MD Whalen

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August 2021

Hello MD Whalen. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to Larry Feign, gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, but 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 serious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to black-hat search-engine optimization.

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. If the article does not exist, paid advocates are extremely strongly discouraged 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:MD Whalen. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=MD Whalen|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, do not edit further until you answer this message. Do you work with/for Larry Feign? I ask because the upload for File:The Flower Boat Girl book cover.jpg, which you uploaded, says it is your own work, indicating you designed the cover for his latest book. Ganesha811 (talk) 16:06, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

REPLY from MD Whalen: Thank you for your diligence. This is not paid editing. I also did not design the book cover. I do not know why the source displayed that. I do not know how to reply to a message on Talk, so I am including this as an edit to your comment.

Hi MD Whalen. To reply on your own talk page, just edit, pretty much like you did. The main thing to remember is that you should put four tildes (~~~~) in a row at the end of your message - this will automatically sign and date it. You can also use one or more ":" colons as an indent at the beginning of your message for formatting. As to the substance of your message, here's the deal. Wikipedia strongly discourages editing articles about your friends and colleagues. This falls under our WP:COI policy. You should use the Template:UserboxCOI to declare your conflict of interest, and stop editing pages related to your friend and his book. I know this probably isn't what you wanted to hear, but it's the only way to make sure Wikipedia stays neutral and free from promotionalism. I'll respond to your specific comments about Zheng Yi Sao's page on that article's talk page. Ganesha811 (talk) 02:13, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Secondary note: Google indicates that Larry Feign writes children's books under the pen-name of MD Whalen. Assuming good faith (WP:AGF) is a bedrock principle of Wikipedia, so I will take your word for it that you are a "friend and colleague" of Feign, as you stated on my talk page, and so you chose his nom de plume as your username. However, if you have any further disclosures to make, go ahead and make them. Ganesha811 (talk) 02:38, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

I understand your questioning about my username. Quite frankly, it is something very personal which I was not going to reply to, but I do understand your concern. Briefly, the name MD Whalen arose from a shared joke. Mr. Feign used it as a pen name. Being a shared joke, I also adopted it, in this case as a username in what I considered a wholly unconnected context. Clearly this has led to suspicions such as yours. He and I are friends. We have no financial relationship. I have no input into his work. My amendments to various pages are a favour to a friend. If you want assurance that we are separate people, I shall point out that Mr. Feign has an aversion to Wikipedia. He has indicated to me repeatedly (and in public speeches) that more than half the content on the page about Zheng Yi Sao is either misinterpretations of historical sources, misleading, or outright fiction. Despite my encouragement for him to correct these, he declines to make such an effort. Since I don't have the source documents (or the interest in reading them), I am not qualified to make such corrections on his behalf. Nevertheless, out of respect for my friend, I make amendments and additions where I am able to. I hope this satisfies you. Meanwhile, I hope you will at least reverse your nomination to delete an image of the book cover, which due to my inexperience was attributed to me, and which I have since corrected. I find it hard to understand how placing a book cover image in connection with an article about the book's author is in any a violation Wikipedia policy, though of course I lack your expertise in the legalities. In any case, I do hope we can end this dialogue in a friendly understanding. And thanks for your advice about how to sign these comments: MD Whalen (talk) 14:11, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi MD Whalen - thanks for your explanation. You should know that both he and you are welcome to edit the Zheng Yi Sao page, or any other Wikipedia page, as long as you don't add information about yourself or him, in violation of our conflict-of-interest policies. I hope that you can become a valuable contributor here, and feel free to ask me for advice about how to do so - it's just best for everyone that we don't edit pages in ways that are influenced by our personal connections.

As to the book cover, it's tricky. Wikipedia is free content (WP:NFC), meaning that not only is it free to access, it is shared according to copyright laws as well. The copyright for the book cover is presumably owned either by the artist who created it or the publishing company which paid for it. To upload an image to Wikipedia, the copyright needs to be released, either with a specific, sharable license, or by releasing it entirely into the public domain, meaning anyone can use it for any purpose at any time. If an image is not released in this way, it shouldn't be on Wikipedia. Given that you didn't make the cover art, you don't have any right to release it, so the image has to be deleted for now. If the copyright holder wanted to re-upload it and release the copyright (this is legally binding), they would be welcome to do so. Let me know if you have any questions about this. Ganesha811 (talk) 14:24, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

The copyright to the book cover is held in fact by the author, Larry Feign, who gave me permission to upload it. As I said, he declines to register on Wikipedia, so I did it on his behalf, with permission of the copyright holder. You have removed it on the assumption that I had no right to do so, without asking me (considering that we were already in dialogue, you had no excuse not to ask me). This certainly is not proper conduct on Wikipedia.

