User talk:Kenosplit

Welcome!

Hello, Kenosplit, and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent contributions seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes. Wikipedia does not allow advertising. For more information on this, please see:

• Policy on neutral point of view
• Guideline on spam
• Guideline on external links
• Guideline on conflict of interest
• FAQ for Organizations

If you still have questions, there is a new contributors' help page, or you can . You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page and how to develop articles
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• Article wizard for creating new articles
• Simplified Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! Lwarrenwiki (talk) 20:42, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

A more personal welcome

@Kenosplit: As you might have guessed, the previous message was a standardized Wikipedia template. In my own words, this time: welcome to Wikipedia. Please continue our conversation either on my talk page, or if appropriate, at Talk:Machine Zone. Lwarrenwiki (talk) 20:42, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion

This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident in which you may be involved. Thank you. Lwarrenwiki (talk) 22:02, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Kenosplit I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia. Thanks for disclosing that you work at Machine Zone here. I'm providing you with more formal notice of our COI guideline and paid editing policy, and will have some comments and questions for you below. Please do reply here, below my comments.

Hello, Kenosplit. 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. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your circle, your organization, its competitors, projects or products;
• instead propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or 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 familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, 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. You've done that at another user's talk page, and that editor added a template to the article Talk page.

To finish the disclosure piece, would you please add the disclosure to your user page (which is User:Kenosplit - a redlink, because you haven't written anything there yet)? Just something simple like: "I work for Machine Zone and have a conflict of interest with regard to that topic" 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 nothing promotional about the company (see WP:USERPAGE for guidance if you like).

That would finish the the disclosure piece.

As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP. The first is disclosure. The second is what I call "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 viola 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.

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, disclose your COI on the Talk page using the appropriate template, and then submit the draft article through the WP:AFC process 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. A section has been added to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:Machine Zone - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.

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. (which I will say more about, if you want).

I hope that makes sense to you, and that you will stop editing the article directly.

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.

Will you please agree to follow the peer review processes going forward, when you want to work on the Machine Zone article or 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. And if you want me to quickly go over the content policies, I can do that. Just let me know. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 16:54, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

• @Jytdog: Thank you for the message. I understand Wikipedia's guidelines but don't believe I violated them in anyway, and it certainly was not my intention to violate them. Your changes to the "Machine Zone" article, however, have completely done away with basic facts about the company. Most of the changes you made were not even to text I wrote -- they were written by Lwarrenwiki, who is not a Machine Zone employee and has no apparent bias in trying to promote the company. Your changes to the Machine Zone article were extreme and only make the article inaccurate and antiquated. It ignores anything about the company beyond summer of 2015. Isn't the purpose of Wikipedia to offer accurate, up-to-date information? That was my only intent in making edits to the article -- not to promote the company, but to offer more up-to-date information about the company. I would simply like the article to be more accurate and hope that we can work together to achieve that.

I would be happy to talk about content in a bit - can we first get through the process of getting you oriented here? Would you please make the disclosure on your user page and agree to not edit content about Machine Zone directly? Please do let me know. Then, I would be happy to provide you with a brief orientation as to how Wikipedia works -- how we decide things, and on what bases. You won't be able to really participate here until you understand that stuff. Do let me know about the two questions. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 19:02, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

@Jytdog: I updated my user page and agree not to edit content about Machine Zone directly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kenosplit (talk • contribs) 19:11, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that! 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 WP software converts that into an indent; 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 {{od}} 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. 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. I am going to start a new section in a minute, providing the overview of how this place works. It is kind of long, but meant to be quickly skimmable, and also something you can dig into if something puzzles you. Jytdog (talk) 19:19, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

How Wikipedia works

OK, so I would like to get you oriented to how Wikipedia works, including our criteria for whether articles should exist, or not. There are some non-intuitive things about editing here, that I can zip through ~pretty~ quickly....

The first thing, is that our mission is to produce articles that provide readers encyclopedia articles that summarize accepted knowledge, and to do that as a community that anyone can be a part of. That's the mission. As you can imagine, if this place had no norms, it would be a Mad Max kind of world interpersonally, and content would be a slag heap (the quality is really bad in parts, despite our best efforts). But over the past 15 years the community has developed a whole slew of norms, via loads of discussion. One of the first, is that we decide things by consensus. That decision itself, is recorded here: WP:CONSENSUS, which is one of our "policies". (There is a whole forest of things, in "Wikipedia space" - pages in Wikipedia that start with "Wikipedia:AAAA" or for short, "WP:AAAA". WP:CONSENSUS is different from Consensus. ) And when we decide things by consensus, that is not just local in space and time, but includes meta-discussions that have happened in the past. The results of those past meta-discussions are the norms that we follow now. We call them policies and guidelines - and these documents all reside in Wikipedia space. There are policies and guidelines that govern content, and separate ones that govern behavior. Here is very quick rundown:

Content policies and guidelines

• WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing. This where will also find stated in that Wikipedia is not to be used for promotion WP:PROMO - please think about why you are editing Wikipedia, as you read that)
• WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
• WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down to the sources you bring!)
• WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content and WP:MEDRS defines what reliable sourcing is for content about health
• WP:NPOV and the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what most folks think -- it doesn't mean "fair and balanced" - it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references.
• WP:BLP - this is a policy specifically about articles about living people. We are very careful about these articles (which means enforcing the policies and guidelines above rigorously), since issues of legal liability can arise for WP, and people have very strong feelings about other people, and about public descriptions of themselves.
• WP:NOTABILITY - this is a policy that defines whether or not an article about X, should exist. What this comes down to is defined in WP:Golden rule - which is basically, are there enough independent sources with substantial discussion about X, with which to build a decent article. I reckon this will be of special interest to you.

