User talk:Jlglex99

Welcome![edit]

Hello, Jlglex99, 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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Hello, Jlglex99. 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. 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 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. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 19:47, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not add commentary, your own point of view, or your own personal analysis to Wikipedia articles. Doing so violates Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy and breaches the formal tone expected in an encyclopedia. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 19:47, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not add or change content without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Wikipedia:Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 19:47, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your guidance. I noticed that you deleted my contributions to Interactive Data Corporation. Do you have that text, which you could send to me privately? I spent some time writing it and would like to keep it in my private files. (jlglex99@gmail.com)

You can actually recover the text for yourself. If you click on the "history" link at the top of the article you will see a list of the 50 most recent edits to that article. Clicking on the date & time of any edit will show you the article as it was at that time. By selecting two little circles to the left of two of those dates and then clicking "Compare selected revisions" you can see the changes that were made between one of those times and the other. If you want to see edits outside that range of the latest 50, you can click on the "older 50" link, or on one of the other numbers (100, 250, 500) next to that link to get more than 50 edits.
It is likely that much of the content you posted could be used, but you would need to carefully read it and make sure it is written in neutral terms and does not read as promotional. You should also try to provide some sources to support what yo write. It should not be difficult to provide sources, as you must have got your information from somewhere. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 20:42, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your reply.

The information included in my text came primarily from my father's verbal communications to me, his son, over the decades of my life. I have always been interested in his career, and he told me a lot about it verbally. The stories I heard from him have also been verified, verbally, by my mother & his sister and also by some of his business colleagues (the marketing officer that I mentioned in the text). That marketing officer also wrote and delivered a eulogy at my father's memorial service last year. I have a copy of the program from the memorial service, and my mother wrote the obituary that was published in the NYT. There was a reference link to the obituary in the text that you deleted. I also have a clipping from a third party publication, which publicized his election to partner of the investment bank, White Weld, during the 1960's. I have other clippings and also his school transcripts. He also left behind a large set of file cabinets that contain all kinds of files related to his multi-decade career. Those are located at his former residence, which is still owned now by my mother, in Beverly Farms, MA. I have not yet gone through all of those, but I'm sure there are other items in those files that would verify my text further. My father was a man of integrity. The stories he told me are true.

I tried to upload the clipping about his making partner at White Weld, but the Wikipedia screener rejected that, because it was a photo of a clipping and, therefore, the copyright is owned by the original magazine/journal that published the article. I have a hard copy of it, myself, from my father's files; and I took an iPhone photo of that to upload onto Wikipedia, but it was rejected on copyright grounds. That item, and others, would verify some of the information I wrote, but I guess I will need permission from the original publishers, in order to upload them to Wikipedia.

I may have used some "action terms" to make the story sound exciting, but I don't believe that I over-hyped the story at all. It WAS very exciting, especially when the business was finally launched and the sales grew. My father began life in very humble circumstance, and the events of the 1960's brought him to a new level of society, which WAS very exciting for him. Later in his life, he looked back wistfully at those years as, perhaps, the most exciting of his life. So, when I used action terms, I did so not to exaggerate the story, but rather to transmit the very real excitement of those days to the reader.

To the extent that I do, at some future date, publish and promote a book about him, I suppose this Wiki entry might be considered promotional, in the sense that it might spark interest in buying the book. Is that a problem for Wikipedia? I do plan to write and sell a book about him at some future date, and Wikipedia might help to expose the story and the book to a larger audience. I do plan to make as much money as possible on sales of the book and any derivative works.

I thank you kindly for your guidance on this. I am not a journalist or author of any kind, but since my father's death last year, I have had a keen interest in writing a book about him. So, I will need to know all of these rules and regulations surrounding biographical publication and copyright. Any further guidance you can give - without charge - about not only Wikipedia's rules but also the rules of book publication, would be most appreciated. One specific question I have right now is this. Are the rules of Wikipedia the same as the rules for a book? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jlglex99 (talk • contribs) 22:16, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, here are a few comments, which I hope may be helpful to you.

When I wrote "It should not be difficult to provide sources, as you must have got your information from somewhere" I was not thinking of the possibility that your information might come from personal contact through your family. Wikipedia policy is that we require published sources, not just the say-so of a Wikipedia editor who assures us that he or she has personal knowledge. There are two reasons for this: verifiability and notability. On verifiability, unfortunately we cannot assume that something is true just because someone who creates a Wikipedia account says so, because very often people come along and post statements which simply are not true. There are several reasons for this, including sincerely believing something to be true but being factually mistaken, deliberate lying to promote a particular impression or to hide facts which one does not want to be known, vandalism, failing to recognise the difference between opinion and objective truth, and so on, but whatever the reasons, a Wikipedia editor claiming to have personal knowledge has time and time again proved not to be a reliable authority. On the second point, even if something can be established as true, there is the question of whether it is significant enough to be included. Naturally, there is often a wide range of opinion among editors as to what is suitable, but in order to bring some degree of objectivity, Wikipedia aims to have coverage in reliable published sources as an indication of significance. Thus, even if you can find documentary proof of facts about your father's life, if it consists of papers in his personal files, and has not been mentioned in reliable independent sources, it is unlikely to be considered to belong in a Wikipedia article.

