User talk:Nick fradkin

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Regarding your editing of Oliver E. Williamson
Your recent addition has been removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without permission from the copyright holder. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; such additions will be deleted. You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of article content such as sentences or images. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing.

Please also not that you will not "be maintaining his page from now on". See the Wikipedia FAQ on article subjects. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 17:43, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, it appears you are misunderstanding the way Wikipedia works. In addition to the FAQ mentioned by Gogo Dodo, I would ask that you have a look in our FAQ for organizations. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here, I will keep your talk page on my watchlist for now. Kind regards, Amalthea  18:06, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I understand that Wikipedia is a democratic, online encyclopedia. Gogo Dodo is correct, the material I posted is copyrighted. However, the Haas School of Business, my employer, has that copyright, and it has cleared this copyright for posting on Wikipedia. What am I missing? Thanks, nick_fradkin@haas.berkeley.edu (talk) 18:27, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Mostly that neutrality is one of the most important policies of Wikipedia, that's why I pointed you towards that FAQ that details the most frequent pitfalls. Most importantly that is WP:BFAQ, which mentions Conflict of Interest, Neutrality, and Verifiability. While it's true that it would be possible to license the content so that it can be used here (see WP:IOWN), in fact content released by the organizations itself or its PR people is almost always in violation of the neutrality policy (again covered in the FAQ I gave you, WP:BFAQ). It's good that you now are proposing changes on the talk page. Posting a completely new biography without any inline citations to independent, reliable sources won't probably be usable though. Amalthea  15:35, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war. Note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions on a single page within a 24 hour period. Additionally, users who perform several reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. When in dispute with another editor you should first try to discuss controversial changes to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors. Should that prove unsuccessful, you are encouraged to seek dispute resolution, and in some cases it may be appropriate to request page protection. Please stop the disruption, otherwise you may be blocked from editing. --John (talk) 20:29, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

John, please review what has gone on today (see above). I work for the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, who produced the content I posted and is entitled to copyright. Why can't I, as an employee of the Haas School, post this? The copyright has been cleared and I have been specifically asked to change Williamson's page. Nobody has given me a legitimate reason yet for why I can't post this. Please help. Thanks.

nick_fradkin@haas.berkeley.edu (talk) 20:35, 20 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Certainly Nick. First, let me say I sympathize with your confusion; we have a lot of rules or conventions that are not obvious and take a while for new folks to pick up. The main one you are falling foul of is our reliance on consensus. If you read what I linked to it should be obvious what you are doing wrong. Let me know if you need more help. --John (talk) 20:37, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. How can I tell who is disputing the truth of the content I posted? Right now, consent seems arbitrary, because once I change something, a Wikipedia worker takes it down. In other words, how do I prove consensus? Who is the primary editor? There seems to be hundreds of users who change this page at any given time, so is it my duty to contact every single one and get their approval to change the content? Surely, that can't be the case...

Thanks, nick_fradkin@haas.berkeley.edu (talk) 20:47, 20 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Hello Nick-You communicate with other users about your goals for the page by going to the article's "talk page", which is the little "discuss" tab. For the Williamson article, that's here. Editors who are interested in the article are likely to see what you post there. C RETOG 8(t/c) 21:50, 20 October 2009 (UTC)