User talk:OddBike

OddBike (talk) 19:26, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, OddBike. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the page Curtiss Motorcycles, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:


 * avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the request edit template);
 * disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Conflict of interest);
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:Spam);
 * do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. See Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. SpinningSpark 19:15, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

My revert
Hi OddBike, the main reason I reverted you at the Curtiss Motorcycles article was that you deleted great swathes of historical information. That might not be what the company is doing now, but it is still part of the history and belongs in an encyclopedia.

You should also take care not to change the format of the page unless you are sure you are doing something in line with our guidelines. The thing that jumped out at me was you changed the capitalisation of section headings. We don't do that here – section headings are in sentence case. However, that's a minor thing. If that was all that was wrong I would just have corrected it.

Your biggest sin was not providing the sources the information came from. As a COI editor, you are expected to ask someone else to make the changes for you. But no one is likely to add information from you without a reference. Regards, SpinningSpark 19:44, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

Thank you
Thank you for your insights Spinningspark, I am new to this world of Wikipedia editing so I understand if I'm messing up the procedures. My aim isn't to remove information (I don't want to give the impression I'm attempting to "alter" the history) so much as to edit the page to reflect the current history and structure of Curtiss, as it is now a distinct entity from Confederate as of March 2019. Additionally the attempts of the representatives of the new owners of Confederate to edit the page to reflect this have been denied, it is their desire to move the Confederate history to a new page to distinguish from Curtiss. OddBike (talk) 19:59, 16 June 2020 (UTC)


 * My understanding is that Curtiss Motorcycles is Confederate Motors renamed and that Confederate(d) Motorcycles LLC is a new, separate company. Is that not so?  If that is correct, then the new arrangements should be added to the end of the history section since that is the correct chronological sequence.  There is no reason to change any of the existing history unless it contains errors.  Nobody at this time has been denied the ability to edit the page, but COI editors are strongly advised not to do so directly.  It nearly always ends in tears if they do.  You can use the Request edit template to ask someone else to make the edit.  Please be aware that the person servicing such requests is unlikely to be familiar with the subject so keep it simple.  They like to see it in the form of "please replace text X with text Y" so it is easy to understand what is being asked. SpinningSpark 21:38, 16 June 2020 (UTC)