User talk:Jobpiston

September 2011
Hello Jobpiston. If you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article Zoe Crosher, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about following the reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:


 * Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
 * Be cautious about deletion discussions. Everyone is welcome to provide information about independent sources in deletion discussions, but avoid advocating for deletion of articles about your competitors.
 * Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).
 * Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. 72Dino (talk) 04:39, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Zoe Crosher has been reverted. Your edit here to Zoe Crosher was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline. The external link(s) you added or changed (http://lacma.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/art-here-and-now-new-acquisitions-by-zoe-crosher-and-mark-flores/) is/are on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 18:50, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Some advice
Hello Jobpiston! Full disclosure, I am Zoe Crosher's spouse. Not sure if we've met in real life so I'm sorry I'm contacting you basically in public, but as I'm writing about your Wikipedia contributions as another Wikipedia editor, I think this is appropriate. Anyways, a word about the issues you've been having with the article on Zoe.

Wikipedia is a community with conventions & rules it's been developing through a very long process of dialogue. In my experience, experienced Wikipedians are usually forthright about letting you know what the conventions are, but it's up to you to take the time to learn & follow them. The articles on what Wikipedia is and what Wikipedia is not should give you a general feel for what's involved.

Specifically, Wikipedia tries to offer fair and balanced views. The fact that you're editing the page as Zoe's assistant and with her approval speaks not for you, but against you, as it implies a risk of abusing the article as a means of self promotion. To avoid this, you probably want to get familiar with guidelines suggested by the users who reverted your edits: the neutral point of view, conflict of interest, verifiability, autobiography, and those explaining various style issues in the box on top of the article. This sounds ominous, but it shouldn't be. It really boils down to the following:


 * While editing the article, wear the hat of someone who is knowledgeable about Zoe's work & aims to give a fair account of it to an interested reader, rather than of someone who is assisting her & tries to impress her colleagues, critics, or collectors.
 * Keep everything above board.

In particular, editing anonymously (such as from an IP account, 75.85.13.51, if this was you) to avoid the issue of conflict of interest with your user account is a very serious breach that can, and may yet, get you blocked.

On the more practical level:


 * Style: keep it informative and up to the point.
 * The main audience is the general public, meaning everybody who speaks enough English to consult an encyclopedia and wants to get a general idea of Zoe's work. The audience is not the art world, and your goal is to inform and educate, not advertise.   For example, "Playing with fictional documentary, Los Angeles, the fantasy of expectation and the false promise of travel, an obsession with transience, the identities it provokes, and the reconsidered archive..." is IMO not a very good start for the biography section, as it's full of arty sound bites which read good in a press release but are almost unintelligible to a casual reader.  (You can still explore these topics e.g. in a section on the main themes of Zoe's work.)
 * Similarly, a Wikipedia article is not an indiscriminate repository of details, such as all of Zoe's exhibitions and all articles written by her and about her, but instead attempts to outline notable information about the artist & explain the content and context of her work. If someone wants to get all the details, they can find Zoe's CV on her website.
 * Content: every main claim needs to be supported by published materials. In particular:
 * Use sources independent of Zoe wherever possible. Independently published articles about Zoe by her friends & coworkers are not considered independent, so try to use them only when they provide immediately relevant information.
 * You may refer to Zoe's press releases, and to texts by her or by others published as part of her work, as long as you do it sparingly, only where appropriate, and note the source. For example, I would recommend "XY states in the introduction to ZC's LAX: Out of the Window that this body of work explores the false promise of travel" over "LAX: Out of the Window explores the false promise of travel".
 * If you find an unfavorable review in a notable source, make sure to include the gist of it. Look at the "Reception" or "Critical reception" section of some movies to see how to present both favorable and unfavorable points of view.
 * Images fall into two categories, public domain / free content on one hand, and fully copyrighted on the other.
 * Free (public & free content) images may include e.g. install shots or a photo of Zoe herself, if whoever took the picture agrees to distribute it under appropriate terms. Such images are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, from where it is easy to include them in other language Wikipedias and similar sites.  The upload should specify the license terms under which the image is released, and you need to confirm these with the author.  The options are one of the free content licenses or the public domain (guidelines), and I would suggest to use the same GNU and Creative Commons licenses applied to the Wikipedia text; see the portrait of Cindy Sherman as an example.
 * Non-free (fully copyrighted) images include all of Zoe's artwork, and can be included if they are (a) immediately relevant to the content of the article or a section, and (b) shrunk to a low resolution. When uploading these images, you must explain why their use is appropriate.  In general, non-free images should be used very sparingly, say at most one per body of work (e.g. LAX, LA-Like, duBois), and avoided where free images such as install shots are available.  Look for other non-free artwork as a guideline of how it's used & documented; examples from my own past contributions are a computer game screen shot and an album cover.
 * Conflict of interest: finally, I'd recommend finding someone in the Wikiproject Photography or Wikiproject History of Photography you can ask for neutral advice, e.g. to point you to articles about other art photographers you could use as guidelines, and to spot-check your facts & style when you're done. Since Zoe's work draws in part on Cindy Sherman's (a fact the article should probably mention), perhaps you can inquire if someone who edited the Sherman article would like to assist.  You can also work on the article in your own user space, for example at User:Jobpiston/Zoe Crosher, and paste it to Zoe Crosher only in agreement with an independent user and/or an admin.

Good luck! – MirancheT C 19:36, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

November 2021
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate your contributions; however, it appears you may have written a Wikipedia article, or a draft for a Wikipedia article, about yourself, at Job Piston. Creating an autobiography is strongly discouraged – please see our guideline on writing autobiographies. If you create such an article, it may be deleted. If what you have done in life is genuinely notable and can be verified according to our policy for articles about living people, someone else will probably create an article about you sooner or later (see Wikipedians with articles). If you wish to add to or change an existing article about yourself, you are welcome to propose the changes by visiting the article's talk page. Please understand that this is an encyclopedia and not a personal web space or social networking site. If your article has already been deleted, please see: Why was the page I created deleted?, and if you feel the deletion was an error, please discuss this with the deleting administrator. Thank you. Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 19:56, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Job Piston


A tag has been placed on Job Piston requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a person, a group of people, an individual animal, an organization (band, club, company, etc.), web content, or an organized event that does not credibly indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please read more about what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the. Johnj1995 (talk) 19:57, 21 November 2021 (UTC)