User talk:Historian1868

December 2017
Hello, I'm CorbieVreccan. I wanted to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions to St. Joseph's Indian School have been undone because they appeared to be promotional. Advertising and using Wikipedia as a "soapbox" are against Wikipedia policy and not permitted; Wikipedia articles should be written objectively, using independent sources, and from a neutral perspective.

You may not feel that the criticism of the school is "neutral" but the fact is that substantial criticism exists, and is well-sourced in the article. Your edits are clearly promotional and seem to indicate a potential conflict of interest, as you are writing misleading edit summaries:"Deleted uncited info" while removing not only sourced content but the sources/citations themselves. This is disruptive editing and will not work out well here.

Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thank you. - Co rb ie V    ☊ ☼ 01:55, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, Historian1868. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the article St. Joseph's Indian School, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. Editing for the purpose of advertising or promotion is not permitted. 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, company, organization or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the request edit template);
 * disclose your COI when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
 * do your best to comply with 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).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. - Co rb ie V    ☊ ☼ 02:00, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

St. Joseph's Indian School
Hi Corbie,

I would like to disagree with you about my changes being deemed as promotional. I am in fact, a bit of a critic of their fundraising. But, I have looked into this school and the wikipedia page is biased without including the full story...even the history is incorrect. So, I was trying to flesh out the entire controversy. I am new to this and am unsure how to add the new info, fix the clearly wrong parts, and add the references needed to allow show. Can you tell me how to make the changes in the most constructive way possible? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historian1868 (talk • contribs) 02:12, 19 December 2017 (UTC)


 * This should go on your talk page. I am copying it here and responding here. Stop spamming my page. You posted the same message there multiple times.
 * If you want the article to be fair, why are you deleting neutral sources, stable content, and well-sourced criticism? Have you edited the page before as an IP, or with another account? Because your edits are identical to other, habitual edits from those connected to St. Joe's who have done exactly what you are doing in an effort to delete well-founded, well-sourced, serious criticism. The only "reference" you tried to add was a link to the school's personal webpage. As I said in my edit summary, the St. Joseph's website is already linked; linking to individual sub-pages as "sources" is undue weight. Also the group's own site is a primary source. Read WP:IRS. You also tried to add it as if it were a neutral reference. This school has a history of having employees come on WP and POV-push in their interests, and WP admins and other experienced editors here are used to spotting these patterns. - Co rb ie V    ☊ ☼ 02:31, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

I would appreciate if you would give me some grace with my inexperience and refrain from unfounded accusations. That said, I wold appreciate some assistance. I have no idea what their employees do. What I do know is that some of this was wrong, one sided, and actually not well sourced. For example, this school was not a traditional boarding school as described on the page and, historically, never was.It was actually founded at the request of some Catholic tribal members from Cheyenne River. Students were never forced to attend (unless you count their own famines forcing them), etc. Big difference. They do/did (not sure) some sleazy things with their fundraising. In fact, I was a critic of it back in the 1990's when it as just getting press (I lived on the Lower Brule Reservation back then). That is why I spent all day trying to learn to use the sight starting with this section. The link to their site was an attempt to show their rebuttal...which seems like the right thing to do on wikipedia. I also added that they do not offer up their info for external scrutiny to charity rating sites...so we have no way of knowing how they compare. Not sure if an employe would point that out! BTW, the link to the give.org title in the references is misleading....that is not the heading of the page linked to. So, if you would be so kind, I would appreciate some guidance (rather than accusations of complicity) or at least neutrality from you, the administrator. Believing that the current content is accurate and well nuanced, and that the content of all sources (some of which are unavailable on the internet...but I have in my possession) are cited in neutral fashion is an inaccurate form of bias. I may not know how to do this within your community, but I can back-up everything I write. I am happy to share all original works with you if you'd like. But, such exposition is not appropriate for this context so we would have to do that via direct e-mail. My students rely on wikipedia for their papers. I think it should be accurate. So, this is my first attempt. Anyway, I apologize for violating norms of which I was unaware. I do not work for this school. I do research for a living. I live in Virginia, and I am a professor. I hope to update the history section using the cited and one other more thorough source and don't want to go to all of that work if, no matter what I do, it will be flagged. I could use some constructive criticism rather than suspicion. Thank you for your consideration, David Historian1868 (talk) 04:18, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Welcome!
The links I already posted above, plus the following links, should answer your questions about editing on Wikipedia. (Again, content must be sourced to reliable sources if you want to add it) :
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Editing tutorial
 * Picture tutorial
 * How to write a great article
 * Naming conventions
 * Simplified Manual of Style

Please bear these points in mind while editing Wikipedia:
 * Respect copyrights – do not copy and paste text or images directly from other websites.
 * Maintain a neutral point of view – this is one of Wikipedia's core policies.
 * Take particular care while adding biographical material about a living person to any Wikipedia page and follow Wikipedia's Biography of Living Persons policy. Particularly, controversial and negative statements should be referenced with multiple reliable sources.
 * No edit warring or abuse of multiple accounts.
 * If you are testing, please use the Sandbox to [ do so].
 * Do not add troublesome content to any article, such as: copyrighted text, libel, advertising or promotional messages, and text that is not related to an article's subject; doing so will result in your account or IP being blocked from editing.
 * Do not use talk pages as discussion or forum pages as Wikipedia is not a forum.

The Wikipedia tutorial is a good place to start learning about Wikipedia. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and discussion pages using four tildes, like this: &#126;&#126;&#126;&#126; (the software will replace them with your signature and the date). Again, welcome! - Co rb ie V    ☊ ☼ 20:34, 19 December 2017 (UTC)