Welcome to Wikipedia: check out the Teahouse!

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Hello! Joshwenke, you are invited to the Teahouse, a forum on Wikipedia for new editors to ask questions about editing Wikipedia, and get support from peers and experienced editors. Please join us! heather walls (talk) 17:21, 24 May 2012 (UTC)Reply

Welcome!

Hello, Joshwenke! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking   or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! Rsrikanth05 (talk) 08:56, 1 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
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Managing a conflict of interest

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  Hello, Joshwenke. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the page Lorence Wenke, 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 which forms all or part of work 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. John from Idegon (talk) 22:11, 27 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

August 2018

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  Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Lorence Wenke. Your edits appear to be disruptive and have been or will be reverted.

Please ensure you are familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, and please do not continue to make edits that appear disruptive. Continual disruptive editing may result in loss of editing privileges. Thank you. John from Idegon (talk) 00:05, 29 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

 

Hello Joshwenke. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, such as the edit you made to Lorence Wenke, and that you have not complied with Wikipedia's mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. Paid advocacy is a category of conflict of interest (COI) editing that involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Undisclosed paid advocacy is prohibited by our policies on neutral point of view and what Wikipedia is not, and is an especially egregious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to Black hat SEO.

Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question if an article exists, and if it does not, from attempting to write an article at all. At best, any proposed article creation should be submitted through the articles for creation process, rather than directly.

Regardless, if you are receiving or expect to receive compensation for your edits, broadly construed, you are required by the Wikimedia Terms of Use to disclose your employer, client and affiliation. You can post such a mandatory disclosure to your user page at User:Joshwenke. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Joshwenke|employer=InsertName|client=InsertName}}. If I am mistaken – you are not being directly or indirectly compensated for your edits – please state that in response to this message. Otherwise, please provide the required disclosure. In either case, please do not edit further until you answer this message. John from Idegon (talk) 00:07, 29 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

John, Lorence is my grandfather but I am not being compensated in any way for the edits made to the page, nor am I being compensated by him for anything. I am simply helping him update his Wikipedia page by adding a picture of him (previously there was none), more information about his children, his alma mater, etc. This information should be more well-known, but if you don't believe that the information is helpful to the community, then you may delete it. The information I added and updated couldn't even be used for any agenda, or to support any conflict of interest. It is simple, commonly-known information that should be available on Wikipedia as it is on his website, in articles, etc. Thank you!

Thanks for your response. Some things to consider: Whether you are paid or not, you clearly have a conflict of interest in writing about your grandfather. That would apply to any subject's grandson!
Second, the portrait. Obviously it's a studio portrait. Generally, the copyright to a photo is owned by the photographer. When you sit for a portrait, he sells you prints and retains the rights to the photo. Lacking any evidence that the photographer has sold the rights for the photo to your grandfather, we must assume he hasn't. If he has, we would need email verification from him that he has indeed released the rights to your grandfather, and email verification from your grandfather that he is willing to release the image to Wikipedia under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. That would mean anyone anywhere could use the photo at any time for any purpose, including commercial and modification. Extreme examples of that could include using his face photoshopped onto a nude model or displaying the portrait in an advertisement with a caption saying, "I strongly support supplying children with pot." As long as his name was not used, there would be nothing he can do. We do not accept photos of living people to be soley used on Wikipedia.
Third, I notice you have Wikipedia grouped in with Twitter and Facebook on your grandfather's website. Although I certainly wish you wouldn't do that, of course there is nothing I can say about it. Wikipedia is not social media. It is an online encyclopedia. See NOTFACEBOOK. By nature, encyclopedias are tertiary. That means that we do not write about a given subject, we write about what has been written about (in reliable sources) the subject. Information needs secondary sources. Neither you, or his campaign, are secondary sources on him. You are welcome and encouraged to contribute to his article. Please follow best practices for COI editors and propose edits on the talk page, with secondary sources. Although I have no political biases, I'm familiar with your grandfather and his good reputation. (I lived in Brady Township and later Portage for 28 years of my life. I raced Hobie Cats with Doug, his predecessor, back in the mid 70s. Been out west for 14 years now, but Kalamazoo will always be home.) Might I suggest you find details about his life outside of politics and add them? There must be some sources available for that! Good luck. John from Idegon (talk) 02:31, 29 August 2018 (UTC)Reply