User talk:Mboyselshe

4D Labs
I got your email, general article discussion should happen at the article or on user talk pages. This serves Wikipedia's desire for transparency, particularly in the community being able to keep an eye on my actions (since I have been grated "the admin toolkit", e.g.. I have access to tools for deleting articles and so forth. Where possible, unless there is a severe privacy issue involved, I try and operate on user talk and article talk pages.  I hope you understand. (I leave the email open because I am sometimes asked to redact personal information either inadvertently or maliciously inserted into the encyclopedia, and email is the best way for people to contact me privately about materials which, by their nature, must be kept private.)

To answer your question, however, the removal of lots of completely unsourced information, or information sourced only to what the Labs say about themselves, was in the interest of Wikipedia's desire for information to generally be backed by reliable, arm's length, secondary sources.

To the extent that articles become platforms for publishing what's said by an organization about itself, Wikipedia would go too far toward perhaps putting an undue weight on things that a neutral party would not cover, or portraying it in too positive a light. This goes to three of our most basic policies: WP:V, WP:RS, and WP:NPOV, and WP:V is quite key here. I assume good faith and take you at your word that you have good knowledge of the subject, however, personal knowledge is not, a priori, verifiable.

You are of course welcome to restore some material, backed by more in the way of reliable, arm's length sources--typically newspapers, magazines, books. You may also take a look at User:Joe Decker/IsThisNotable. I'm still working on refining it, but my hope is to provide a more step-by-step (if still not simple) approach to explaining what we need in terms of demonstrating notability under WP:GNG. I hope that it will be helpful.

My edit comment, and I had forgotten this, also noted that the article topic may not meet WP:GNG. That is to say, it is not clear that there is sufficient, arm's length secondary sources covering 4D Labs to have an article on the topic. The specific policy I was referring to is WP:GNG. With respect to the sources existing within the article, the same sorts of sources that I've asked for if you wish to restore the material I removed are needed in general at any article. SFU isn't, of course, "arm's length" from 4D Labs.

I understand that you feel that the desire for arm's length sources is "unfair", but we do attempt to enforce this restriction fairly, with a few carve-outs for specific categories of article, and even those carve-outs are based on the assumption that such sources *will* exist for, to give an example, an Olympic athlete. There are at times failures of execution, but the policies I quote here have very broad consensus within the Wikipedia community, and any failure of execution is not, in general, a sign of a failure of intent, bias, or malfeasance.

I do hope you will consider adding reliable, independent sources to the article and restore what material they verify.

Best regards, --j⚛e deckertalk 22:23, 17 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Please note that I will copy future emails on this subject into this thread. It would be better if you just reply here. --j⚛e deckertalk 22:27, 17 June 2014 (UTC)