User talk:Miketotten

Welcome! It's good that you're patrolling your own bio; we're certainly happy to correct any inaccuracies, though I haven't looked at your page in more than a year. The correct way to sign an entry on a talk page is to end it with " ~ "; when you post the change your username is added automatically. Be sure to log in. The wikipedia policy WP:BLP gives you many rights that can help keep the record straight.

Keep in mind, I have no way of verifying your identity (and even if I could, we still have to use reliable sources for our assertions), so we can't necessarily add something just because you say so. For innocuous biographical information (birthdate etc), we can cite your blog or About page as a source. For everything else, we have to refer to some kind of refereed publication-- either academic or a news source with an editorial board. However, you have every right to remove (or ask us to remove) inaccurate information that has no citation without any of the process overhead at all. Just leave a note on the talk page for the article so we know what you did and why, and so we can keep it from being put back.

On another note, it was not at all my intention to distort your record at all. I reviewed your blog before posting my highlights about your trip to Iraqi Kurdistan; this is the reference I used (Back to Iraq - Part One). In addition to your prior posts about nightlife in Turkey, this part caught my attention:

I wanted to do it, though. Badly. How many people have ever decided to spontaneously make a road trip to Iraq from Europe for one day as a tourist after they were already in the car and driving the wrong direction toward Greece instead of the Tigris? We had no visas. No map. No plan. And no time. Sean had to be back in Copenhagen in three days for final exams. Pulling this off would be very nearly impossible. Nothing appealed to me more. I pulled off the road and stopped the car so I could think. "We’re going to make this work,” I said. I called my wife Shelly and told her what we were up to. I also called a friend of mine who works on the Council of Ministers in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. Would it be possible for us to  get tourist visas on arrival at the border?

The spontaneous road trip to Kurdistan on tourist visas seemed pretty open-and-shut to me. Thanks for clarifying your paid work-- your posts at the time were cryptic and, lacking any other source, I took your hints differently than intended. I didn't add the stuff on you working for other countries' governments, though I've just tracked down a citation for your Azerbaijan trip that was otherwise unsupported. Best wishes and I hope the article portrays you accurately!

Wellspring (talk) 19:07, 3 June 2009 (UTC)