User talk:Lukedmor

Welcome!

Hello, Lukedmor, 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! Dmcq (talk) 08:31, 23 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Original research

I reverted the addition you made to list of logarithmic identities as it looked like wp:original research. That's the wikipedia term for something people figure out for themselves instead of it being written down somewhere. Dmcq (talk) 08:31, 23 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Lukedmor. We have been having a lot of disruption at cryptocurrency pages; people in online communities around these currencies as well as company representatives have come to Wikipedia to promote them. Such editing constitutes a conflict of interest here in Wikipedia. I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

Hello, Lukedmor. 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. Editing for the purpose of advertising or promotion is not permitted. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:

avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, company, organization or competitors;
propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
disclose your COI when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
do your best to comply with 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).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. 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. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you are connected with the Zcash Company, directly or through a third party (e.g. a PR agency or the like), and if you hold Zcash? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 16:41, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Jytdog, I understand your concerns. I am not in any way connected to Zcash Company — I am a graduate student of computer science. My academic interests include cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, so naturally I find Zcash an interesting concept. I am uncomfortable sharing any information about my assets on the internet, but I remark that as a typical graduate student in the united states I am living in debt. I value peer review, and I also value blind review: my comments regarding your edits to the Zcash page are valid, as I am sure any unbiased party would see (particularly one that is familiar with the technology). I hope this gets worked out — I think Zcash is more interesting as technology rather than "yet another cryptocurrency", and the wikipedia page on it was severely lacking on the technology front (as well as on the front of relevant research paper citations). Thanks for your attention; let me know how we should proceed. Lukedmor (talk) 17:48, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for replying! 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, which the Wikipedia software will render into an indent when you save your edit; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons in front of your comment, 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 as you already doing, we "sign" at the end of the comment 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 when you save your edit. 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. Will reply on the substance in a second... Jytdog (talk) 20:33, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thanks for replying. Saying if you hold Zcash does not say anything about you except that fact. I am not asking how much! Jytdog (talk) 20:34, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I do hold Zcash. Despite that, my contributions (which I made anonymously before logging in for one last edit) and my criticisms of your edits are neutral and reliably sourced. Lukedmor (talk) 20:46, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. This means you have a financial interest in the topic and have a conflict of interest. What conflict of interest does, generally, is skew judgement. That is why, for example, judges recuse themselves if they have some financial interest in the outcome, and why in academic publishing you are obligated to disclose, and peer reviewers review in light of the disclosure, and if the paper is published, people read it with that in mind.

As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP. The first is disclosure. The second is a form of prior 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 voilà 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. So the bias that conflicted editors tend to have, can go right into the article. Conflicted editors are also really driven to try to make the article fit with their external interest. If they edit directly, this often leads to big battles with other editors.

What we ask editors to do who have a COI or who are paid, 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 through the WP:AFC process, disclose your COI on the Talk page with the Template:Connected contributor (paid) tag, and then submit the draft article for review (the AfC process sets up a nice big button for you to click when it is ready) 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

(i) disclose at the Talk page of the article with the Template:Connected contributor (paid) tag, putting it at the bottom of the beige box at the top of the page; and

(ii) propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. Just open a new section, put the proposed content there, and just below the header (at the top of the editing window) please the {{request edit}} tag to flag it for other editors to review. In general it should be relatively short so that it is not too much review at once. Sometimes editors propose complete rewrites, providing a link to their sandbox for example. This is OK to do but please be aware that it is lot more for volunteers to process and will probably take longer.

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.

But understanding the mission, and the policies and guidelines through which we realize the mission, is very important! There are a whole slew of policies and guidelines that govern content and behavior here in Wikipedia. Please see User:Jytdog/How for an overview of what Wikipedia is and is not (we are not a directory or a place to promote anything), and for an overview of the content and behavior policies and guidelines. Learning and following these is very important, and takes time. Please be aware that you have created a Wikipedia account, and this makes you a Wikipedian - you are obligated to pursue Wikipedia's mission first and foremost when you work here, and you are obligated to edit according to the policies and guidelines. Editing Wikipedia is a privilege that is freely offered to all, but the community restricts or completely takes that privilege away from people who will not edit and behave as Wikipedians.

I hope that makes sense to you.

Will you please agree to learn and follow the content and behavioral policies and guidelines, and to follow the peer review processes going forward when you want to work on 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. Best regards Jytdog (talk) 20:56, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I understand, I'll follow the process where it's relevant. Lukedmor (talk) 21:26, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not getting paid, so I would use Template:Connected contributor instead of the paid variant. Lukedmor (talk) 21:28, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]