User talk:Rjirtle

Conflict of interest
As you seem to be editing an article about yourself, you ought to read the advice about conflict of interest and about autobiography. --David Biddulph (talk) 20:15, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Hello Rjirtle. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, such as the edit you made to Randy Jirtle, but you have not complied with Wikipedia's mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. Paid advocacy is a category of conflict of interest (COI) editing that involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Undisclosed paid advocacy is prohibited by our policies on neutral point of view and what Wikipedia is not, and is an especially egregious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to black-hat SEO.

Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question if an article exists, and if it does not, from attempting to write an article at all. At best, any proposed article creation should be submitted through the articles for creation process, rather than directly.

Regardless, if you are receiving or expect to receive compensation for your edits, broadly construed, you are  required by the Wikimedia Terms of Use to disclose your employer, client and affiliation. You can post such a mandatory disclosure to your user page at User:Rjirtle. The template Paid can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form:. If I am mistaken – you are not being directly or indirectly compensated for your edits – please state that in response to this message. Otherwise, please provide the required disclosure. In either case, do not edit further until you answer this message. Perhaps this is a bit more directly on point than my colleague's comment above. John from Idegon (talk) 20:59, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

File:Portrait of Randy Jirtle 2019.jpg
Hello I'm and I'm a member of Wikipedia's volunteer response team. I saw you recently uploaded this file and marked it as OTRS pending. Can you please provide the ticket number related to this file? Thanks! --Cameron11598 (Talk) 21:35, 24 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Hello just circling back on this, if you could please provide an OTRS ticker number in regards to this image it would be appreciated otherwise an OTRS team member will end up tagging the image for deletion. Regards --Cameron11598 (Talk) 20:36, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Communications
Hi Rjirtle. The most convenient way to communicate with other users on Wikipedia is via user talk pages, just as I am posting here now on yours. I have added your talk page to my watchlist, which means I will be notified of any changes, such as if you post a response. Since we've started this conversation here, it is best if we keep the whole thing on your talk page to avoid confusion, but you can also if you want to get in touch with me in future post a message on my talk page and I will see it. In addition, in any other venue where you want to bring my attention you can use a ping, like  or , where you replace username with my username, or the username of whoever else you wish to attract the attention of. Take a look at Help:Notifications for more information. Note that for a notification to work you need to sign the message at the end with four tildas like this, which is good practice to do whenever you are leaving a new message on a talk page so that people know who left the message and when.

With regard to the above notices about conflict of interest, although it might look scary the intention is to help you make sure that you are working within the guidelines of Wikipedia, not to scare you away. Assuming that you are indeed the subject of the article then the paid editing issue does not really apply, however you most certainly do have a conflict of interest, which you can read more about at Conflict of interest. This needs to be declared and I'm sure David Biddulph and John from Idegon who posted above will also be happy to help guide you as to what you ought to do (I'm a fairly novice editor myself and not necessarily up on the fine details of policy). The most important thing for the time being is that you stop editing the article Randy Jirtle. I hope that helps, I probably won't be around tomorrow (it being Christmas Day), but I will be around after that. Physdragon (talk) 03:25, 25 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Hey Physdragon: Thanks for your communication, and help. Would you please let me know if you received this short message so I know I am doing something right. I only want to add a few awards that I have recently received for my epigenetics research, get rid of links that no longer work, and update my photo. However, it seems like I have stirred up a hornets nest. Please tell me now best to accomplish what I would consider to be very modest objectives. Thanks, Randy Jirtle Rjirtle (talk) 04:53, 25 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Hi Rjirtle. I strongly recommend reading through Conflict of Interest in detail so you can learn the details of the policy for yourself.  A couple of key points: firstly, you ought to declare the conflict of interest on your user page, you can do this by adding  .  Secondly, you should request edits to the article on the talk page.  You can do this using the request edit template, , which you can read more about here.  You can use that to request the change to the photo and the awards information.  Myself or another editor will then look at the request and either make the changes, ask for more information, or give a reason why the changes are not going to be made.  Note that you should also reply to Cameron above about the photo.


 * I would also recommend reading through Autobiography, which explains why writing an article about yourself is a bad idea, one of the key points being that it is very hard to write about yourself in a neutral way. Having had a read through it, it does seem a bit promotional and also has issues with the use of primary sources (your personal website and CV are not appropriate references for a wikipedia article).  Any new edits you request might have to wait until there has been a chance to go through and fix some of these issues. Physdragon (talk) 18:55, 26 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Hey Physdragon: Thanks for this information. This is all still quite confusing to me, so I was hoping to start with making a few requests to update the Randy Jirtle website - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Jirtle. You state that "personal website and CV are not appropriate references for a wikipedia article." You can delete references [2] and [3] if you think this is appropriate. I could then either provide additional documentation for these University positions or they could remain undocumented. Which option do you think is most appropriate? I am starting with these relatively easy requests, so I can better figure out how to ultimately go about editing this site more extensively so it is again up-to-date. Thank you for bearing with me. If you answer me back, at least I know that I am finally able to communicate with you via the Wikipedia website. :) Rjirtle (talk) 22:29, 26 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, if you could provide links to university websites or other third party sources that attest to those positions that would be helpful. The same goes for awards, etc, a link to the website of the awarding organisation, or to a news article that mentions it, is necessary.  I can see that a lot of the current references are to your papers.  While it is not a problem to have references to your papers for specific points they shouldn't really form the bulk of the references.  What the article needs more of is references to things other people have written about you and your research.  If you know of and can provide any references like that it would be helpful. Physdragon (talk) 15:25, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

File permission problem with File:Portrait of Randy Jirtle 2019.jpg
Thanks for uploading File:Portrait of Randy Jirtle 2019.jpg. I noticed that while you provided a valid copyright licensing tag, there is no proof that the creator of the file has agreed to release it under the given license.

If you are the copyright holder for this media entirely yourself but have previously published it elsewhere (especially online), please either
 * make a note permitting reuse under the CC-BY-SA or another acceptable free license (see this list) at the site of the original publication; or
 * Send an email from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-en@wikimedia.org, stating your ownership of the material and your intention to publish it under a free license. You can find a sample permission letter here. If you take this step, add OTRS pending to the file description page to prevent premature deletion.

If you did not create it entirely yourself, please ask the person who created the file to take one of the two steps listed above, or if the owner of the file has already given their permission to you via email, please forward that email to permissions-en@wikimedia.org.

If you believe the media meets the criteria at Non-free content, use a tag such as non-free fair use or one of the other tags listed at File copyright tags, and add a rationale justifying the file's use on the article or articles where it is included. See File copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have provided evidence that their copyright owners have agreed to license their works under the tags you supplied, too. You can find a list of files you have created in [ your upload log]. Files lacking evidence of permission may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described in section F11 of the criteria for speedy deletion. You may wish to read Wikipedia's image use policy. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 21:33, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for this email link to send a copyright release from Portrait Innovations for the photo Portrait of Randy Jirtle 2019.Rjirtle (talk) 21:59, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

File:Portrait of Randy Jirtle 2019.jpg listed for discussion
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Portrait of Randy Jirtle 2019.jpg, has been listed at Files for discussion. Please see the to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the page history of each individual file for details. Thanks, FastilyBot (talk) 01:01, 15 July 2020 (UTC)