User talk:Janny529

Welcome!

Hello, Janny529, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! -- Jytdog (talk) 16:56, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Conflict of interest notice

Hi Janny529. Thanks for disclosing your conflict of interest with regard to [Tim Berry (entrepreneur)]]. I'm providing you with Wikipedia's conflict of interest notice.

Hello, Janny529. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about ensuring their edits are verified by reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:

Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).
Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies. Note that Wikipedia's terms of use require disclosure of your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. Jytdog (talk) 16:57, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Can we talk a bit please?

you seem to be a freelance writer... can we talk a bit please? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 18:32, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How do we do that? Yes, I am a freelancer. :-)

Thanks, Janny529 (talk) 18:34, 23 April 2015 (UTC)Janny529[reply]

we can just chat right here... thanks for being open to this! OK so this is not going to be happy news for you but have you heard of the wiki-pr scandal that happened a couple of years ago here? Jytdog (talk) 18:40, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, no, I hadn't heard of it. Are you telling me that as a freelancer, I'm suspect of being a PR person? Janny529 (talk) 18:41, 23 April 2015 (UTC)Janny519[reply]

i started writing a long reply but i just realized something. you wrote that Tim asked you to work on the article. is he your friend, or do you work for him, or is this a freelance gig? I'll say more after you answer... Jytdog (talk) 19:24, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is a freelance gig. I do other writing for Tim, and in the process of working on some other stuff he mentioned that his Wiki page had been flagged for "commercial" and such content, so he wanted to see if I could fix that. That's how all this started. But I just do work for Tim as a freelancer--I don't work for any of his companies or for him in any other capacity. He hired me through oDesk.Janny529 (talk) 19:36, 23 April 2015 (UTC)Janny529Janny529 (talk) 19:36, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that makes sense, that is what i thought! OK.

so wiki-pr is kind of like elance, but was tighter-knit. as you see, it is really easy to sign up for a WP account. The Terms of Use and our username policy all say that one person should only have one account, and if you have more than one you need to make that clear on the user page of each account. the reason for that is, that people sometimes lie and create multiple accounts (we call them "sockpuppets" or "socks") and do bad things with them, like try to skew decisions that we make here (decisions are by "consensus" which we define carefully -- it is not a sloppy concept - but more "voices" can sway consensus sometimes)

What Wiki-PR did, was solicit people who wanted articles written and offered to write the articles for pay, and then people from Wiki-PR actually created those articles via a bunch of sockpuppet accounts. (doing it with a throw-away sock account made them harder to catch in some ways) There were maybe 250 of such accounts, and these accounts either created or heavily edited maybe a thousand articles in WP. (you can read all about it Wiki-PR editing of Wikipedia and for a wider perspective, see Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia.

what is wrong with that? The problem is that when people edit for pay or under some other conflict of interest (COI), they tend to a) skew the article heavily in favor of whoever is paying them or the subject of their COI; and b) they tend to write pretty crappy articles, by our standards (quite often if there is not an article about some one, something, or some company, it is because there are not enough good sources to create one - to pass our WP:NOTABILITY standard for whether an article should exist or not.

(Probably the biggest problem we have in WP is "advocacy" - some bias a person brings to their work here, that makes it hard for them to be neutral. imagine, a Cubs fan, or someone who took a drug and had a bad side effect and comes to think of the drug and the company that makes it, as evil.... those are advocates). COI is a subset of advocacy (you own a company, or you are suing a drug company, or you are editing an article for pay). advocacy messes up Wikipedia all the time.

while everybody in Wikipedia is concerned with the WP being neutral, some editors here worry a LOT about paid editing in particular - about people with money skewing Wikipedia. The community here goes through waves of intense concern about paid editing/COI. There was a big wave a couple of years ago, in the wake of the Wiki-PR thing. We are in the midst of another one, over this -- which got a story in Newsweek.

anyway, after the Wiki-PR thing, there was a strong push to try to ban paid editing.

however, very deep in the guts of this place, is a concern with privacy. Nobody has to say who they are! (and people who do have been harassed in the real world over controversies here, sometimes in really ugly ways). So privacy is strictly protected here, via our WP:OUTING policy. :::::So there is a fundamental tension here between the very, very protected anonymity of editors (The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) which owns wikipedia, just sued the NSA over privacy and Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, recently wrote an editorial in the NY Times (here) where he talked about the very very high value WP places on anonymity ... and on the other, very strong concerns everyone has with the integrity of WP. So you see the problem?

because of that the efforts to ban paid editing failed.

in the wake of that failure, the WMF updated the Terms of Use subsection on "Refraining from Certain Activities" to contain a new bit as follows:

Paid contributions without disclosure
These Terms of Use prohibit engaging in deceptive activities, including misrepresentation of affiliation, impersonation, and fraud. As part of these obligations, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. You must make that disclosure in at least one of the following ways:

a statement on your user page,

a statement on the talk page accompanying any paid contributions, or

a statement in the edit summary accompanying any paid contributions.

so...I know that you didn't know about this, which I am sure is why you didn't make the required disclosure when you made your initial edits. You are fine now, for the stuff you did for Tim.

but if you ever want to do more freelance work writing Wikipedia articles, please make sure you disclose your "employer, client, and affiliation" for those edits... and please honor the "edit request" thing.

the edit request function is how Wikipedia manages COI. Somebody with a COI is free to propose article content, but somebody without the COI reviews it and implements it, if it is truly neutral.

at the end of the day, everybody wants Wikipedia to be great. I hope you can see the sense in all that. sorry this was kind of long! Jytdog (talk) 19:56, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

While I understand caution, and I certainly understand the "sock puppet" thing--which anonymity, unfortunately, only enables to keep happening--I also, however, find it insulting to a freelancer to imply that merely because I get paid to write something--or in this case, "clean up" something--that that makes me an advocate for that person. It does NOT. It makes me a paid professional, doing a job that has worth in and of itself. What was written was not advertising, nor was it pushy. It simply stated what the man has done. It's not his fault he's an achiever! ;-)

Under the Wikipedia "caution" lurks a couple of dangerous prejudices: one, that being paid to write somehow automatically biases me toward the person involved; and two, that since "anyone" can write, people who are actually getting paid for it are looked at with a jaundiced eye. Perhaps this is why, in the bigger world, Wikipedia is never considered a viable source for actual research...because it's written by people who may or may not know how to write, who may or may not be "pushing" an agenda, or who may or may not know what they're talking about. Discouraging the input of professionals only exacerbates all these problems; it certainly does nothing to insure the "integrity" of Wikipedia!

The sad part about this? If Tim writes HIS OWN material, it'll get flagged even worse, because it's not going to be factual and "objective" enough. But if he pays ME to clean up material he originally wrote, it's just as suspect. I guess the only way to truly have a biography written about someone on here, then, is to have a total stranger do it...but then, again, that total stranger's work wouldn't be acceptable if they were being paid to write it.

Catch-22, anyone?

I did send the material with an Edit Request, just in case what I did wasn't acceptable. You can take it and mold it if you need to, so it's not "commercial." Tim wants a Wiki presence, which he deserves to have; but frankly, this experience, and all the hoops one has to jump through just to try to do a job, does not make me interested in ever doing business with Wiki in any capacity again.

Thanks, Janny529 (talk) 20:16, 23 April 2015 (UTC)Janny529[reply]