User talk:Vinophil

Welcome

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SSRN links
Hello-I see you've recently edited a bunch of articles and added references to SSRN articles. I'm concerned that there might be a conflict of interest in promoting those, since they all seem to have an author in common. If you are that author, you probably have plenty to contribute to Wikipedia, so this isn't meant to lock you out, just advising you to be aware of common practice here. If there's a reasonable chance that what you're adding could be seen as having a conflict of interest, a suggested route is to suggest an edit on the article's talk page first. It's fairly likely someone will take that suggestion and implement it for you. Or someone might object, in which case you could discuss it. Or you might get complete silence for weeks, in which case you probably could add the material yourself, at least knowing that nobody had previously objected.

I'm going to undo your additions for now. C RETOG 8(t/c) 22:47, 2 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Cretog8--I am sort of muddling through here...not used to doing this sort of editing. I don't think there are any "conflict of interest" issues though, as you will see if you go to the SSRN links. I am largely just adding some nuances to the discussions I edited to reflect my research in the area. Check some of them out and let me know if you think I am doing anything inappropriate. Best, Phil

Hi Cretog8--comments interspersed:


 * Hello-I'm sure everything you're doing is in good faith, but it kinda clashes with the culture here at Wikipedia.

I certainly want to be on the "up-and-up," with no intention to clash with Wikipedia! :)

And honestly, your additions are so fast-and-furious that I'd be hard-pressed to evaluate each of them. Yes, it just occurred to me why an article I wrote a long time ago was getting so many citations on my "Selected Works" site at Berkeley Electronic Press...it was because someone mentioned it on Wikipedia. So, having contributed to a number of research areas in economics over the years (monetary economics, urban/regional economics, and environmental economics, mostly), I thought I should get those ideas into Wikipedia, where their merit could be evaluated by the many readers.

My advice above stands: If you go to the article talk page and suggest an addition, you're most likely to get either approval or silence and then you can add the material without any concern of rubbing the locals the wrong way. If you do that, one way to make it clear when you add the material to the article is to link to the talk page discussion in the edit summary. I will try to figure out how to do this, but am much more of a computer novice than most people these days. If there is some quick and easy link to explain it to me that would be superb.
 * Also, I see you're linking to SSRN, but most of the articles are actually published. If it's not published off of SSRN yet some (including me) object to it. If it is published off of SSRN it's tricky because you want to link to the authoritative published version, but also to a free version that someone can read. I think I've done something like that before, I'll try to find an example for you (probably not today) or clean up one of your references to do that.

The reason I used the SSRN links is that I have uploaded most of the more important papers I have written to that site...many of the papers were scanned in by secretaries to create the .pdf files, being pre-digital era and hard to find, except perhaps in dusty old library stacks! :)


 * I really don't want to scare you away from Wikipedia. If you think you're here for more than a hit-and-run, you would probably be very welcome at WikiProject Economics. C RETOG 8(t/c) 23:12, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Inappropriate edits.
Please be sure your contributions to Wikipedia are relevant for the page you are editing. I just reverted (see here) your edit to the lead paragraph of Income elasticity of demand, where you said:


 * Many introductory textbooks employ terminology which can sometimes be confusing to students.

That's just an opinion, so it does not represent a neutral point of view. It's also not relevant to the topic of the page (certainly not relevant enough to go in the lead paragraph). Many of your other edits also appear to be original research. Rinconsoleao (talk) 10:27, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Here is another inappropriate contribution which I reverted in the page population mobility:


 * A general model exists that can characterize all such moves in the context of a unified theory.

Whether the model is 'general' and 'unified' and can 'characterize all moves' are points subject to debate. Making such dramatic claims for a model would require additional citations (not just a link to the unpublished paper itself).

Moreover, many of the edits made by this user seem to be intended to promote papers written by Philip Graves of the University of Colorado at Boulder. If this user is Philip Graves, then those edits are inappropriate because they represent a conflict of interest. If this user is not Philip Graves, it would be helpful to have more independent citations demonstrating the importance of that professor's research. Rinconsoleao (talk) 10:40, 3 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I'd like to mention the meta issue of this possible self-citation. This is a page on the experimental economics with a public good, and we should consider the possibility that Vinophil is using Wikipedia itself as the public good on which to run a mini-experiment. The paper that he linked (possible WP:COI) has as its thesis the idea that those of us who value public goods relatively more highly (than private) will sacrifice more of our leisure time to work for the public interest than will those working for private accumulation; this is a theory that would only be confirmed by its timely removal from the page..... Is the WP:POINT to create a paradox? To link a paper that will be removed under WP:RS only if it is true? (Anyway, I changed the page, but didn't remove the link to this paper.) --Wragge (talk) 22:08, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi to both Wragge and Rinconsoleao--I think I should perhaps explain myself at tad. On the "flurry" of postings, that is all over (I was mostly interested in getting some quite highly-cited published papers available to readers of Wikipedia, which is evidently viewed as a conflict of interest). I scanned down my posted papers on SSRN (Social Science Research Network) and attempted to see where a link to one of them might be useful for Wikipedia readers. The migration work, for example, was argued in a recently published paper by Mark Partridge at Ohio State to be superior in explanatory power to the work that largely got Krugman the Nobel Prize recently. There are about 700+ ISI Web of Science Social Science Citation Index citations to this work, yet it was not represented at all in Wikipedia which I viewed as an oversight. Some of the newer environmental work is less well-known (though mostly published)--the gist of it is that any time conditions favor free-riding in output markets, there will also be disincentive to generate income for the purpose of incrementing those goods, as such income would be negligible to provision cost. Hence, *all* benefit-cost analyses of public goods (at least those lacking strong special interest support, e.g. National Defense), are being conducted at the wrong income level. Moreover, all of the ungenerated income, apart from general equilibrium effects, would have been spent on the public good. While Wragge makes the correct observation that there is nothing about allowing people to generate extra income in public goods experiments that will eliminate the free rider incentive not to do so, it is the case that not everyone free rides always and fully, and existing experiments *explicitly* disallow such real-world behavior by stating that the respondent is to "be clear that the WTP for the public good is to come out of your fixed income" (to attempt to eliminate hypothetical and other biases that might cause a respondent to overstate values). Oh well...trying to explain myself here, but it is getting a bit lengthy. Just drop any references you guys view as inappropriate. I thought I was adding balance to the existing entries, but it is evidently not being viewed that way. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.168.224.42 (talk) 22:31, 3 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Those sound like valid points, and I understand you would like to see them represented on Wikipedia. But we are not supposed to promote our own work here. Basically, when a research contribution becomes sufficiently influential to be notable in an encyclopedia, someone else will write about it in Wikipedia. If you are the one who decides whether your work is notable, then the incentives are wrong. These norms require some patience, but they ensure that what ends up here is notable. Rinconsoleao (talk) 09:22, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Ok...makes sense to me. The only reason I made those posts was that I discovered that a fairly mediocre paper of mine was getting an inordinate amount of downloads (519 last I looked) at B.E. Press, evidently because someone cited it in Wikipedia. I figured it was sad that many much better papers were not getting that sort of attention. The whole Wikipedia experiment is quite interesting--I tell my students for their paper assignments that a Wikipedia citation is not a "real" citation (partly for the reasons that got me in trouble!), but that there are real citations within Wikipedia...the key is to know the difference. :)