User talk:Vividgusts

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, Vividgusts. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about in the article Martin J. Silverstein, 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 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. Closeapple (talk) 16:56, 15 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Please remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Articles should be written in prose; they should not be bullet-pointed like a CV. Also, material in the article should be backed up by reliable sources; you made several additions that were unsourced.


 * I'm not immediately seeing where you have a conflict of interest. However, it may be smoother if you make your changes in smaller chunks and discuss the changes at Talk:Martin J. Silverstein to get support (consensus) for the changes before you make them. —C.Fred (talk) 17:10, 15 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Your most recent edit had some major faults. You deleted sources that supported the information about Silverstein. You then added a number of unsourced claims including:
 * Silverstein serves as a Trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, a Board of Visitors member at Temple University Beasley School of Law and as an Overseer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing Science. He also serves as a Trustee of the (Pennsylvania) Public School Employees' Retirement System, a public pension fund with $50 billion in assets. He sits as a Judge Pro Tempore in the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania and on the Federal Judicial Nomination Advisory Panel.
 * worked to reopen markets to banned Uruguayan commodities; and engineered the signing of the first Bilateral Investment Treaty of the Bush Administration. These actions led the President of Uruguay to publicly credit President Bush with saving his government and preventing economic collapse.
 * The United States government decorated the Ambassador with the Superior Honor Award Medal and The Foreign Affairs Award for Public Service for his "performance with exceptional dedication and distinction." The Republic of Uruguay decorated him with the Medalla de la Republica Oriental del Uruguay, rank of Gran Oficial, the highest honor it ever bestowed on an American citizen.
 * That's just three examples. The criticial thing is that you must cite your sources on Wikipedia, especially in a biography. Removing sourced material and replacing it with unsourced material is widely regarded as disruptive editing. —C.Fred (talk) 17:15, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Please review the guidelines for copyright
On further inspection, there may be a bigger problem with your edits to Martin J. Silverstein. You appear to have copied a lot of the text from http://www.martindale.com/Hon-Martin-J-Silverstein/1127773-lawyer.htm into the article. That page is under an all-right-reserved license; the text is not free to use on Wikipedia.

The information from that page may be usable; the question is whether Martindale vetted the information, making it a reliable source, or is just reprinting what Silverstein or his staff uploaded. That's a separate question; the critical issue is that we may not violate the copyrights of the Martindale site. —C.Fred (talk) 17:19, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

December 2016
Your addition to Martin J. Silverstein has been removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without evidence of permission from the copyright holder. If you are the copyright holder, please read Donating copyrighted materials for more information on uploading your material to Wikipedia. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted material, including text or images from print publications or from other websites, without an appropriate and verifiable license. All such contributions will be deleted. You may use external websites or publications as a source of information, but not as a source of content, such as sentences or images&mdash;you must write using your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. —C.Fred (talk) 17:28, 15 December 2016 (UTC)