I have just noticed your tagging the article about Larry Feign. I must say that I think this goes too far. What's more, if you were to remove or reverse my edits to the page about Larry Feign, the result would be a wholly inaccurate article, which does not serve Wikipedia's readers in any way. Can you identify any information on the page that is in any sense editorializing, promotional, false, or objectionable in nature? My contributions have been to correct previous contributors' errors, and to update new information. Wherever possible, sources are cited in order to verify what I've written. I ask you to kindly remove this flag. And to reinstate the image of the book cover. MD Whalen (talk) 14:33, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

If you would like the book cover to remain, Larry will have to send an email releasing his copyright to Wikimedia Commons. Instructions to do so can be found at this link, along with relevant email templates. As to tagging the page for Larry Feign, this just standard procedure. Like it or not, you have a conflict of interest. While there are particular phrases that concern me, there are also no sources for much of the information given, so it is impossible to verify (see WP:V). Adding stuff you know to be true, but which cannot be verified, is WP:OR and discouraged. I get what you're feeling, but I'd ask you not to take it personally. If we allowed everyone who said they were a friend of the article's subject free reign on the articles, Wikipedia would be overrun with vandals and promotionalism. A Wikipedia article doesn't belong to the subject - it belongs to everyone. Ganesha811 (talk) 16:22, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

I contacted Larry Feign via e-mail regarding permissions for the image. As expected, he declined to make any representations to Wikipedia directly. In his e-mail he pointed out that by contract he is the copyright holder to the book, not just to the text elements. This means he holds copyright to maps, calligraphic illustrations, and the cover art. His contract allows him to authorize third parties to reproduce portions of the book, including artwork, for, among other uses, reference and cataloguing purposes. He has granted me the right to release the book cover image to Wikipedia.

Furthermore, he has this to say about your tagging the page about him. I quote his words from his message:

"This is a perfect illustration of what's wrong with Wikipedia. In the alleged name of veracity, they disallow verifiable information from a primary source--in this case, an acquaintance of the subject--which is the gold standard in historical research, purely on the grounds that we are acquainted and not on the quality of the information; yet they permit conjecture, opinion, and misinformation, such as that predominating on the Zheng Yi Sao page (and numerous related pages), just because someone adds a citation, regardless of how tainted that source is. From a historian and biographer's perspective, this is, shall we say, ass-backwards. What's more, the editor who tagged the page names you as a "major contributor" to the page, which implies that you're responsible for a sizable portion of the content. I have checked the revision history, and you have made precisely 11 edits, not a single one of which is in dispute, out of over 100 edits to the page. Your contributions account for as little as 5% of the actual content. This is curious grounds for flagging the article, leaving readers the impression that it contains not a word of truth. Instead they should put their efforts into flagging the Zheng Yi Sao article on the grounds that many of the citations are based on unoriginal sources of dubious scholarship, and prejudicial readings of scholarly works.

"Despite what I take to be honest and sincere efforts by the Wikipedia editor you have been corresponding with, and what I imagine is a thankless job to root out false information on such a large platform, it is Wikipedia's own conventions which create this rigid fixation on a very superficial application of source management. However, I know that many people, including journalists, get their information about me from Wikipedia, so I am happy that you and others have kept the page up to date and, thankfully, low key. I wouldn't tolerate any hyperbole there. I truly don't understand what grounds they have to object to the information you have provided from a first-hand knowledgeable point of view." (end of Feign's message)

MD Whalen again: I do wish to know how long your "warning tag" will remain. If no one comes along to object to the material, will the tag expire? Or is it the other way around? Until someone comes along to verify every adjective and comma, the tag will remain? MD Whalen (talk) 00:57, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Re: copyright - I'm not a copyright expert (though some of the good people on the Wikimedia Commons are), but that doesn't sound sufficient. Again - if he is the copyright holder, he needs to release that copyright explicitly, himself, by sending an email to Wikimedia Commons or by uploading the image himself.

Regarding his criticisms: these are not new criticisms of Wikipedia. Many people find the idea that their own personal knowledge is inadequate for Wikipedia discomfiting. But here is the key point - we are not historians. This is a tertiary source, which relies on secondary sources to verify the information we collate. This is not the place for primary documents, testimonies from friends, people sharing information they have gathered themselves, or anything like that. Like the Britannica, this is an encyclopedia. WP:VNT.

As to the tag, it will remain until another editor takes a look, decides the issues have been addressed (or were never that bad to begin with), and removes it. It would be discouraged for you to remove it. I wouldn't worry too much about it, though. It's not a scarlet letter - such tags are fairly commonplace throughout Wikipedia. Dedicate your time to other things - such as improving Zheng Yi Sao's page, if you are interested, or any other one that catches your eye. Ganesha811 (talk) 01:22, 1 September 2021 (UTC)