204.9.57.90

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, 204.9.57.90. 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, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
• instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate 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).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you. Toddst1 (talk) 22:25, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

If this is a shared IP address, and you did not make the edits, consider creating an account for yourself so you can avoid further irrelevant notices.

June 2016

While I very much appreciate the changes you made to the article Fairfax Times, I wanted to make you aware of why they got reverted. First, individuals with a vested interest should not make changes to their articles about themselves or the organizations they work for, per WP:BIAS. Even if a contributor makes clear their conflict of interest, those changes are suspect because of the COI. Second, some of the changes you made were to cited text. Changing the text without providing a new citation makes it look as if the old citation were supporting the edit, which is clearly not the case. Third, while there may be factual errors in the text, Wikipedia's rules require contributors to rely only on published, neutral sources. If those sources are inaccurate, yes that's a problem. But we can't rely on original research. Some sources might be clearly in error (for example, one that says John F. Kennedy died in 1965, not 1963), and general knowledge says we should not use that source or change the text. But the changes to the text you made aren't based on general knowledge, or "clearly" wrong. It would take an expert in the newspaper's history to know the truth, but Wikipedia doesn't rely on your or my expertise but on published sources. Finally, some of the changes you made clearly changed the intent of the article ("published" instead of "purchased"), and without a citation to a neutral, reliable, published source that intent should not be changed.

I very much would hope that a solid history of the Fairfax Times is published some day, so that this article could rely on an entirely accurate history of the publication. Until then... - Tim1965 (talk) 23:51, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

REPLY: Look it up. The editor is no longer Steve Cahill. Someone needs to fix this inaccuracy.

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