Photo copyright edit

You were asking at the Teahouse about the deletion of a photo. The explanation was given in the edit summary for the change, referring to Commons:Deletion requests/File:Monument to Rhode Island State Police.jpg. - David Biddulph (talk) 16:51, 19 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Teahouse talkback: you've got messages! edit

 
Hello, Deutschdesign. Your question has been answered at the Teahouse Q&A board. Feel free to reply there!
Please note that all old questions are archived after 2-3 days of inactivity. Message added by Writ Keeper 17:27, 19 November 2012 (UTC). (You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{teahouse talkback}} template).Reply

Hey, DeutschDesign, I do have two more comments, in a more general line. First, I'd just like to give you a totally friendly reminder about our guidelines on conflicts-of-interest. Basically, we recommend that people don't directly edit the pages of subjects they have a conflict of interest about, like their employers of close family. Now, you're completely fine to do what you want to do here; direct editing is not actually forbidden by the rules, and uncontroversial changes, like what you're doing, should be totally fine. I'd just like to let you know that, in the future, there's a thing called edit requests, which might be a better way to go if you need to change anything more controversial.

Second, you might want to consider a change in username. The problem here is that our username policy disallows account names that suggest they represent a company, rather than a person. You see, each user account on Wikipedia needs to correspond to one and only one person, and names like yours sometimes look like they're accounts that are shared among many people who work at the same company. It'd just be easier for you to create a new account where the name clearly suggests that it's only used by one person. If you like, you can use a name like "Bob at DeutschDesign", which will clearly show that it belongs to a single person, rather than the entire company, while still showing the company affiliation.

Let me just say this too: you've done nothing wrong! Copyright policy, username policy, and the like are all tricky things to get a handle on, so don't feel bad about not getting them quite right the first time. It happens to the best of us; we definitely won't hold it against you. :) And I don't mean to imply that you've been editing in violation of our conflict of interest guidelines, either; so far, you've been perfectly fine! I'm just trying to make sure you don't run into trouble later down the road without understanding what's going on. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me on my talk page, or you can always ask another question at the Teahouse. Thanks! Writ Keeper 17:42, 19 November 2012 (UTC)Reply