User talk:Sburns875

If you have a close connection to some of the people, places or things you have written about, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:
 * 1) editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
 * 2) participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors; and
 * 3) linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant 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 conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. For more details about what, exactly, constitutes a conflict of interest, please see our conflict of interest guidelines. Stonemason89 (talk) 15:23, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your input. However, I feel that the section-blanking made by Ms. Burns was, in fact, appropriate - It was the right thing to do, aside from her "conflict of interest."


 * There are controversies like this which arise, in just about every one of these election races (often for those at the state level too!)... The Audra Shay allegations are relatively minor, compared to the situation with the last person elected National Chairman of the Young Republicans (he allegedly made a homosexual advance on a sleeping man, which was not his first brush-up with this type of legal situation - and resigned his position) - Yet, you don't see any mention of that, in this article, do you?


 * And the candidate who ran against Audra Shay, this time around, has a recent misdemeanor criminal conviction, relating to election fraud; that is a more-serious charge (and one that has been legally established as factual), but it is also omitted from this article.


 * It would not be feasible, nor in accordance with Wikipedia guidelines, to provide even an overview or mention of each of these allegations; they arise all the time, and this will not be the last of them. It is unfair, therefore, to single out Audra Shay, for a new section of this encyclopedia entry. So Ms. Burns made the right call.


 * Furthermore, it should be noted that, in correcting aforesaid imbalance in this article, Ms. Burns was doing her job... Due to the high-ranking of Wikipedia entries in search engines, and the increased worldwide knowledge and usage of this resource, many people have taken advantage of the ease-of-editing, in order to slant encyclopedia entries, in accordance with their personal biases, goals, or for other purposes (often political in nature). There is now an organized industry for "online reputation management" that has emerged, as a result of these problems - and wiki monitoring is a key part of this. Using Wikipedia for astroturfing (like Microsoft did) is of course wrong, but members of an organization correcting unbalanced editing of an article (about that organization) is a legitimate task for them to perform. This is especially true when dealing with "biographies of living persons," for which Wikipedia has a strict policy - and which the current (unreverted) revision of this article remains in violation of. Pacificus (talk) 06:57, 17 July 2009 (UTC)