Navanew

July 2024

Hello, I'm Spf121188. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, Stephanie Pfirman, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. You can have a look at referencing for beginners. If you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. SPF121188 ^{(talk this way) (my edits)} 17:42, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, Navanew, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

I noticed that one of the first articles you edited appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article. Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

To reduce the chances of your contributions being undone, you might like to draft your revised article before submission, and then ask me or another editor to proofread it. See our help page on userspace drafts for more details. If the page you created has already been deleted from Wikipedia, but you want to save the content from it to use for that draft, don't hesitate to ask anyone from this list and they will copy it to your user page.

One rule we do have in connection with conflicts of interest is that accounts used by more than one person will unfortunately be blocked from editing. Wikipedia generally does not allow editors to have usernames which imply that the account belongs to a company or corporation. If you have a username like this, you should request a change of username or create a new account. (A name that identifies the user as an individual within a given organization may be OK.)

In addition, if you receive, or expect to receive, compensation for any contribution you make, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation to comply with our terms of use and our policy on paid editing.

Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• Best practices for editors with close associations
• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Contributing to Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
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• The Teahouse, our help forum for new editors

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, visit the Teahouse, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{Help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! AntiDionysius (talk) 12:25, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi -- thanks for this explanation. Since I mostly added citations of additional sources, I'm not sure what I added that you think is not objective. You note that "it's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so." Could you please take another look at the history and let me know what part of it does not appear to be objective or neutral? I'd appreciate it. Navanew (talk) 12:45, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

So it's important to distinguish here between @Spf121188's comment above about your edit not being cited and my notice about a conflict of interest. We are two different people, highlighting two different issues.

I am here to tell you that if you are the person this page is written about, you have what Wikipedia calls a Conflict of Interest. You should review our policy on those, but there are three main things:

1. A conflict of interest isn't a statement about the quality of your editing, it is a status you have - it means you're externally connected to the thing you're writing about (in this case, by being the person you're writing about)
2. If you are going to interact in any way with a subject with which you have a conflict, you are required to disclose your conflict at all times when doing so.
3. You are very, very strongly discouraged from making any direct edits to articles about which you have a conflict; instead, go to the article's discussion page and request other editors to do it for you.

The reason for this third part is that people who have COIs tend, with few exceptions, to have quite a hard time being neutral on those subjects. Even when they're trying to be or think they are neutral, the output is often decidedly non-neutral when read by everyone else. Your edit is a good example of this:

Stephanie Pfirman is a professor at Arizona State University known for her work on sea ice, pollutants in sea ice, how sea ice is changing over time, innovations in education, and advancing women and interdisciplinary scholars.

"known for...innovations in education and advancing women and interdisciplinary scholars" aren't objective, neutral statements. They're pretty positive descriptions - especially when they're not cited at all.

Similarly, the exhaustive list of accomplishments - while I'm sure all of them are individually true - comes off more like a resumé than an encyclopaedia entry. People's Wikipedia pages don't list everything they've accomplished. They usually don't even list everything they've published. And none of these accomplishments were cited either.

So for all these reasons, it is best if you don't edit your own page directly. You can make requests at Talk:Stephanie Pfirman, disclosing your COI and providing a source for anything you're asking to have added, and other editors can do the addition. That way, the additions get made in a neutral manner, instead of you going through the frustrating experience of having your edits reverted. AntiDionysius (talk) 13:52, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

ah, got it, thanks for this detailed explanation Navanew (talk) 14:16, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

AntiDionysius pretty much covered this perfectly, the only thing I'll add is that when you put "(O'Garra et al., 2021,)" as a reference, it doesn't provide inline citations, and doesn't add to the reference list at the bottom of the article, where readers can easily verify the information given. Your biggest problem, though, is what AntiDionysius talks about above, about maintaining neutral point of view. I hope all this helps. SPF121188 ^{(talk this way) (my edits)} 14:21, 2 August 2024 (UTC)