User talk:Thectrlaltdelboy

Welcome!

Hello, Thectrlaltdelboy, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 17:11, 30 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Thectrlaltdelboy. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing, which is mostly about health and medicine. Your edits to Nu Skin Enterprises were promotional. Lots of people come to Wikipedia with some sort of conflict of interest and are not aware of how we manage it. 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, Thectrlaltdelboy. 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. 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. Unmanaged conflicts of interest can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies and cause disruption in the normal editing process. Managing conflict of interest well, also protects conflicted editors themselves - please see WP:Wikipedia is in the real world, and Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia for some guidance and stories about people who have brought bad press upon themselves through unmanaged conflict of interest editing.

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 have some connection with Nu Skin, directly or through a third party (e.g. a PR agency or the like)? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it, and please keep in mind that if you are editing for pay or the expectation of being paid, you must disclose that. After you respond (and you can just reply below), if it is relevant 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) 17:14, 30 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for your messages

yes I have a connection to Nu Skin in that I am a Sales Leader with the company since 2011 and as such am in a very strong position, probably more than most if not all other editors of this page, to be able to provide accurate and up to date information. The edits I have made today are not promotional (I cannot benefit from any transactions not related to my Sales Leader ID number) but made to increase accuracy and reduce tabloid sensationalism and poetic licence divergent from facts.

If my desire to ensure that a company I have a long standing positive connection to is reflected in the correct light constitutes a conflict of interest then please advise what you wish me to include and where, however I don't see a conflict of interest myself as I do not and cannot benefit financially from the Nu Skin wikipedia listing Thectrlaltdelboy (talk) 21:20, 30 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Additional

in reverting the page to the pre-edit you have reinstated a number of factual inaccuracies, which I feel is counter-beneficial to the purpose of wikipedia and which in my humble opinion would be better being replaced by correct information Thectrlaltdelboy (talk) 21:27, 30 May 2018 (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 (see WP:THREAD) - 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 -- you already have this part down -- 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 when you save your edit. That is how we know who said what to whom and when.

Please be aware that threading and signing are fundamental etiquette here, as basic as "please" and "thank you", and continually failing to thread and sign communicates rudeness, and eventually people may start to ignore you (see here).

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) 23:00, 30 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again for your note, and for forthrightly disclosing your relationship with Nu Skin.

So, the way we think about this, is that you have a financial interest in the image of the company whose products you sell - that is an "external interest" that will affect your approach to the article, and constitutes a conflict of interest.

You and I can take this question to the community if you like, but I have worked on these issues for a long time and understand how the community thinks about them, and the outcome is (to me) very obvious. But if you wish to get further input on this issue, please let me know and I will bring this to the community that the conflict of interest notice board.

Let me know. If you accept that you have a conflict of interest about this topic here in Wikipedia, I can walk you through how we manage COI here, but I don't want to get ahead too far. Jytdog (talk) 23:05, 30 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

well from your description of how COI works in wikipedia then whilst I don't agree that I have a conflict of interest in the dictionary definition, I do agree that the wikipedia COI applies in my case. I would add that it seems to me that the only people who would be either be bothered to make any edit or contribution to a page such as the Nu Skin Enterprises entry would be those who have an interest of some sort in the company, whether that be an axe to grind for whatever reason, or those who have a less negative connection such as myself but who are something of an insider and as such able to provide insight that most other people don't have; as such I guess every contributor or editor of the page would by default have a conflict of interest? Thectrlaltdelboy (talk) 20:49, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]