User talk:Mfeinstein

A belated welcome!
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Again, welcome!  Imzadi 1979  →   08:32, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

May 2014
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 * a key early stepping stone for the development of a U.S. Green electoral politics. Facilitated by [Danny Moses], some 150 people attended and moved ahead with forming [http://www.cagreens.org/

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 * History of the Green Party of the United States (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver)
 * added links pointing to Jim Berry, John Marks, John Robbins, Ron Daniels, Catherine Burton and Carol Miller

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File permission problem with File:Kent Smith campaign headshot, 1994.png
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Speedy deletion nomination of Ten Key Values of the Green Party in the United States


A tag has been placed on Ten Key Values of the Green Party in the United States, requesting that it be deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under two or more of the criteria for speedy deletion, by which articles can be deleted at any time, without discussion. If the page meets any of these strictly-defined criteria, then it may be soon be deleted by an administrator. The reasons it has been tagged are:
 * It seems to be unambiguous advertising which only promotes a company, product, group, service or person and would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic. (See section G11 of the criteria for speedy deletion.) Please read the guidelines on spam and FAQ/Business for more information.
 * It appears to be a clear copyright infringement of http://www.cagreens.org/ten-key-values. (See section G12 of the criteria for speedy deletion.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material, and as a consequence, your addition will most likely be deleted. You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. This part is crucial: say it in your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. If the external website belongs to you, and you want to allow Wikipedia to use the text — which means allowing other people to modify it — then you must verify that externally by one of the processes explained at Donating copyrighted materials. If you are not the owner of the external website but have permission from that owner, see Requesting copyright permission. However, even if you use one of these processes to release copyrighted material to Wikipedia, it still needs to comply with the other policies and guidelines to be eligible for inclusion. If you would like any assistance with this, you can ask a question at the help desk.

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 "Click here to 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 removed 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. Tutelary (talk) 21:21, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

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In fairness
...you may want to weigh in on this accusatory comment. - 70.192.130.126 (talk) 21:17, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

July 2015
This account has been blocked indefinitely from editing Wikipedia because the username, Mfeinstein, matches the name of a well-known, living person.

If you are the person represented by this username, please note that the practice of blocking such usernames is to protect you from being impersonated, not to discourage you from editing Wikipedia. You are welcome to continue to edit under this username, but we ask the following:
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If you think that you were blocked in error, you may appeal this block by adding below this notice the text, but you should read our guide to appealing blocks first. 5 albert square (talk) 01:13, 7 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Please note that if you are unblocked then you will not be able to continue editing in the manner in which you have been. Please read our conflict of interest policy, you have been editing your own article and those of subjects that you are associated with.--5 albert square (talk) 01:17, 7 July 2015 (UTC)


 * - This is actually a pretty bogus block, in the first place, since "Mike Feinstein" is not a commonly-known, famous individual that we soft-block over. In the second place, you are misleading Mr. Feinstein by intimating that he can not directly edit his own biography. He most certainly can, so long as he observes Terms of Use by declaring his COI either on his user page, on the talk page or the article, or in the edit summary of each edit he makes to the piece. Of course he may face political harassment if he does this, since our rules against bullying newcomers are weak. Carrite (talk) 06:47, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Carrite, I suggest that you read this.--5 albert square (talk) 20:39, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Jimbo Wales says right after that he meant blocking if you did a polite request first and it was ignored. Popish Plot (talk) 14:54, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Reply
Hi, thanks for message. You obviously haven't understood the speedy deletion notice above, but I deleted your article because
 * The article was a copyright violation. Copyrighted text is not allowed in Wikipedia, as outlined in this policy. That applies even to pages created by you or your organisation, unless they state clearly and explicitly that the text is public domain. In this case the copied site clearly says © 2011 Green Party of California All Rights Reserved There are ways to donate copyrighted text to Wikipedia, as described here; please note that simply asserting on the talk page that you are the owner of the copyright, or you have permission to use the text, isn't sufficient. But in any case the copyrighted text is far too promotional to be useful for Wikipedia's purposes, so there would not be any point in your jumping through all the hoops that are required.
 * Just to make it clear, it is illegal in the US, EU and elsewhere to infringe copyright. Although you may quote parts in a non-commercial context, that doesn't help you here where most of the text is lifted verbatim from copyrighted sources.
 * They are in the public domain. &mdash; since the Green Party of California (at least) is explicitly claiming copyright, the onus is on you to show that the Green Party does in fact allow its text to be distributed and modified for any purpose, including commercial, because that is what PD means

Thanks for letting us know about the copyright language on the Green Party of California website. We did not know it was there. We think the company that we contracted with in 2011 to design our Drupal site for must have placed it there as part of the setup, and we never noticed it. We've since deleted it, so that there is no mention of copyright anywhere on our site.


