User talk:Steven Quay

Welcome!
Hello, Steven Quay, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
 * Introduction and Getting started
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gladamas (talk • contribs) 21:51, 30 July 2017(UTC)

Conflict of interest and username issues
Hi Steven Quay. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with regular editing which is mostly about health and medicine Your edits to date are promotional with respect to Atossa Genetics. A person whose name is the same as your username is the CEO of that company.

With respect to the WP:USERNAME policy, specifically WP:IMPERSONATE, would you please review that section and take one of the actions advised there? If you don't we may need to soft-block this account until the issue can be resolved. Thanks.

If you do happen to be the real world Steven Quay, I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below. This is a separate but possibly related issue to the one above.

Hello, Steven Quay. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:


 * avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
 * instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the request edit template);
 * when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
 * exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you.

Comments and requests
Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. As mentioned above, you are editing here under the name of a real world person, and once we resolve the IMPERSONATE issues, that will be somewhat resolved, but we would still need you to explicitly declare your relationship with the real world Steven Quay or Atossa Genetics, if there is one. Would you please disclose any such relationship?

After you respond (and you can just reply below), I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 22:54, 30 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes, I am the real world Steven Quay (although I may not be the only Steven Quay in the world, if you know what I mean). First, let me apologize for having violated Wikipedia's rules. I am very new to being an editor (a matter of hours) and jumped in without reading everything. I am the founder of Atossa Genetics and so was trying to update our own page as well as topics from our page that have their own pages. So that's what I am trying to do. If I can clearly be shown (I am an old guy so step by step please) how I can propose changes for others to make that would be very useful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Steven Quay (talk • contribs) 23:32, 30 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for replying!  Quick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting - when you reply to someone, you put a colon ":" in front of your comment, and the Wikipedia software converts that into an indent when you save your edit; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons "::" which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this  in front of your comment. This also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread.  I hope that all makes sense. And at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages when you save your edit.  That is how we know who said what.  I know this is insanely archaic and unwieldy, but this is the software environment we have to work on. Sorry about that.  Will reply on the substance in a second... Jytdog (talk) 19:30, 31 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Okay, hopefully I am a quick learner. I will await your substantive response.Steven Quay (talk) 19:34, 31 July 2017 (UTC)


 * OK... Thanks for your note, and for disclosing your relationship with the real world Steven Quay and with Atossa. So you have a COI for that company and related topics, as we define that in Wikipedia.


 * To finish the disclosure piece, would you please add the disclosure to your user page (which is User:Steven Quay - a redlink, because you haven't written anything there yet). Just something simple like: "I am founder and CEO of Atossa Genetics and have a conflict of interest with regard to that company and related topics"  would be fine.  If you want to add anything else there that is relevant to what you want to do in WP feel free to add it, but please don't add anything promotional about the company or yourself (see WP:USERPAGE for guidance if you like).


 * I added a tag to the Atossa Genetics article's talk page (Talk:Atossa Genetics), so the disclosure is done there. Once you disclose on your user page, the disclosure piece of this will be done.


 * As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP.  The first is disclosure.  The second is a form of peer review.  This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense.  In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and voilà there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done.  No intermediary - no publisher, no "editors" as that term is used in the real world.  So the bias that conflicted editors tend to have, can go right into the article.  Conflicted editors are also really driven to try to make the article fit with their external interest.   If they edit directly, this often leads to big battles with other editors.


 * What we ask editors to do who have a COI and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, is:
 * a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft through the WP:AFC process, disclose your COI on the Talk page, and then submit the draft article for review (the AfC process sets up a nice big button for you to click when it is ready) so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and
 * b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can make the edit request easily -  and provide notice to the community of your request -  by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline.  I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:Atossa Genetics -  there is a link at "request corrections or suggest content" in that section --  if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.  You can also add a  tag to flag it for other editors to review.


 * By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. We get some great contributions that way, when conflicted editors take the time to understand what kinds of proposals are OK under the content policies.    (There are good faith paid editors here, who have signed and follow the Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms, and there are "black hat" paid editors here who lie about what they do and really harm Wikipedia).


 * But understanding the mission, and the policies and guidelines through which we realize the mission, is very important!  There are a whole slew of policies and guidelines that govern content and behavior here in Wikipedia.   Please see User:Jytdog/How for an overview of what Wikipedia is and is not (we are not a directory or a place to promote anything), and for an overview of the content and behavior policies and guidelines.  Learning and following these is very important, and takes time.   Please be aware that you have created a Wikipedia account, and this makes you a Wikipedian - you are obligated to pursue Wikipedia's mission first and foremost when you work here, and you are obligated to edit according to the policies and guidelines.  Editing Wikipedia is a privilege that is freely offered to all, but the community restricts or completely takes that privilege away from people who will not edit and behave as Wikipedians.


 * I hope that makes sense to you.


 * I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where the company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content.   If you are not sure if something is uncontroversial, please ask at the Talk page.


 * Will you please agree to learn and follow the content and behavioral policies and guidelines, and to follow the peer review processes going forward when you want to work on any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss.  Best regards -- Jytdog (talk) 19:41, 31 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I absolutely agree to follow the rules and policies! I am an 'old guy' who enjoys hanging on by my nails to this fast changing world that I find myself in. If I screw up please jump on me; I probably didn't understand something. Regards, Steven Quay (talk) 19:48, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your quick reply! And again, welcome.  Great to have you.  I want to give you a heads up that there are some problems with the article about your company that I am going to fix in a while.  I will explain what I am doing in edit notes, but if you don't understand or disagree with something, please ask at  the talk page.
 * More generally please be aware that there is a community of editors who work on content about health and medicine - we call it WP:MED and that stands for WIkiProject Medicine. There is a subproject for pharmacology at WP:PHARM.  Each project has a talk page (WT:MED and WT:PHARM) where you can ask questions or join in the discussions.  There is also a project about companies with a Talk page - WT:COMPANIES.
 * Doc James, who left a message for you below, is the more-or-less unofficial leader of WP:MED.
 * All of us in WP:MED work very hard to make sure that articles about drugs and other treatments are free of conflict of interest, and present high quality content. There are four things that it will be useful for you to be aware of:
 * There is a "manual of style" that governs how we write about medicine and defines the structure of articles. We are careful to separate out what is a treatment, from what is research, for example.  This is at WP:MEDMOS.
 * We are very careful about sourcing content about health - everything here depends on sources. The sourcing guideline is at WP:MEDRS and Doc James' message below summarizes that - we use high quality review articles and other "secondary" sources.   We avoid "primary sources" (publications of research results or clinical trials or company websites) like the plague.  For everything else, the relevant guideline is WP:RS - we strongly prefer independent sources.  So for your company, stuff in Fierce Biotech or the other Fierce sites or Xconomy,  but not stock blogs like Seeking Alpha, newspapers like the Seattle Times or the NYT or WSJ, and we use company websites here very sparingly as well.
 * A general guideline about how to edit about health is at WP:MEDHOW. You will probably find that useful!
 * Scientists from academia and industry who come to Wikipedia sometimes have a hard time adapting to this weird environment. There is an essay at WP:EXPERT that you might find helpful, as it aimed at folks like you and might help you get your feet on the ground.
 * I will let you be now. I appreciate your gracious responses above and look forward to seeing you around! Jytdog (talk) 20:05, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

July 2017
Please do not add promotional material to Wikipedia. While objective prose about beliefs, organisations, people, products or services is acceptable, Wikipedia is not intended to be a vehicle for soapboxing, advertising or promotion. Thank you. Alexf(talk) 11:48, 31 July 2017 (UTC)