User talk:MelissaMcGrath

August 2012
Hello, MelissaMcGrath. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may need to consider our guidance on conflicts of interest.

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 ensuring their edits are verified by 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. &mdash; Scientizzle 19:38, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you
Thank you for your advice. I will look at the guidelines related to conflict of interest. However, whoever has been posting to the Tom Luna wikipedia page has definitely not been following these guidelines. The information is clearly bias and several points were not factual. How do I ensure the correct information is posted if not through the editing process? --MelissaMcGrath (talk) 23:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)MelissaMcGrath


 * I have a few suggestions. First, If you're going to fix factual issues, do them one at a time, citing appropriate reliable sources to back up each claim, and use a clear edit summary explaining the changes for each edit. This will help others to follow your train of thought; some of the changes you made looked fine but others read like a PR press release. additionally, removal of some criticisms backed up by reliable sources (e.g., ) is completely inappropriate.
 * Another issue is your comment that "The previous biography contained incorrect information about Tom Luna. Some of this information was attributed to news sources that got the information wrong and were asked to correct it." Wikipedia policy is verifiability, not truth--this means that the sometimes-frustrating-reality is that unless a reliable source is available to correct the information you feel is incorrect, policy does not allow the inclusion of unverifiable information.
 * Finally, this article is covered under the biographies of living people policy, which sets a higher bar for sourcing contentious claims. I would suggest asking for help at Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard where many experienced editors can help improve the article. Best of luck, &mdash; Scientizzle 16:27, 28 August 2012 (UTC)