User talk:Missmiu

CIDA
The page was locked because somebody was repeatedly overwriting the existing article with a nonencyclopedic publicity statement that was too obviously written by the organization's own public relations department. That's not appropriate on Wikipedia — articles need to be written and formatted according to our rules around neutral point of view, writing style, independent sourcing and the like. It's obviously acceptable to add relevant information to the article, but it's not okay to rewrite the whole thing to sound like a membership brochure or a public service announcement or a mission statement. It's supposed to be an encyclopedia article about the organization, not a public relations profile posted by the organization.

I do want to stress that this isn't an issue unique to CIDA; Wikipedia has a huge problem with organizations and companies and people of all stripes trying to use Wikipedia as an advertising or PR database instead of an encyclopedia. But that's not what we're here for, and we do sometimes have to temporarily lock down pages to get it to stop. And it doesn't mean that the organization can't directly contribute content, either — there are just some rules about the writing style and referencing and formatting that need to be used in order to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

The 10-edit thing just means that you need to make at least 10 edits under this username to Wikipedia articles other than that one; once you've done so, that one will become available to you again. However, I should point out that content that's too visibly "PR brochure" in tone, or otherwise inappropriate for a neutral and objective encyclopedia article, will get reverted again, and Wikipedia also has the option of escalating the page protection so that only editors with administrator privileges can edit it at all.

One thing you might want to consider, if you want to work on the article while familiarizing yourself with Wikipedia's policies and procedures, would be to work on a draft version of the article at User:Missmiu/CIDA. That way you can work on it without disruption, learn how Wikipedia actually wants our articles to be written and formatted, ask people for feedback on how to improve the article if necessary — and then it can get moved back into article space when it's done. But the finished product does have to look and sound and read like an actual encyclopedia article rather than a marketing brochure.

I'm more than willing to help out if you have any further questions, of course. Bearcat (talk) 02:46, 30 August 2010 (UTC)