In terms of behavior, the key norms are:

• WP:CONSENSUS - already discussed
• WP:CIVIL - basically, be nice. This is not about being nicey nice, it is really about not being a jerk and having that get in the way of getting things done. We want to get things done here - get content written and maintained and not get hung up on interpersonal disputes. So just try to avoid doing things that create unproductive friction.
• WP:AGF - assume good faith about other editors. Try to focus on content, not contributor. Don't personalize it when content disputes arise. (the anonymity here can breed all kinds of paranoia)
• WP:HARASSMENT - really, don't be a jerk and follow people around, bothering them. And do not try to figure out who people are in the real world. Privacy is strictly protected by the WP:OUTING part of this policy.
• WP:DR - if you get into an content dispute with someone, try to work it. If you cannot, then use one of the methods here to get wider input. There are many - it never has to come down to two people arguing. There are instructions here too, about what to do if someone is behaving badly, in your view. Try to keep content disputes separate from behavior disputes. Many of the big messes that happen in Wikipedia arise from these getting mixed up.
• WP:TPG - this is about how to talk to other editors on Talk pages, like this one, or the one in the article about your company: Talk:Machine Zone, and also deletion discussions, should ever get involved in one of those.

If you can get all that (the content and behavior policies and guidelines) under your belt, you will become truly "clueful", as we say. If that is where you want to go, of course. I know that was a lot of information, but hopefully it is digestable enough.

SO... Anytime you want to create an article, here is what to do.

1. look for independent sources that comply with WP:RS for most things (and with WP:MEDRS for any content about health) - those sources need to give serious discussion to the topic, not just be passing mentions. Start with great sources.
2. Look at the sources you found, and see if you have enough per WP:Golden rule to even go forward. (generally you need at least two or three independent sources with substantial discussion) If you don't have them, you can stop right there; if you already created the article, you can expect someone to nominate it for deletion.
3. Read the sources you found, and identify the main and minor themes to guide you with regard to WP:WEIGHT - be wary of distortions in weight due to WP:RECENTISM
4. Go look at manual of style guideline created by the relevant WikiProject, to guide the sectioning and other style matters (you can look at articles on similar topics but be ginger b/c WP has lots of bad content) - create an outline. (For example, for biographies, the relevant project is WP:WikiProject Biography or for companies, see WP:WikiProject Companies)
5. Create the article in draft space. Create the talk page, and disclose your COI there.
6. Start writing the body, based only on what is in the sources you have, and source each sentence as you go.
7. Make sure you write in neutral language.
8. When you are done, write the lead and add infobox, external links, categories, etc
9. Consider adding banners to the Talk page, joining the draft article to relevant Wikiprojects, which will help attract editors who are interested and knowledgeable to help work on the article.
10. The completed work should have nothing unsourced (because the sources drove everything you wrote, not prior knowledge or personal experiences or what the client wanted; there is no original research nor WP:PROMO in it.
11. Submit your article for review via the WP:AFC process - again I can help there if you like. You will get responses from reviewers, and you can work with them to do whatever is needed to get the article ready to be published.

There you go! Let me know if you have questions about any of that

Anyway - there it is. Hope that makes sense. I know you already created your the article has already been created so a bunch of that is not necessary. But it might help you understand how others will react to it.

Once you have that under your belt, we can have a real discussion about article content at Machine Zone, based on these policies and guidelines. Jytdog (talk) 19:26, 14 April 2016 (UTC) (redact per below Jytdog (talk) 21:56, 14 April 2016 (UTC))

Thank you for the information. I've read it and would like to move forward with discussing the article content at Machine Zone. And, just to clarify something you wrote, I did not create the Machine Zone article. It has been in existence for some time and was being maintained by another Wikipedia user. I just wanted to update it to make it more accurate and reflect the new products/services and branding of the company. Kenosplit (talk) 21:48, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeah i realized that after I wrote it. i redacted above. sorry. and good luck!! Jytdog (talk) 21:56, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Jytdog, I would still like to work with you on editing the Machine Zone article so that it is more accurate and up-to-date. I am fine with making suggested edits to the article rather than editing it directly, but my suggested edits will be in line with the edits I made before, which I do not believe are promotional. If it's an issue of citations, I can cite to articles and other sources supporting the facts in my edits.Kenosplit (talk)