User talk:Rgovers

February 2012
Hello Rgovers. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about following the reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:


 * Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
 * Be cautious about deletion discussions. Everyone is welcome to provide information about independent sources in deletion discussions, but avoid advocating for deletion of articles about your competitors.
 * Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).
 * Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. MrOllie (talk) 21:16, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Response to February 2012 comments
Dear MrOllie,

Thank you for your concern, but frankly, this is a bit frustrating as I have made a real effort and spent quite some time to provide a neutral, well cited and balanced update. Yes, I am very close to the topic and know everyone involved, but I did follow the guidelines and I did so under my own name. As an academic I value transparency.

I have made sure that all books currently available on the topic of place branding or nation branding are cited. This indeed includes quite a few references to Anholt, and, to a lesser extent, Go and Govers. It just reflects that they are the most prolific authors in the field.

I have not deleted anything or made comments in deletion discussions and I would welcome additional edits to my text by others, but just for you to delete it all? How does that favor the discussion?

I have not included any commercial links (links to books yes, but book royalties are of very limited concern, it is the intellectual contribution that drives us, and hence the links are included for users' reference and convenience).

I have used great caution in all this and I wonder if I had made these changes under another username or if someone else would have made these changes, would they also all have been deleted?

Without my edits, the place branding and nation branding pages are wholly incomplete and not up-to-date. The nation branding page actually has a Wikipedia statement on top requesting better referencing, which I think I provided. How can we improve the quality of those pages if experts are not allowed to contribute? For instance: two of the books I added to the place branding section are edited books. They should be listed if only to credit the many authors that contributed to those Yearbooks and to expose their work to Wikipedia users. Is there a way around this? All publications on place branding are published by Palgrave Macmillan. Can publishers' editors contribute?

Looking forward to your response and many thanks in advance,

Kind regards RGovers (talk) 21:16, 8 February 2012 (UTC)