 * it was written in a promotional tone. Articles must be neutral and encyclopaedic. Quoting the party's policies rather than verifiable facts is clearly spamming, and I note that your references are to the party and similar organisations, not to independent verifiable sources

I don't understand at all when you say quoting a party's key principles is spamming. Its simply a quote of something that the party says and it is identified as such. The Ten Key Values are a key foundation of Green organizing in the United States since 1984 and that is an important fact about US Green history. That is why I took the time to create the page on Wikipedia that explained the history behind the creation of the Ten Key Values. I've done substantial research on the topic and had listed all of the principles who were involved. I absolutely do not understand why that isn't appropriate content for Wikipedia.

Jimfbleak - talk to me?  06:03, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Unblocked
Hi,

I have decided to unblock you, however I will be watching your edits.

One of the policies of Wikipedia is neutrality and when I looked at your edits, they certainly did not come across as neutral. Articles should not take sides but should explain the sides fairly and without bias. Edits should avoid stating opinions as facts and should not be stated in Wikipedia's voice. They should be attributed to particular sources etc etc. As a general rule, sourced information should not be removed solely on the grounds that it appears biased. Instead it should be re-written. I suggest that you read the neutrality policy in full.

On top of that, I noticed that you edited your own article. Please note that editing articles which you have a connection with is strongly discouraged. This is because it undermines the public's confidence that Wikipedia is an independent source amongst other things. Wikipedia is certainly not a forum for self-advertising, self-promotion etc, it is an encyclopaedia and as such Wikipedians should put the best interests of the encyclopaedia first and foremost. If you have a conflict of interest with an article, I would suggest that you discuss changes to the article on the relevant article talk page. Alternatively, you can post a request at the conflict of interest noticeboard.

I hope the above makes sense.

Apologies for blocking you before. If you have any questions about the above, please do not hesitate to drop me a line on my talk page. In the meantime I'm off to eat some of this :)--5 albert square (talk) 23:47, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:31, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Reply
Thanks for message.
 * With regard to the copyright issue, what I said still applies. The fact that you have taken down the text doesn't change the fact that it was published with out being explicitly public domain, and the only way it's copyright status can change is for it to be re-published by the copyright owners with an explicit PD tag.
 * Most of the article consists of the statements by the organisation which are first-person and heavily promotional. It's all self-promotion, but We believe it is important to value cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity, and to promote the development of respectful relationships across these lines. and similar is non-encyclopaedic, we are not a platform for your views.
 * You did not provide independent verifiable sources to enable us to verify the facts and show that it meets the notability guidelines. Sources that are not acceptable include those linked to the organisation, social media and other sites that can be self-edited, blogs, websites of unknown or non-reliable provenance, and sites that are just reporting what the organisation claims or interviewing its officials. None of your references in the introduction to the article were independent third-party sources.

You have a conflict of interest when editing this article. If, after reading the information about notability linked above, you still believe that your topic is notable enough for a Wikipedia article (and that there is significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources), you could, if you wish, post a request at Requested articles for the article to be created. See also Best practices for editors with conflicts of interest.

As the national party's primary historian, you appear to have a financial stake in promoting a topic. Paid advocacy is a category of conflict of interest (COI) editing that involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Paid advocacy is prohibited by our policies on neutral point of view and what Wikipedia is not, and is an especially egregious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a black hat practice. Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question if an article exists, and if it does not, from attempting to write an article at all. At best, any proposed article creation should be submitted through the articles for creation process, rather than directly. Regardless, if you are receiving or expect to receive compensation for your edits, you are  required by the Wikimedia Terms of Use to disclose your employer, client and affiliation. You can post such a mandatory disclosure to your user page at User:. The template Paid can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form:   . For the reasons given above, you cannot post the copyright text, and I am not allowed to restore it because it is clearly not PD. I am prepared to restore the introductory text if that will help, although it needs better referencing without reliance on primary sources. Please first respond to the COI query first, and let me know if the partial restoration will help.

If you want to reply, you can do so on my talk page. You can alternatively leave a message on this page, and I will know you have done so if you start it with a link to my user name, User:Jimfbleak and sign it with four tildes ~ when you post it.

