that regard. But your edits on Richard H. Brodhead seem somewhat juvenile in my opinion - you are anonymously attacking somebody's character on an public encyclopedia. I understand that Brodhead called your Melville biography "unreliable" or something like that and you took great offense to that since you painstakingly put together what many consider the definitive biography of Melville. At least, in Brodhead's critique (which I haven't read), you knew his name, and even more importantly, it was clear he was expressing an opinion. I have no opinion on your biography of Melville or Brodhead's work on Melville and couldn't care less to be perfectly honest. Your biography seems impressive to me and appears to have received rave reviews. You can hate Brodhead and attack him in your articles, news quotes, amazon reviews, Chronicle message boards, etc. - it doesn't really matter. But you shouldn't attack him on supposedly neutral non-opinionated encyclopedia website. I believe your unique relationship with Brodhead establishes a conflict of interest and you should stop editing his article. Additionally, adding your own article to the page is a clear vanity edit. I personally agree with much of what you say about Brodhead - I think he succumbed to pressure from the faculty in dismissing Pressler. And, I believe some of the things he said in the wake of the accusations were uncalled for. But, overall, I am not nearly as critical as you are. Just my opinion, and I'm try to not put that in the article. It is clear that you are in academia in the way you cite your sources. See WP:CITE to see how wikipedia traditionally uses reference tags. Using Michael Gaynor's article that you cite is also not typically seen as an acceptable medium to use on wikipedia (unless it was published in a journal, but I'm assuming you are just talking about his renewamerica page). Cheers! -Bluedog423Talk 01:04, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

See also WP:BATTLE. Concerning your recent edits to Herman Melville that I reverted, see WP:NPOV. Thanks! --Ronz 02:29, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Concerning your edits to Richard H. Brodhead, please see WP:3RR and WP:BLP. Thanks! --Ronz 02:33, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

COI discussion
FYI there's a discussion about some of your editing mentioned above at Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard. --Ronz 02:39, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Your edits to Richard H. Brodhead
Please stop adding unreferenced controversial biographical content to articles. Content of this nature could be regarded as defamatory and is in violation of Wikipedia policy. If you continue, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. --Ronz 15:39, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Poor editing style
Please read How to edit a page before making any more changes on wikipedia. Your edits, ex. to Herman_Melville do not conform to basic wikipedia policies. Newtman 01:40, 17 October 2007 (UTC)