Teresa DeJohn

Welcome!

Hello, Teresa DeJohn, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 21:46, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Teresa DeJohn. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing. Your edits to date were promotional with regard to Ganeden, and are typical of those of company employees or PR people. I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

Hello, Teresa DeJohn. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
• instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate 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).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you.

Comments and requests

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with Ganeden, directly or through a third party (e.g. a PR agency or the like)? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 21:47, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Promotional prose and copyright violations

The content you've added to the article talk page is promotional and largely copied from your company's website. It will need to be deleted and expunged from the page's edit history. Please don't add inappropriate content to Wikipedia. 2601:188:180:11F0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 (talk) 15:29, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Response from the writer

This content was actually written directly from me--I am the PR Manager for the company and write marketing copy. It is not copied and pasted from the Ganeden website, nor is it promotional. If you read it, it's factual information about what Ganeden does and what ingredients it offers. The previous information on the wikipedia page was inaccurate and incomplete. Teresa DeJohn (talk) 15:58, 12 July 2017 (UTC) PR Mangager for Ganeden

Thanks for your note, and for disclosing your relationship with Ganeden. So you have a COI for that company and related topics, as we define that in Wikipedia.

To finish the disclosure piece, would you please add the disclosure to your user page (which is User:Teresa DeJohn - a redlink, because you haven't written anything there yet). Just something simple like: "I work for Ganeden and have a conflict of interest with regard to that company and related topics" would be fine. If you want to add anything else there that is relevant to what you want to do in WP feel free to add it, but please don't add anything promotional about the company or yourself (see WP:USERPAGE for guidance if you like).

I added a tag to the Ganeden article's talk page, so the disclosure is done there. Once you disclose on your user page, the disclosure piece of this will be done.

As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP. The first is disclosure. The second is a form of peer review. This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and voilà there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary - no publisher, no "editors" as that term is used in the real world. So the bias that conflicted editors tend to have, can go right into the article. Conflicted editors are also really driven to try to make the article fit with their external interest. If they edit directly, this often leads to big battles with other editors.

What we ask editors to do who have a COI and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, is:

a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft through the WP:AFC process, disclose your COI on the Talk page, and then submit the draft article for review (the AfC process sets up a nice big button for you to click when it is ready) so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and

b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:X - there is a link at "request corrections or suggest content" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request. You can also add a {{request edit}} tag to flag it for other editors to review.

By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. We get some great contributions that way, when conflicted editors take the time to understand what kinds of proposals are OK under the content policies.

The latter is very important! There are a whole slew of policies and guidelines that govern content and behavior here in Wikipedia. Please see User:Jytdog/How for an overview of what Wikipedia is and is not (we are not a directory or a place to promote anything), and for an overview of the content and behavior policies and guidelines. Learning and following these is very important, and takes time. Please be aware that you have created a Wikipedia account, and this makes you a Wikipedian - you are obligated to pursue Wikipedia's mission first and foremost when you work here, and you are obligated to edit according to the policies and guidelines. Editing Wikipedia is a privilege that is freely offered to all, but the community restricts or completely takes that privilege away from people who will not edit and behave as Wikipedians. (To be clear, you generating content based on your knowledge of the company, is not valid in Wikipedia. Wikipedia content summarizes accepted knowledge, found in what we call "reliable sources", which are independent of the subject, and these sources must be cited.)

I hope that makes sense to you.

I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where the company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content. If you are not sure if something is uncontroversial, please ask at the Talk page.

Will you please agree to learn and follow the content and behavioral policies and guidelines, and to follow the peer review processes going forward when you want to work on the Ganeden article or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. Best regards Jytdog (talk) 17:53, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Pasted reply here, that was left on my talk page in this diff, to keep discussion in one place. Jytdog (talk) 18:17, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for all of your helpful information on getting my company page updated. I'm new to this, so your expertise is greatly appreciated. Is this how I correctly respond to you when you leave a comment? I have added my title to my user page, and will try to put my edits on the talk page again. The last time I did this, another use said the content was copied and pasted from the website and deleted it, even though I personally drafted all of the changes and did not copy and paste. (I write a lot of the marketing content for the company.) Please let me know if I've done it properly this time. Thanks! Teresa DeJohn (talk) 18:11, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. What you did here has nothing to do with Wikipedia. It has no chance of being used. Please slow down and read the stuff above in the paragraph that starts "The latter is very important! ". Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 18:23, 12 July 2017 (UTC)