User talk:Staceyastanley

September 2014
Hello, I'm Fluffernutter. Wikipedia is written by people who have a wide diversity of opinions, but we try hard to make sure articles have a neutral point of view. Your recent edit to Leslie Marshall seemed less than neutral to me, so I removed it for now. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. ''Please note that Wikipedia articles are the responsibility of the community; we do not allow article subjects to dictate what articles about them should or shouldn't say. Being an employee of the article subject does not allow you to overwrite sourced article content, especially not with PR-type content.'' A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 21:27, 22 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi Fluffernutter - I'm a bit confused as to why the subject of a page is unable to edit her own page! Can we at least add a picture? Stacey Stanley
 * Hi Stacey. Per our Conflict-of-interest policy, while you are not prohibited from editing the article of someone who's paying you to edit it, you are very strongly discouraged from doing so, for exactly the reason you've run into here: an article subject's notion of what constitutes neutral, encyclopedic content if often heavily at odds with an encyclopedia's notion of what constitutes neutral, encyclopedic content. Honestly, writing an appropriate Wikipedia article is really quite difficult because of the standards Wikipedia requires of them. We simply don't recommend doing it unless you are already well-versed in our policies and capable of operating from a neutral distance from the topic (i.e. your boss hasn't sent you to write "a better biography of me" or something else that your livelihood depends on). For example: Wikipedia articles are written from a neutral point of view, and a neutral point of view does not make statements about, say, who an article subject is "not afraid to" stand up to, or how "fast growing" their product is. The writers here at Wikipedia write facts, not PR, spin, opinions, or impressions. We wouldn't let someone write an article about Ms. Marshall saying "Leslie Marshall is just a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad person", because that would be negative spin; similarly, we can't let you write an article about how she's great and "stands up" and is the best, because that's positive spin. For another thing, Wikipedia articles rely on reliable sources for their facts. Reliable sources are independent, third-party accounts about article subjects that cover them in a neutral and editorially-controlled manner, and the Wikipedia article will cite each source using a footnote so readers can track back exactly why Wikipedia says that so-and-so does this-and-that. Without these footnoted sources, an article could say literally anything and the reader would have no way of verifying whether it's true or not. If we simply let people write things they wouldn't or couldn't verify in our articles, Leslie Marshall could say "Leslie Marshall is an alien from the planet Krakalax who eats kittens for breakfast" and there would be nothing to be done about it. Sound complicated? Exactly. That's why we discourage people like you from trying to write articles; it's just hard to do right. So, what can you do? Well, you can certainly correct factual inaccuracies (the wrong birth year, wrong political party, whatever) as long as you conspicuously disclose that you are doing it in the pay of Ms. Marshall (see the Wikimedia Terms of Service - bottom of that section, regarding paid editing - for exactly what type of disclosure, where, is required of you). If you want larger changes made to the article, you have a couple of options. You could request them at WP:Paid Editor Help, a noticeboard where people specialize in working with paid editors. Or you could request changes on the article's discussion page, so other editors can evaluate the change and make the edit if it seems right to them. Or you try some of the options listed at this page, including emailing the Volunteer Response Team. I know Wikipedia can be a bewildering place, especially because the way we run things is very different from how most other "social" or "crowdsourced" sites operate. Please read over all the items I've linked in this explanation; each of them will take you to a page explaining the policies I was talking about. I hope this explanation has helped you! A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 21:58, 22 September 2014 (UTC)