Talk:Occupational Safety and Health Administration/Archives/2016

Inaccuracies in OSHA article

I work in the Office of Communications for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. On 8/15/16 I made edits to Wikipedia's OSHA entry. As explained in the edit summary, the changes I made included “Updates to incomplete information. Deletion of duplicative text. Reorganization of existing paragraphs.”

It seems that all my edits were removed on 8/19/16 by user GermanJoe. This has had the effect of rendering much of the information about OSHA on this page incomplete and/or inaccurate.

I reported this in an email to info-en-q@wikimedia.org on 8/24/16 but have received no reply.

I am also posting this message on the Wkipedia Help Desk page.

Please advise as to how my edits can be restored.

Thank you.

OSHAUpdates (talk) 14:51, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

• Your edits removed critical content about your office and added overly detailed information about your office's own point of view and activities without third-party sources. Both types of edits are highly inappropriate for a "conflict of interest" editor, besides the general recommendation to not edit articles with a conflict of interest at all. Another quick clarification: the article is not OSHA's entry in Wikipedia, but an encyclopedic article about your office - preferably written by uninvolved volunteers. Please use edit requests on the talkpage for further suggestions, and be as specific as possible. But as I could be seen as involved by now, I'll leave checking your suggestions to other uninvolved editors (there may be some delay, as Wikipedia is a volunteer project). GermanJoe (talk) 15:26, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

• OSHAUpdates, GermanJoe: I restored some material and added third-party citations to support the new paragraphs. In my opinion, noting that the fines for safety violations has been raised is fine, as it is correcting inaccurate information and does not editorialize on the article subject. I also restored the paragraph on Permissible Exposure Limits. Almost every secondary school student in the U.S. is/should be familiar with these, as they are listed on the MSDS sheets they use during experiments. Therefore, I believe the PELs deserve a mention. Altamel (talk) 01:42, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

• User:Altamel, I partially disagree with your argument that the topic's handling in US schools should directly correlate with Wikipedia's coverage of the topic. Schools and encyclopedias have similar but different goals, and different ways to provide information. But that's a minor point of disagreement about the necessary level of detail - I think, your changes for these specific points may be a good compromise. Thank you for having a look from an uninvolved point of view. GermanJoe (talk) 02:31, 3 September 2016 (UTC)