Pmasters

October 2011

Hello Pmasters. If you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article BDSM, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

1. editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
2. participating in deletion discussions about articles related to you, your organization or its competitors; and
3. linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. This policy has not changed since you were warned about it three years ago. Please feel free to ask me for more info if this is confusing to you. ~TPW 22:13, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Conflict of interest

I can appreciate your confusion and frustration about conflict of interest policies on Wikipedia. As with any policy here, even if you feel you have a firm grasp on it, other editors may see things differently. I've had to skirt the COI issue myself from time to time, so maybe I can offer some guidelines to help you contribute.

First things first: I've looked at your editing history, and writing an article about oneself really is clearly a conflict of interest. For that article in particular, there is no gray area to contend with. The only exception is that you should certainly remove incorrect information about yourself, and can request that the edit be removed from the history if it's libelous. If you do remove info, I suggest you explain why in the edit summary or, better still, on the talk page.

As for editing other articles in your specialty, there's probably a lot of potential for you to contribute. You have a lot of knowledge and, I'm guessing, you have access to a number of Secondary sources to back up what you do know. I don't think you will have any quibbles with other editors if you add information that rounds out BDSM articles.

However, you take pains to be transparent if you want to add a citation to a book you read, or a link to a site of your own. What I have done when I felt something I've written off-site would benefit an article here is to use the {{Edit request}} template in a new section on the article's talk page. This lays it out plainly: I would like to make this edit, but it may be a conflict of interest, so can someone else please take a look and decide? That approach won't always get the suggested edit made, but it will alleviate any concerns about your intentions.

A note about links: the only place it's appropriate to put an external link is in the "external links" section of an article, never directly in the text [www.example.com like this]. That's another red flag that may cause your edit to be reverted quickly. Use a <ref> tag instead.

In sum, I believe your expertise is sorely needed on Wikipedia, so I hope you continue to edit articles that interest you. However, you should not edit an article about yourself without good reason, and you shouldn't use your edits to introduce your own work to articles - ask others to do that for you.

Best of luck and please feel free to enlist my help in the future.--~TPW 01:58, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Suggested link to external article (copied from Talk:Wax_play for future reference)

I have an article on my own wiki which is more extensive than the article here and which I think could be usefully linked to this one, perhaps as "further reading" or "see also". Could someone check it out?

It's at:

http://www.peter-masters.com/wiki/index.php/Wax_play

Thanks

Pmasters (talk) 06:01, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

I think it would alright to add as an external link, particularly since this article isn't facing a problem with too large of an external link section. Further reading sections are generally discouraged unless the source can be later expanded into the article which self published sources, while potentially informative, often cannot be referenced due to not meeting the criteria for WP:reliable sources. I'll go ahead and add an external link section for this though.AerobicFox (talk) 06:13, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that. "External links" hadn't occurred to me. I'll file that away for future requests :) Pmasters (talk) 11:13, 30 October 2011 (UTC)