One of the problems with telling new editors about Wikipedia's policy on promotional editing is that such new editors can have very specific ideas as to what the word "promotional" means, often having a much more narrow use of the word in mind than that in which it is intended. One of the various interpretations that come up fairly frequently is taking the word "promotion" as applying only to commercial promotion to sell something, and it seems from what you have said that you may be thinking in those terms. Certainly that is one way in which something can be promotional, but it is not the only one. If I write about someone and try to give the impression that he or she was really good at what he or she did, and that we should admire him or her, I am writing to promote that person's reputation. Likewise I can write to promote a point of view or opinion, or many other things.

Using what you call "action terms" to "make the story sound exciting" is a good example of one of the things which should not be done in a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia seeks to have neutral, dispassionate, coverage of its subjects, and not to promote either a positive or a negative image of the subjects of articles. Seeking "to transmit the very real excitement of those days" is entirely appropriate in some kinds of writing, such as a biography, but it is not the kind of thing that Wikipedia seeks to do.

Language such as "visionary", "leading edge investment firm", and "seemingly boundless energy and work ethic" are not neutral. They promote their subject, and are the sort of things one sees in marketing copy and in eulogistic obituaries, not in dispassionate neutral recording of facts. Even more out of line with Wikipedia's policy on neutral point of view is "excellent example of the wide ranging economic benefits of entrepreneurship in our economy": not only is what is or isn't an "excellent example" a personal judgment, but also "wide ranging economic benefits of entrepreneurship in our economy" is a value judgment.

What you have said above gives the impression that you may not be aware of the extent to which your writing has been subjective and non-neutral. That is very often the case in writing about a subject close to oneself, as it can be very difficult to stand back from one's writing on such a subject and see it from the detached perspective of an outsider. That is, in fact, one of the main reasons why Wikipedia's guideline on conflict of interest discourages writing on such a subject.

I have some advice which I often give to new editors who start editing by creating new articles, and although you have been editing existing articles rather than creating new ones, the fact that you have done large amounts of editing which has made quite substantial changes is essentially similar to writing new articles, so perhaps the same advice my be relevant to you. My advice is that it is best to start by making small improvements to existing articles, rather than creating new articles or making substantial changes to existing ones. That way any mistakes you make will be small ones, and you won't have the discouraging experience of repeatedly seeing hours of work deleted. Gradually, you will get to learn how Wikipedia works, and after a while you will know enough about what is acceptable to be able to write whole new articles without fear that they will be deleted. Over the years I have found that editors who start by making small changes to existing articles and work up from there have a far better chance of having a successful time here than those who jump right into creating new articles from the start. Of course, if you are not interested in contributing in any way other than writing about your father then that advice will not appeal to you, but I offer it for your consideration anyway.

Finally, Wikipedia has its own policies and guidelines, which have been created for specific purposes related to creating an openly editable encyclopaedia, and publishing in other contexts, whether books, newspapers, blogs, company or personal web sites, or anything else, is a different matter altogether. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 11:30, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your feedback.

I don't want to spend too much time on this during the week, but I do have one specific, follow up question for you ...

In my original text, I included a reference to my father's obituary, which was published by the New York Times and some other newspapers. Does that count as a verification of facts under the rules of Wikipedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jlglex99 (talk • contribs) 20:42, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that would normally be regarded as a reliable source, though I have not checked the particular statements you posted in the article against the obituary, so I can't comment specifically on those.
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Whenever you post to a talk page or other discussion page (but not when you edit an article) always finish your post with four tildes, i.e. ~~~~. That will be automatically be converted to a signature with a time stamp. Not only does that make it clear who posted the message and when, but it also contains a link to your talk page, making it easy for other editors to contact you if they wish to.
I came back to this page to check whether you had posted to it again, and therefore saw your latest message, but you can't assume that editors will always do that, and if there had been a bigger time gap between my last message and yours I would almost certainly not have come back to it, and so I would probably never have seen your message. You can avoid that risk in the following way. In your message include {{Ping|JamesBWatson}} (or, of course, any other editor you wish to communicate to). Provided that in the same edit you also sign your post with ~~~~ as described above, the editor you ping will automatically get a notification of your message. Important note: For that to work, the ping and the four tildes signature have to both be given in the same edit. It won't work if you do one of the two and then and do the other in a second edit, or if you make a typo in the ping and correct it in a separate edit without repeating the signature. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 09:08, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]