User talk:Alexvalk

Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia. However, please do not add promotional material to articles or other Wikipedia pages. Advertising and using Wikipedia as a "soapbox" are against Wikipedia policy and not permitted. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thank you. Syrthiss (talk) 14:21, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Please do not add promotional material to Wikipedia. While objective prose about beliefs, products or services is acceptable, Wikipedia is not intended to be a vehicle for soapboxing, advertising or promotion. Thank you. Syrthiss (talk) 14:26, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. 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. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

1. editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
2. participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors; and
3. linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

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. Syrthiss (talk) 14:27, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Specifically...

I would welcome expansion of the article, since I realize its a notable organization and what I have for it isn't that much. That said, I believe I deleted the article previously because of the text that you are attempting to add. If you behave yourself according to our COI guidelines above, and can suggest information to expand the article on the talkpage, then we can work together. If you insist on replacing the text with promotional text, you'll find yourself blocked from editing the encyclopedia. If you want to reply to me, you can edit this page below this note and I'll see it. Syrthiss (talk) 14:38, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Hi! OK, I have put in a request into the Children's Legal Centre's discussion page. I think that's what you were asking me to do. What happens now? Is it ok? Can I put it into the main page?

Hi Alex: thats sort of what I was asking. You got the template right, and I started moving over some of the text so you can see how the process goes. However, since the material is still generally the material from the infosheet we need to copyedit it before moving it over and look for references. We may be able to get away with a direct link to the info sheet for some of them. Do you have an online link to it? If you can copyedit yourself so it is neutral it would speed the process up. Syrthiss (talk) 16:17, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Hello! Please explain what is wrong with what I've been putting in

Hi, Thanks for telling me how to reply, as I was getting very confused about how to respond!

I am new to adding information to Wikipedia and would like to add information about the Children's Legal Centre. I am the media officer here and I work on the website, so I can assure you that there is no breach of copyright.

I am confused about what information I am able to add - I looked up a number of other charities on Wikipedia (Save the Children, Children in Need etc) and they seem to have plenty of information about themselves. The info I just tried to put up was from a factsheet I have written about the CLC. Please help! I am very confused.

Hi Alex. You may not be aware, but those articles on other charities are most likely written by people not associated with the charity. They wrote them because they felt the charity was notable and well documented. To add material to the Children's Legal Centre page, the text has to be neutral in tone and well referenced to reliable sources. Some things can be referenced to your own site, like size of the charity and founding date + people...but we don't want articles that essentially are copies of the organization's own website (copyright violations not withstanding).

I realize it may be hard to get your legs under you if you are interested in editing the encyclopedia. If there are facts that you want to add, why don't you put your suggested text and the reference that supports it on the talkpage (don't really worry that much about formatting the reference, I or other editors can do that for you if you don't feel confident about it). Then we can be sure the language is neutral before adding it to the encyclopedia.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any more questions. Syrthiss (talk) 14:53, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Hi

So, I need to get you to check all of the copy before it goes on? I'm very confused about this to be honest - looking at the BBC, Amnesty, and any other organisation I've looked up on Wikipedia the info has clearly come from within the organisations and is promotional. But for the CLC I have to run it by you before I can put it up? The info I just put up today simply explained the charity's services. Can you explain why it was removed?

PS - should I add the text here for you to check? Or should I just create the page again?

Sure:

The Children's Legal Centre (CLC) is an independent charity run by experts on law and policy which relating to children and young people. Founded in 1981, The Children's Legal Centre has 29 years of experience in providing legal advice and representation to children, their carers and professionals throughout the UK. and the following sentence were fine. All of that could be supported by your site.

The Child Law Advice Line (CLAL) 08088 020 008. This might be useful, but is a little outside the scope of an encyclopedia article.

We help 10,000 callers each year with problems including parental responsibility, contact, adoption and housing., Our specialist advisors help more than 1,000 callers each year on issues including school admission appeals, attendance and bullying - We? Our? Encyclopedia articles need to be written in the third person. This kind of language is fine for your info sheets, but is horribly out of place here.

The Children’s Legal Centre publishes a wide range of free factsheets on family and education law to help children, parents and carers also probably fine, since its clear from your website that you do indeed do this.

I could go on and on. Its not just one or two things that could be taken out that would improve the tone, or I would have done it myself. To answer your first question - No, you don't need me to vet all copy before it goes in. Honestly, I'd prefer if you didn't write the article at all. As I said above, our COI guidelines show how you can avoid promotional edits and thats the mechanism I explained to you here. I do also have better things to do with my time, but I'd be willing to assist in this. To be clear: I have areas that are conflicts of interest with my real life work that I would very much like to write in, and aside from very minimal fixes I stay far far away from those areas so I am not asking other editors to do something that I don't do myself.

For your point about BBC and Amnesty International (I assume this, from 'Amnesty'): if promotional material exists in those articles, please feel free to remove / rewrite it. To put it in vulgar terms: other stuff exists. Just because someone else has managed to get advertising copy in doesn't mean it is open season to insert our own. Syrthiss (talk) 15:27, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Hi. OK, thanks for explaining. I will try again if that ins't going to get me blocked! Totally understand about third person etc, will try to do a stripped down version.

And to answer your PS - if there is material that you want to add, I'd say cut and paste this: {{Request edit}} as it appears here (not the version that has tlx in it that you see when you edit the page) onto Talk:Children's Legal Centre and put what you want to add below it. That way the request will go into a queue and even if I am not around some other editor can add the information. Syrthiss (talk) 15:36, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

and don't worry about being blocked at this point - its pretty clear now that you're trying to work with us. Syrthiss (talk) 15:36, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

update

Hi! OK, I have put in a request into the Children's Legal Centre's discussion page. I think that's what you were asking me to do. What happens now? Is it ok? Can I put it into the main page?