User talk:KAustin

Your submission at Articles for creation: Paolo Casali has been accepted
 Paolo Casali, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created. The article has been assessed as Start-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article. You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. . Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia! SwisterTwister  talk  00:20, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * If you have any questions, you are welcome to ask at the  .
 * If you would like to help us improve this process, please consider.

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, KAustin. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about in the article Paolo Casali, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:


 * avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
 * instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the request edit template);
 * when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the 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 which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you. bonadea contributions talk 16:27, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion
There is currently a discussion at Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident with which you may be involved. Thank you. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:54, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion
There is currently a discussion at Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident with which you may be involved. Thank you. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 13:55, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Paid editing in Wikipedia
Hi KAustin. Thanks for disclosing that you are being paid to edit Wikipedia. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing, which is mostly about health and medicine.

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. Unmanaged conflicts of interest can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies and cause disruption in the normal editing process. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review.

Your editing for pay on behalf of UT creates a conflict of interest for you on those topics.

We look for disclosure in two places - on the user page and locally, at any article where you are working with a COI. To finish the disclosure piece, would you please add the disclosure to your user page (which is User:KAustin - a redlink, because you haven't written anything there yet). You can just move the tag you put at the top of this page, to that page. Would you please also list the articles that you work on there on behalf of UT, so they are are in one place?

There is already a tag at Talk:Paolo Casali, so the disclosure is done there. 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 and you are not getting this second one, which is is a form of 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 voilà 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. So the bias that conflicted editors tend to have, can go right into the article. Conflicted editors are also really driven to try to make the article fit with their external interest. If they edit directly, this often leads to big battles with other editors.

What we ask editors to do who have a COI or who are paid, 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 through the WP:AFC process, disclose your COI on the Talk page with the Template:Connected contributor (paid) tag, and then submit the draft article for review (the AfC process sets up a nice big button for you to click when it is ready) 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
 * (i) disclose at the Talk page of the article with the Template:Connected contributor (paid) tag, putting it at the bottom of the beige box at the top of the page; and
 * (ii) propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. Just open a new section, put the proposed content there, and just below the header (at the top of the editing window) please the  tag to flag it for other editors to review.  In general it should be relatively short so that it is not too much review at once.  Sometimes editors propose complete rewrites, providing a link to their sandbox for example.  This is OK to do but please be aware that it is lot more for volunteers to process and will probably take longer.

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. (There are good faith paid editors here, who disclose, avoid editing directly, and whose proposals are high quality and aimed at our mission, and there are "black hat" paid editors here who lie about what they do or only half-follow the policies and guidelines, and really harm Wikipedia and are a time sink for the editing community).

But understanding the mission, and the policies and guidelines through which we realize the mission, is very important! There are a whole slew of policies and guidelines that govern content and behavior here in Wikipedia. Please see User:Jytdog/How for an overview of what Wikipedia is and is not (we are not a directory or a place to promote anything), and for an overview of the content and behavior policies and guidelines. Learning and following these is very important, and takes time. Please be aware that you have created a Wikipedia account, and this makes you a Wikipedian - you are obligated to pursue Wikipedia's mission first and foremost when you work here, and you are obligated to edit according to the policies and guidelines. Editing Wikipedia is a privilege that is freely offered to all, but the community restricts or completely takes that privilege away from people who will not edit and behave as Wikipedians.

I hope that makes sense to you.

I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where a company has offices) 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. If you are not sure if something is uncontroversial, please ask at the Talk page.

Will you please agree to learn and follow the content and behavioral policies and guidelines, and to follow the peer review processes going forward when you want to work on the Casali article 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. Best regards Jytdog (talk) 15:03, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Ah you have logged into this account again. Please do reply here - I look forward to talking with you. Jytdog (talk) 15:46, 20 March 2018 (UTC)


 * paste reply here that was left on my Talk page, to keep the discussion in one place Jytdog (talk) 16:54, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
 * HI [Jytdog],


 * I hope this is where I leave a message.


 * Thank you for contacting me. It looks as though the disclosure is on my page and the Paolo Casali site (I added it to the red link, as well. Please tell me if I am still in error, as I am a new user to Wikipedia and still a little unsure how to navigate the various publishing pages). I believe you have a misunderstanding of my actions. When I first began working on the article, it was a draft. I did not have the opportunity to complete the article before it was published. Naturally, more sources needed to be added as well as additional information. I contacted the community question page, as suggested by Wikipedia, to ask how to recall it back into a draft state. It was at that time I was more or less attacked. The only helpful information I received was from SwisterTwister, who explained how to comply with COI, which until this moment I believed I had done. I, of course, am happy to comply with the terms. I, then, used the Talk page to suggest changes, as explain on the COI page. My suggested changes were *not* carried ut, and I was ignored. Many of the changes included removing information about the wrong Paolo Casali (the addition erroneous information and refusal to remove it by the users who were so quick to condemn my actions, does not speak well of Wikipedia's regard for ensuring reliable information). After the hateful reaction from the Wikipedia community members and their lack of action on correcting erroneous information, I washed my hands of this matter. It looks as though the page is now in a state of degradation. If you would like my input, I can assist you in cleaning it up with factual information and various reliable sources, but, otherwise, I do not wish to continue editing this page or any other Wikipedia page, for that matter.


 * If I may make a suggestion, I hope you consider contacting the passive-aggressive, or at times aggressive, users who provided no assistance to a new user asking for guidance. I certainly hope that their actions are not something Wikipedia condones from their "teahouse" community. Perhaps in the future, Wikipedia can encourage more users to act as SwisterTwiser, and use his/her example a model of addressing a problem and providing instruction on how to rectify it, instead of or attacking and belittling users.


 * Thank you,


 * KAustin — Preceding unsigned comment added by KAustin (talk • contribs) 16:45, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for replying!  Quick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting (see WP:THREAD) - when you reply to someone, you put a colon in front of your comment, which the Wikipedia software will render into an indent when you save your edit; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons in front of your comment, which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this  in front of your comment. This also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread.  I hope that all makes sense. And at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages when you save your edit.  That is how we know who said what to whom and when.  I know this is insanely archaic and unwieldy, but this is the software environment we have to work on. Sorry about that.  Will reply on the substance in a second... Jytdog (talk) 16:57, 20 March 2018 (UTC)


 * I am sorry you have had a negative experience. I can't write more at this moment as the real world is beckoning, but will write more in a bit.Jytdog (talk) 16:58, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, I got a breather for a second. I do not mean to drag you back into WP, especially if you don't want to.
 * There have been some edits by someone who was not logged in and by four other named accounts, and I was concerned that those might be you as well.  If they were, I wanted to ask you to please only edit with this account and to be sure that you logged in when you did.
 * If you happen to know the people who have been editing the article, it would be great if you ask them to make requests on the talk page.
 * We can get this sorted. Jytdog (talk) 17:15, 20 March 2018 (UTC)