User talk:Plooft

Welcome!

Hello Plooft, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of your edits have not conformed to Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy, and have been reverted. Wikipedia articles should refer only to facts and interpretations that have been stated in print or on reputable websites or other forms of media.

There's a page about the NPOV policy that has tips on how to effectively write about disparate points of view without compromising the NPOV status of the article as a whole. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type   on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~&#126;); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!
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--A. B. 16:46, 2 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Ooops! I left a long response a while back to your comment on my talk page. I just looked at it again and spotted a critical typo: "I was not trying to pick on you." I left out the "not" originally. I hope you knew what I meant, if not, I am so sorry. I was definitely not trying to pick on you. --A. B. 17:36, 5 November 2006 (UTC)


 * That's ok! I assumed that you had meant to say "not trying to...". Your response was a very useful one, that gave me quite a bit of insight in to how Wikipedia works. Are you (or have you been) a Herbalife distributor by the way?


 * No, I have zero connection to Herbalife. As they say, "I don't have a dog in that fight". I participate in WikiProject Spam -- there was a report of abuse to this article by pro-Herbalife people that did not like to see negative stuff (see "Could I get a little extra help on Herbalife?"). So I took this article on. Some were even hassling the editor (on and off Wikipedia) who was trying to keep the article straight. The article's also been abused by anti-Herbalife people.


 * I am generally skeptical of multi-level marketing schemes however I also know some are not abusive and focus primarily on good products. For instance, my wife likes Mary Kay products but does not sell them; she talked a very extroverted (and ethical) friend into selling them, however, and that person has gone on to have a successful, fullfilling career. I don't know where Herbalife comes down on the ethics spectrum but when researching the article to get it NPOV, I noticed that the frequent reports of abuse about the company in the 1990s seem to have tailed off significantly.


 * For now, I just keep the article on my watchlist to ensure it stays NPOV and spam-free. My goal is to keep it an encyclopedia article and not let it become a soapbox. That includes not only obvious bias and spam, but also more subtle stuff. The Wikipedia policy on neutrality does a good job of explaining how to abuse Wikipedia by assembling individually objective statements to create a distinctly non-neutral article overall.


 * Ultimately, editing Wikipedia is about serving the readers, not our own personal agenda or the very active, often inward-focused "Wikipedia community". Millions of people turn to Wikipedia everyday for unbiased information that's based on reliable sources — even if I "know" something to be true, it can't go into Wikipedia until it meets these criteria:
 * Reliable sources
 * No original research
 * Verifiability
 * So, after spilling all these bits explaining what we're doing, I hope you'll stick around and join in. --A. B. 13:33, 6 November 2006 (UTC)


 * FYI, here's a good discussion of how articles spiral out of control: Spam Event Horizon -- once an article gets far enough out of control, the links and POV snowball. The essay focuses on spam, but the same is true of POV material. --A. B. 16:34, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Neutral point of view
Please do not add commentary or your own personal analysis to Wikipedia articles. Doing so violates Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy and breaches the formal tone expected in an encyclopedia. If you would like to experiment, use the sandbox. --A. B. (talk) 15:54, 18 February 2007 (UTC)