— Thanks again User:Jimfbleak for responding. We still appear to be on different planets on this issue, but I respect the fact that you value Wikipedia and are trying to ensure its mission is followed. I have absolutely no financial stake in this issue. I receive absolutely no financial compensation for any Green Party history I write - neither for the Green Party of California, nor for any other Green Party in the world for whom I help with their history. In fact I am not nor have I ever received financial compensation for any content that I have provided for any Green Party web site, from my county level all the way to the Global, nor do I ever expect to seek nor receive such compensation. As regards substantiating the history of the Ten Key Values, there are no independent sources of the kind you are taking about. Everything about the creation of Ten Key Values from that time are from first hand accounts from those involved. I strongly and emphatically disagree with your characterization of the text about it as heavily promotional. You seem to imply that any similar history based overwhelmingly upon first hand accounts of an aspect of a political party's history is de facto promotional. I don't agree. As someone who majored in philosophy, but also took several upper level history classes in college, my training in writing history has been to do the best one can with such sources, especially when they are the only ones available. The fact is that in doing my research, I became intimately aware of some of the controversies and rather than taking sides to favor one person's characterization over another's, I mentioned them generically as existing at the time. As for content from political parties not being in the public domain, I also still do not understand your point there at all. People constantly go to web sites and copy text about say, a water policy, and then either choose to cite it or just claim the argument as their own - which they are free to do if they are in agreements with them. This goes on every day, around the world. I just don't understand what you are talking about. For example, I just went to the Wikipedia page for the Democratic Party and there are multiple references to text from the Democratic Party's website democrats.org. On that site is this text "Copyright © 2015 DNC Services Corporation All rights reserved. " Yet that text is left there as is. I just don't get it. Finally in regards to restoring the introductory text, yes please restore it, and I will look at it further in regards to your point about independent secondary sources. But as I've stressed here, I don't believe there are any. In addition, if you don't believe you can restore the rest of the text, I would really appreciate it if you could separately email to me the entire text, as I've lost all of that work. I was doing it on Wikipedia first, before posting it elsewhere on the web, including on the Green Party's web site. If I am able to receive all of the text, then I could post it on a Green Party site and we could add there that it is expressly in the public domain. Will that work? I've actually written to several people in our party today, to see if they've ever had similar such encounters with Wikipedia and how they've dealt with it. Again, thanks for your time on this. Mfeinstein (talk) 15:32, 27 April 2020 (UTC) ~

User:Jimfbleak Hi again. Back after a really long time!. Apparently I didn't appropriately address this to you many year ago when asking whether you could restore the background to the Ten Key Values page I had been editing as you had offered. It would be great to be able to retrieve that information that I worked so hard on at the time.

In that vein, I have a larger question regarding posting Green Party-related information. There are pages here on Wikipedia that refer to factual information about the Green Party, that in many cases are simply factually wrong. I recently saw this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Green_politicians_who_have_held_office_in_the_United_States, that listed people who were supposedly Green Party affiliated public officials. I saw one name there from Alaska that I did not recognize and I followed up with that individual via social media, and with the local registrar of voters, and found out that he had never been a member of the Green Party in Alaska, so I removed his name and wrote an explanation of why I did so in the history. Seeing this, it led me back to the issue we had before that you said that factually correct material from official Green Party websites could not be used here on Wikipedia because it was not specifically placed into the public domain. It would be extremely helpful if factually correct information about Green Party candidates, election results, public officeholders, party history and the party's Ten Key Values drawn from official Green Party websites could be posted on Wikipedia, because so often the information posted on Wikipedia on such issues is factually incorrect, like the example I just gave. To this end, could you give an example of -- or point me to -- language that would be appropriate to be posted on Green Party pages so that it would place that information in the public domain, so that it would be freed up to be used here on Wikipedia?

Thanks! ~ Mfeinstein (talk) 15:32, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Possibly unfree File:Kent Smith addresses Green Parties of the West conference.jpg
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Kent Smith addresses Green Parties of the West conference.jpg, has been listed at Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at if you object to the listing for any reason. Thank you. Stefan2 (talk) 17:10, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi, User:Stefan2 I haven't logged onto my wikipedia for a while and found today that you had taken down the photo that I posted of Kent Smith, that I said I posted because I took the picture. The reason you gave for taking it down, was that it came from the Green Party of California Flickr Page. I run that page and posted the pic there too!!!! OMG, I can't believe you went to these lengths to take this picture down, when it was something that I took personally. How do we get it back up there? --Mfeinstein

Talkback
Stefan2 (talk) 20:40, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

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